How much do you know about electric cars? I do not mean the hybrids that really don't save much gas like people truly think. I mean the lithium ion battery operated car that can plug in to any outlet available!
Consumers would talk about how this car would not go more than 200 miles and it was a problem when in fact it really wasn't. In most cases people used their cars during the week to commute to and from work. Maybe take a cruise to the grocery stores but most of these places were not 200 miles away from home.
Once you got to school or work you could hook up your plug to the outlet and let it charge while your in the office for 5 hours or more. It only took about 3 to 5 hours to fully charge one of these babies.
They make no noise and accelerate full strength without any pollutants! It was amazing! It still can be as amazing if people would ask for more of these babies to be produced!
Right now on market is the Tesla Roadster. That puppy is going for a down deposit of $5,000. This new technology allows this car to travel 220 miles per charge. I understand that this car is pretty expensive but it has more to it than any Ferrari can give to our earth and people.
If you would like to see more of these green cars on the road go ahead and call your nearest dealerships and ask them to start making these true green cars! Let them know it is for the future and we are going to depend on economically friendly products.
A great video to watch is "Who Killed The Electric Car" so you can learn more about the history of the electric cars and trolleys. Other cites would be teslamotors.com and google search electric cars and a list of a billion searches will pop up. I also encourage you to look up mapquest.com or yahoomaps.com to see how many miles you actually commute daily. I hope that it is not more than 100 miles a day as we should lean off the oil boob!
See ya
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Electric cars are great! I really think they should be the future of the automotive industry, rather than bio-fuel cars or hybrids. Here in Japan there are quite a few electric cars. It's time for America to get on the bandwagon it jumped off in the early 2000s.
By the way, if you talk to a dealership about making electric cars, they can't help you. They're a dealership. Not an automaker. All dealerships do is sell cars, not make them. If you want to talk to someone about making electric cars, you need to go right to the source, like contacting the main offices of GM, Ford, etc.
I think I commented on one of your other environmental blogs...
I am totally for the environment and all, but I'm also a realist. Electric cars aren't all that they're buzzed up to be, simply because, the electricity that powers them is not generated in an environmentally sound manner. For instance, in the United States, the primary source of power is coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel out there. So every time you "plug in" that electric car of yours, that battery is being pumped full of juice generated at a power plant. If millions of people had electric cars, coal and oil plants would spew out even more pollutants than they do now.
So the issue shouldn't be cleaner cars, it should be cleaner electricity. In my humble opinion, the answer is nuclear -- now just hear me out here. Nuclear's only atmospheric pollutant is steam - just ordinary H20, which isn't a pollutant at all, actually. There is the problem, then, of spent radioactive fuel. There are studies underway searching for a way to safely "recycle" old nuclear fuel so that it can be used again. France, the majority of whose electricity is generated by nuclear power, is the world's leader in nuclear fuel recycling research. Hopefully the breakthrough will come soon.
Others think that nuclear's big problem is with the risk of an accident. Ever see the movie "China Syndrome?" Yea, something like that. But, out of the thousands of plants around the world, and the thousands of naval ships and submarines that are powered by nuclear energy, there have been only two accidents- Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, which is probably about 75 miles west of were I live. Actually, I live within the "emergency zone" (I think it's officially 20 miles) of another nearby nuclear reactor, and I'm not the least scared. I'm glad my electricity is being produced in a way that's environmentally safe, and that will someday in the future, power cars which run on clean electricity made at a clean power plant.
Yes, generating electricity is a problem. Studies have shown that even with the dirty way of producing energy, electric cars are still cleaner than using conventional, gasoline vehicles.
However, what I think we should really be concentrating some efforts on is the use of solar energy. Solar panels are becoming more efficient and affordable as time passes. It won't be long before even better panels are produced, especially if we send some funding in that direction.
Using energy from the sun and wind to produce electricity for our homes, businesses, and electric cars would be the ultimate best. We're talking practically zero-emissions. We have the technology. What are we waiting for???
What are we waiting for is a good question. I know part of the problem is that wind and solar don't quite produce the amount of energy the world needs. It's pretty ridiculous that the US, for example, is home to 5% of the world's people, but uses 50% of the world's energy. Energy conservation is important, too, but I guess that goes without saying.
