Quote:
Originally Posted by S14DB
How many kWh's does it take to charge?
How much emissions does the local power plant make to produce those kWh's?
It's all cups and ball. Keep the ball moving...
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Part of the reason it's so hard to break the dependancy on oil is that oil must be produced and delivered in a very specific way. it needs to be harvested and then refined and then distributed... it requires a tremendous infrastructure to get that fuel from it's original place to your vehicle.
Even if you run an electric car off of power from your home, which comes from a power plant that's just as pollutant as your car was, it's a step in the right direction...
The reason being is that it's a whole lot easier to swap out that coal plant for a wind farm than it is to completely replace the oil infrastructure. Electricity can be produced from many many many sources, some good some not so good, but moving everyone to a more versatile and more easily transported power source. Consider that we have power lines to transport electricity a short distance from the plant while oil must be trucked and shipped in from half way around the world.
Nothing is going to give you instant gratification, you're not going to build _A_ car and solve the pollution and oil issues in one shot.... but if you know your ultimate goal and map out a path with achievable milestones you can probably reach it in a decade or two.
Shifting dependency from oil to electricity is the first step... electric motors can be just as powerful an fast as combustion engines, they're also smaller, lighter, and way more efficient (in terms of how much potential energy is actually converted to movement).
Once we've started that we can work on shifting electricity producers from not so green methods (coal) to more green methods (wind, solar, etc)...
while battery capacity is a big issue, and so is the effecency of solar panels, increasing their use will only make them better. Necessity is the mother of invention and if there is money to be made in better battery and solar tech then the big corporations will throw their resources towards finding those better methods and making them cheaper and more marketable...