We Don't Need No Stinking Sparky Cars

And then it burns itself up at the end, providing even MORE power!

The current administration is against anything that provides plenty of cheap electrical power. They must also be against logic,and anti-people.

Of course,here in BC we can't say much,we've had at least three major hydro dam projects on hold for forty years or more.

To Quote Moriarty from the movie Kelly's Heroes. "It is a piece of junk!"

>Of course, the overhead losses in generation, distribution, conversion, and storage are immense.

Even with the losses an electric car is more efficient than a 25% efficient internal combustion engine. There are also grid efficiency increases resulting from large numbers of people charging their cars at night when nuclear and hydro power go unused.

I've made this point before but the fatal flaw of electric cars is that batteries cannot store enough energy.

Obama was quoted early in his presidency as saying "[Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon." Of course this was total fantasy; improving battery energy density has always come slowly and painstakingly. Early in their lifetimes, lithium ion batteries can achieve energy densities about a tenth of gasoline, adjusting for engine efficiency. So unless energy densities are improved by a factor of 10, batteries will remain too big, too heavy, and store too little energy for electric cars to be viable.

Incidentally, better batteries are also what's required to make *some* wind and solar generation actually viable. The quote references losses in storage but there is no such thing as grid-scale energy storage. Hydro sometimes uses the excess electricity at night to pump water uphill and there's the odd flywheel test installation but nothing that can be used on a wide scale. Effective grid-scale storage is a prerequisite of viable wind and solar and unless there's a breakthrough that allows us to store more electrical energy in less space, with less weight, at less cost, this will not be possible.

Consequently, you'll never hear any of the "green jobs" crowd talking about batteries.

Ford Prefect at August 28, 2012 10:58 AM

Excellant anology.

The Tiger tank was expensive, over-weight, under-powered, unreliable, difficult to maintain and expended scarce resources in labour and material at the expense of cheaper, more practical, reliable, proven designs.

Post WW2 Tigers (and Konigstigers) were scraped, turned into memorials, and museum exhibits. The earlier Panzer 4 soldiered on in Spain and Portugal until finally sold to Syria....

"The White House intends to boost government subsidies for wealthy buyers of the Chevy Volt and other new-technology vehicles — to $10,000 per buyer."

This is an interesting bit. Classic socialism is supposed to transfer wealth from the wealthy to the poor. Here we see it in reverse. "The rich getting richer, etc." is the classic knock against free enterprise and capitalism, but here we see government institutionalizing this as a socialist program.

Karl Marx would be more than a little irritated.

The obama administration has yet to learn that America moves on wheels. Not kiddie car wheels but wheels turned by fossil fuel which is still in abundance for the forseeable future. When the cost of turning those wheels becomes excessive the whole country suffers. Even if Obama were to succeed and drive civilization back into caves, the EPA would legislate against building a fire in said caves to keep warm. The EPA and the green movement have done more to destroy economic recovery than any other 10 misguided policies combined. Junk science has replaced common sense. Just imagine the scenario if tomorrow morning the gas pumps across the nation showed a price of 1.29 a gallon for gasoline and diesel. The economic lift would be incredible. Won't happen of course because Obama's energy minister, Steven Chu is still dreaming of getting the price to $10. a gallon to match Europe , which he greatly admires. The fact that he's destroying everything that made america great does not seem to enter the equation. Junk science trumps.

Meanwhile, the ever so greenie & eco aware Germans have decided to power any Volts purchased there with coal.

"It is amazing how biased the international media is when it comes to reporting on energy generation, specifically electricity.

In mid-August, Germany opened a new 2200MW coal-fired power station near Cologne, and virtually not a word has been said about it. This dearth of reporting is even more surprising when one considers that Germany has said building new coal plants is necessary because electricity produced by wind and solar has turned out to be unaffordably expensive and unreliable.

In a deteriorating economic situation, Germany’s new environment minister, Peter Altmaier, who is as politically close to Chancellor Angela Merkel as it gets, has underlined time and again the importance of not further harming Europe’s – and Germany’s – economy by increasing the cost of electricity.

He is also worried that his country could become dependent on foreign imports of electricity, the mainstay of its industrial sector. To avoid that risk, Altmaier has given the green light to build twenty-three new coal-fired plants, which are currently under construction.

Yes, you read that correctly, twenty three-new coal-fired power plants are under construction in Germany, because Germany is worried about the increasing cost of electricity, and because they can’t afford to be in the strategic position of importing too much electricity."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/28/germanys-new-renewable-energy-policy/#more-70077

There was supposed to be a huge government buy of Volts over the summer
to keep the line running until after the election. Wonder what happened?

Anyway the Volt's unit cost rolling off the dealer's lot is still somewhere between
$250k and $200k each. To keep it going will require a government grant to write
off that GM Volt debt for the second time and then think about making them in China.

@ Fred
Germany has seen the light and it's not green. If only McGuinty could read and understand!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/06/germany-in-skeptical-turmoil-on-both-climate-and-windfarms/#more-56069

Can they be recycled as forklift trucks?

Meanwhile, Australai starts its recovery from Greenie Disease . . .

"So the long-running soap opera called Australian Climate Politics has reached its surprising end. In a surprise move the Australian government has announced that it will abandon its plans to transition its newly implemented carbon tax into an Australian emissions trading system, and sign on the the European ETS."

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.ca/2012/08/not-with-bang-but-whimper.html

Red-Green Moonbats From Texas to Mongolia?

From Plato's Cave to carbon indulgences and beyond...

"The $260 billion renewables industry needs storage so power companies can absorb surges from solar and wind farms from Texas to Mongolia."

"they’re trying to squeeze air into salt mines and run empty trains up hills,".
...-

"Ski Lifts Help Open $25 Billion Market for Storing Power"

"Technology developers are shuttling between caves and mountaintops to build a market for utilities set to attract $25 billion in annual investment within a decade.

To store surplus electricity from power plants, they’re trying to squeeze air into salt mines and run empty trains up hills, testing how to harness the energy released when the air bursts out and the cars roll back down. Trials are under way at companies from Germany’s Siemens AG (SIE) and RWE AG (RWE) to General Electric Co. (GE) and a startup backed by billionaire Bill Gates, which is experimenting with the momentum of ski lifts.

“Electricity is the only commodity in the world that isn’t really stored,” said Prescott Logan, who heads GE’s storage business in Schenectady, New York, where last month it opened a $100 million plant to make batteries for utilities. When storage becomes cheap and massive, “the impact will be huge.”

The $260 billion renewables industry needs storage so power companies can absorb surges from solar and wind farms from Texas to Mongolia. The devices will be key for plans by Germany to shift Europe’s biggest electricity market from atomic energy, said Gil Forer, Ernst & Young LLP’s clean-tech head in New York."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-27/ski-lifts-help-open-25-billion-market-for-storing-power-energy.html

If the government has to pay you 75-hundred buck to buy a vehicle, it's a bad vehicle. Period.