My family in Greece has solar panels on the top of their apartment building, but they still need power drawn from the city grid to live. And besides, a lot of places in the world simply can't use solar power because of lack of sunshine. Hydroelectricity can damage the land-- China's Three Gorges Dam displaced a million people and flooded countless acres, drowning villages, animal habitats, and archaeological sites. Wind seems like an okay solution, but I've never seen a wind farm in the US (I've been to Germany once, that's the only place I've ever seen a wind turbine.) Let's encourage energy corporations like Exelon or BP to start building them.
I know I kind of seem like a downer, but I really want the world to find some "alternate" source of power and make it mainstream. We basically want the same thing, just would go about different ways to do it...
Nah, you're not a downer. You bring up very good points.
The fact that solar energy isn't efficient enough yet is why I think money needs to be invested into developing the technology further. Scientists recently discovered how to capture more of the light spectrum with solar panel technology... with this new discovery, panels can be twice as efficient as they are now. However, they need to research further how to properly arrange the new molecules onto the solar panel grids in the best way to be the most efficient. This will take a bit more time, and more money. If the time and money is provided, we'll have a very promising source of alternative and very clean energy.
Well, I think we can finally come to some consensus about this whole energy thing. We need more funding into alternative energy research, but who pays for it? I like the idea of corporations buying into the "green" energy market, and they'd be best for marketing new power sources to consumers. Also, I'll grudgingly admit that, in this case, governments need to pull out some tax payer dollars to start funding research into wind, solar, hydro and nuclear.
I've heard some pretty crazy other sources of energy too, but these would be way in the future. Ever hear of lunar energy? It's derived from turbines in the ocean which are driven by the incoming and outgoing tides. Actually, I think there are a few in existence...
Twice as efficient means that every square meter of panel will generate enough electricity on a sunny day to light TWO 60 watt light bulbs or about 120 watts. That is not very much electricity and most roof tops don't have all that many square meters.
It will take a lot of electricity to push around a car. A horsepower is roughly equivalent to a kilowatt (1000 watts) in an electric motor. My lawnmower has 16 Horsepower and most cars have in the neighborhood of 100 horsepower or more.
100 horse power or translates to 100,000 watts or 833 square meters of solar panel to gather enough electricity to run a car for one hour.
If you don't mind paving the Southwest with solar panels it might work but I think some environmentalists will have something to say about that.
I'm all for solar because every little bit helps. But realistically it is hard to image that it will every be more than a minor fraction of our total energy needs unless we accept a much lower standard of living and the mass starvation that will accompany the energy cuts.
I agree with a previous poster. It is time to start building nukes and lots of them.
Right, twice as efficient might still not be that great at this point. However, my point is that solar technology is getting better quickly. We just need to invest some time and money into making it continue to progress.
The sun puts out a relatively constant amount of energy (it varies enough to create a little global warming or cooling). Only a small amount of energy hits a given square meter of the earth. Even if the solar panels were 100% efficient (and they will never get even close), they could only gather about 340 watts per square meter.
I agree with you that solar energy is a good thing and worth pursuing. I think that we should start to impose building codes that require new construction to incorporate solar.
But I think that realistically it will never account for more than a small percentage of our total energy.
For instance, in the United States, the primary source of power is coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel out there. So every time you "plug in" that electric car of yours, that battery is being pumped full of juice generated at a power plant. If millions of people had electric cars, coal and oil plants would spew out even more pollutants than they do now.
Do yer research. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/ausra-solar-thermal-power-energy...
Actually, I live within the "emergency zone" (I think it's officially 20 miles) of another nearby nuclear reactor, and I'm not the least scared.
I don't want to babysit nuclear energy, and I don't want to leave that radioactive crap for my son and daughter. Citizens in a democratic society have fought vehemently in the past. We will not see it in our back yards in the future.
"I understand that this car is pretty expensive but it has more to it than any Ferrari can give to our earth and people." -- crystalcraze13, a ProU blogger
The problem with solar, even the most recent breakthroughs, are the logistics: using most efficient solar cells theoretically possible (according to your website a generous estimate is 40% efficiency), the square mileage occupied by these panels makes them impractical to use for 100% of our energy needs. In other words, yes, it's theoretically possible, but we have to be willing to sacrifice thousands of square miles of landscape to use for panels. I think the best use of solar energy is in small batches: panels on people's roof tops, which would help decrease their use of electricity generated from dirty power plants. Every little bit counts.
