{"id":19119,"date":"2016-03-23T14:36:31","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T19:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19119"},"modified":"2016-03-23T14:36:31","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T19:36:31","slug":"who-killed-the-electric-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19119","title":{"rendered":"Who Killed the Electric Car?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a title=\"Permalink to Who Killed the Electric Car?\" href=\"http:\/\/energyskeptic.com\/2016\/who-killed-the-electric-car\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Who Killed the Electric Car?<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-meta\"><em>[ Who cares about electric\u00a0CARS?\u00a0 Civilization ends\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/energyskeptic.com\/2016\/when-trucks-stop-running-so-does-civilization\/\">when trucks stop running<\/a>, and trucks can\u2019t run on batteries because they\u2019re 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.\u00a0 A more up-to-date version of this post on batteries, and electrifying trucks and locomotives can be found in my\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/energyskeptic.com\/2016\/when-trucks-stop-running-so-does-civilization\/\">book,<\/a>\u00a0which also explains why it may be impossible to have an 80 to 100 percent electric grid depending on renewables.\u00a0 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\u2019t keep the grid balanced. Since natural gas is very local because the USA has few LNG terminals, this may come sooner than expected.\u00a0 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\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com\/2016\/03\/is-us-shale-oil-gas-production-peaking.html\">there may be only 3 to 7 years of shale gas<\/a>\u00a0in the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville and Marcellus shales.\u00a0 The decline of conventional natural gas was at a crisis point in 2004 and conventional gas has continued to decline since then. ]<\/em><\/div>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>The battery did it.\u00a0 Batteries are far too expensive for the average consumer, $600-1700 per kwh (Service). And they aren\u2019t likely to get better any time soon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe big advances in battery technology happen rarely. It\u2019s been more than 200 years and we have maybe 5 different successful rechargeable batteries,\u201d said George Blomgren, a former senior technology researcher at Eveready (Borenstein).<\/p>\n<p>And yet hope springs eternal. A better battery is always just around the corner:<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who Killed the Electric Car? [ Who cares about electric\u00a0CARS?\u00a0 Civilization ends\u00a0when trucks stop running, and trucks can\u2019t run on batteries because they\u2019re 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10765,9422,269,12246,805,860],"class_list":["post-19119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-batteries","tag-electric-cars","tag-energy-storage","tag-energyskeptic","tag-trade","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19120,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19119\/revisions\/19120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}