@30 – Calvin
You are quite correct. I was commenting on the general expectations of the greenies that there will be lots of electric cars. I learned about the 10 transformer from an article about an energy conference where an electrical utility executive made a presentation about it.
As for the production figure of 70,000? Yeah, but I’ll bet they can only sell about 123 of them. The batteries cost $6,000 each. This price can only go up because of the scarcity of usable lithium deposits – a couple in South America and China. Secondly, lithium-ion batteries decrease in storage capacity about 20% per year. That gives a useful life of 3 years at best. After 3 years its another six grand. It is impossible to make up the cost by reduced fuel consumption unless a gallon of gas exceeds $30. Not only that, but they’re almost immediately unsaleable on the used market.
@33 Old Soldier
You don’t see huge railroads or trucks carrying waste away from refineries. They use just about every drop in the barrel. There are well over 10,000 distinct products that are petroleum distillates or petroleum is a major ingredient. Amongst the are diesel, aviation fuel, heating oil, lubricants, asphalt, plastics, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics – long, long list. The only way to reduce petroleum consumption is to proportionately reduce the consumption of all the other products. If the entire fleet were converted to electric tomorrow they’d just have to burn off all the useless gasoline. Hey, I’ve got an idea! We can take all those clean burning motors we scrapped and use them to burn off the gas.