Now back to my argument for nukes:
The biggest problem for nuclear power is the disposal of spent fuel rods, which you were concerned about. There are programs already in place researching ways to reuse the radioactive fuel, and in the meantime, current methods of storing used fuel do not jeopardize public health.
The citizens which have fought nuclear power have been largely successful, considering a new nuclear power plant has not been built on US soil since the 1970s. What those citizens don't know is that they are also blocking an energy breakthrough: ten trucks of uranium fuel can power one particular nuclear plant for 18 months, while it would take 110 boxcars full of coal to power a non nuclear plant for only five days to produce the same amount of energy (according to the magazine "The American Enterprise," May 2006). That's a lot of CO2 and pollutants in the atmosphere.
Nuclear plants don't require constant attention, either. New automated systems eliminate human error and prevent meltdowns even under the most extreme conditions: tornado, earthquake, you name it. Three Mile Island is a mistake that experts say won't happen in the US again.
Nuclear breaks our oil addiction also. No more conflicts over blood oil or harmful oil drilling.
Nuclear would serve America well for the next few generations, until other sources of "absolutely" safe power are fully developed, like super efficient wind turbines or compact solar arrays.
Listen: you have an incredible trust in nuclear power as an energy choice. I admire that.
But in my opinion we have robust energy efficiency (conservation) and renewable technology available us right now. We don't need to go down that road. I'm not an obstructionist to new forms of energy. I simply disagree that nuclear power is a stepping stone (as you might refer to it) for power that we can generate and be proud of in the future.
"Every little bit counts." I agree full-heartedly. That's a profound statement and decentralized energy is absolutely something I support. Give small wind and solar generators tax rebates, tax credits, and cash for transferring energy back into the grid and using it in their own homes! That's the wave of the future each citizen should ride--"If I could snap my finger: in twenty years, I'd say to people creating new homes, sure you can build that, but you're going to have to attach a solar panel to that roof so that your net energy use is zero."
Isn't that a progressive idea? Montana Public Service Commissioner, Ken Toole, said that.
"I understand that this car is pretty expensive but it has more to it than any Ferrari can give to our earth and people." -- crystalcraze13, a ProU blogger
I agree. Rather than giving huge tax breaks to companies that use large, gasoline guzzling vehicles, we should be giving tax benefits to people who are doing things to HELP our environment.
Tax breaks should be given for people using solar and wind energy, as well as those who drive environmentally-friendly vehicles.
I hate the IRS tax code. It's full of loopholes and crisscrossed with red tape. It's over 40,000 pages long, simply because there are so many little exceptions to rules and tax breaks in it for all kinds of different companies. (FairTax, anyone? But I digress...) But that's the system we got right now, so that's what we'll just have to work with to give companies the incentive to pursue the alternative energy market.
I became a convert for energy decentralization, I think you called it, after I watched a show on the Discovery channel. In it, architects were talking about putting revolving doors in office buildings that actually turn an electric turbine when people walk through them. I thought that was totally ingenious, and though it's such a seemingly insignificant amount of energy produced, it could make a difference. If the majority of the revolving doors in large cities had this technology, we could start to chip away at energy over-consumption.
And I hate to go back to the whole nuclear thing yet again, but yes, I really do believe in this type of energy. And though you criticized using nuclear as a "stepping stone" (which was exactly the idea I was trying to convey), I'm still not convinced to back down from my defense of it. Well, that's going to have to be saved for another blog. Isn't this one supposed to be about electric cars?
Hey, you're an honest person. I understand where you're coming from. That's an excellent idea (you're right, ingenious) to power a turbine with a revolving door. I'll save that idea when the time is right.
But here's how we became sidetracked: electric cars require energy, yes. More energy requires more energy development, no. We can alleviate much of our consumption of energy based on energy efficiency technologies and ingenuities, and conservation programs.
Those huge solar farms I told you about are real. You doubted that we'd have enough transmission lines for one, thousand square-mile farm, and you're right. Recently I heard Mark Mehos, a scientist or policymaker, at the Dept. of Energy's solar laboratory speak on NPR Talk of the Nation. He said that one huge gig would not be necessary, but we have large areas that we could divide up into several smaller plots (say 100 square-miles) that would equal an area about the size of Vermont. The figure is accurate-- it would power 90% of the energy needed in the United States!
