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Who Killed the Electric Car?

By in Energy on .

Who Killed the Electric Car?

[ Who cares about electric CARS?  Civilization ends when trucks stop running, and trucks can’t run on batteries because they’re too heavy (93% of the cargo weight, 25% of the cargo space), and an all-electric truck fleet would require thousands of new power plants, mostly running on finite fossil fuels. Although Wall street can endlessly come up with new financial products to skim the wealth of the middle class, scientists have to work within the laws of physics and thermodynamics. This is the main reason why even a car battery is not likely to ever pan out, as I explain below.  A more up-to-date version of this post on batteries, and electrifying trucks and locomotives can be found in my book, which also explains why it may be impossible to have an 80 to 100 percent electric grid depending on renewables.  We face not just a fossil fuel shortage, but an electricity shortage in the future, which will strike once natural gas declines to the point it can’t keep the grid balanced. Since natural gas is very local because the USA has few LNG terminals, this may come sooner than expected.  Despite the hype about 100 to 200 years of energy independence promised by many economic pundits, Patzek in his lifeitself blog makes the case that there may be only 3 to 7 years of shale gas in the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville and Marcellus shales.  The decline of conventional natural gas was at a crisis point in 2004 and conventional gas has continued to decline since then. ]

The battery did it.  Batteries are far too expensive for the average consumer, $600-1700 per kwh (Service). And they aren’t likely to get better any time soon.

“The big advances in battery technology happen rarely. It’s been more than 200 years and we have maybe 5 different successful rechargeable batteries,” said George Blomgren, a former senior technology researcher at Eveready (Borenstein).

And yet hope springs eternal. A better battery is always just around the corner:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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