Electric cars are the future. Those gasoline-electric cars on the market today are just an interim fix to lessen our reliance on imported petroleum and eliminate harmful emissions.
The U.S. Dept. of Energy has several research programs focused on developing the systems that will support fully electric vehicles. Their current studies assume that by 2020 (less than 12 years from now) a mixture of sedans and SUV plug-in hybrids will account for 25% of all the cars sold. With this growth, additional electrical generating capacity will start to be needed for these additional loads on the grid. A small part of this capacity can come from small local solar cells, which also don’t pollute or require petroleum imports. Additional capacity could be added through nuclear, but it’s unlikely that any new nuclear plants could be built and certified in 12 short years, if they started today.
So the question is, where will the majority of this new electric power come from? Some of it could come from coal-driven power plants for which the U.S. has an abundant supply, but it also pollutes as much as or more than petroleum driven plants. And the DOE just recently killed a research program on developing the technologies for clean burning coal generating plants, citing out-of-control development costs. The U.S. is just about ‘maxed out’ on hydroelectric power and environmentalists would crush any attempt to build more anyway. Wind power is expensive, and slow to build the substantive numbers of systems needed. And current solar cell systems just don’t develop the massive power requirements needed to recharge hundreds of thousands of automotive batteries every night.
So that pretty much leaves us with conventional polluting power plants that in many parts of the country will run on imported petroleum. We’re stuck in this cycle with no real exit strategy for the next 20 to 30 years.
Oh, and even with a quarter of the new cars built in 2020 having some sort of electric propulsion system, that still leaves more than 100 million vehicles in the U.S. that still run completely on petroleum.