"I understand that this car is pretty expensive but it has more to it than any Ferrari can give to our earth and people." -- crystalcraze13, a ProU blogger
That solar guy is talking about paving Vermont with mirrors! I drove across Vermont a couple of years ago. It is one of our smaller states but it is still a HUGE area.
But have at it! I won't miss Vermont much as it is our most liberal state. So go ahead and cover it with mirrors.
An area the size of Vermont... :)
The Once-ler: Well, what do you want? I should shut down my factory, fire a hundred-thousand workers? Is that good economics, is that sound for the country?
i have been learning about it and it is something we really have to consider! I am glad that you brought this argument to the table! Thanks. That was going to be my next blog but this will do just fine
Is the Tesla the really small car in the Nintendo Wii commercial?
"my first name must be, "He aint sh@t", cause everytime I come through, yall be like "He aint sh@t"!....I'll be dat" --Redman
"Anything that can go wrong, Will go wrong"----Murphy's Law
No, the Tesla is a really nice looking sports car... very sleek, fast, and sporty!!
The car in the Wii commercials is a Smart Car. Check it out at www.smart.com.
jay leno's garage shows him driving the tesla roadster. he absolutely loved it. check this hot car out on teslamotors.com and it will show you everything you need to know about it.
www.jaylenosgarage.com/ and you can see him drive the tesla
I was about to mention that movie. I've been quoting it lately because that energy policy guy who served with Jimmy Carter and appeared in Who Killed The Electric Car, S. David Freeman, is visiting my city next month. What a treat.
"I understand that this car is pretty expensive but it has more to it than any Ferrari can give to our earth and people." Phenomenal writing
Every organism's heartbeat holds a universe of beauty at http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/green-underbelly
i would be sooo excited to see him lecture! I bet you are going to have so much fun
Yep look for the speech's synopsis following May 13th....!
"I understand that this car is pretty expensive but it has more to it than any Ferrari can give to our earth and people." -- crystalcraze13, a ProU blogger
Well I had the pleasure of organizing Earth Week events at my university this year. And personally the most amazing part was that we invited Martin Eberhard to come and speak. (For those of you who don't know, Martin Eberhard is the founder of Tesla Motors) While I will do a full post on this later, I want to convey the sense that Electric Cars are the future of transportation.
Electric cars boast potentially powerful engines, have the ability to travel all the range that is needed in day to day driving (around 100 miles), and have efficiencies that make a prius look like a humvee.
The assertion that electric cars are emission free is incorrect as of right now. But, as many people here may have already learned, an electric car is inherently more efficient than any Internal Combustion Engine. So even with an older coal power plant spewing large quantities of emissions, an electric car will produce slightly lower emissions than even a prius would. But the reality is that our electricity comes from a variety of sources, and these are generally more environmentally friendly than an outdated coal power plant. Electric cars do have better emissions than any fuel cell vehicle will ever have.
In browsing the comments made above, there was some notion that the power grid could not handle the increased load. This is simply untrue. Assuming that one would generally charge the vehicle at night, roughly half of the US transportation needs could be met with the existing capacity and infrastructure.
Also the discussion surrounding the feasibility of solar vs the need for nuclear is a legitimate discussion. Though, one should look across the pacific ocean at the progress made in Japan. They were able to effectively subsidize solar cells in the short run, which allowed solar production to be scaled up to lower the costs. Now the subsidy has ended, and Japan has a thriving solar industry. While nuclear could provide the desperately needed increased power output at extraordinary costs, investment now in solar and other renewable industries could stave off this undesirable outcome.
Electric cars will become affordable, the Tesla Roadster enables further development to produce cars at a lower cost in the future. According to Martin Eberhard, Li ion batteries are improving at a rate of 8% per year. This means that they will become more affordable, and will be able to provide the range necessary to outperform gasoline cars in every aspect.
Just throwing in my two cents
Will post a full blog soon....
Your two cents should be more like a dollar! I am just joking. Thanks for the post! I enjoyed reading it. I would like to hear more from you. I am glad you did what you did for your school. It is very important that we get these ideas around the board.