Crock: Electric Cars
Electric cars are a crock. I've been too polite to share, but since a reader asked, there are some huge practical and environmental problems if everyone started doing the wrong thing and driving electric cars. This whole thing is sponsored by companies that stand to make billions if people started buying these things.
The big gotcha that most non-electronic engineers don't realize is that electric cars consume
huge amounts of electric power. One electric car consumes as much power in typical operation as
four homes! Why do you think they need special wiring and take forever to charge? Why do you think the batteries fill up half the trunk? All the power to charge these things has to come from somewhere; it's not like charging the little battery in your
D300. (PS - as soon as I can find the box, since I haven't used my D300 since 2007, I ought to sell it.)
Here's the big problem: If we all got electric cars, we'd need four times as many new electric power plants, and four times as many transmission towers to get that power to our homes! Imagine a landscape cluttered with power lines; how else will we get four times as much electric power home or at work to charge all these things? These aren't just golf carts.
It's ironic that the same people who worry about replacing real bulbs with carcinogenic CFL bulbs loaded with mercury, lead, EMI and EMF just to save five watts are the same ones mislead to think that an electric car that charges at 10,000 watts overnight on 440V three-phase is saving energy.
Each horsepower requires about 745 watts, but only if the car is 100% efficient, which they are not. It will need a lot more power for each horsepower in practice, and most small cars can make a maximum of at least 150 HP today. Wimpy electric cars might make do with just 20 HP maximum, or 10 HP for cruising at 55 MPH, still needing 15,000 watts to make just that!
When you ignore all the free subsidies handed out like cocaine to get people hooked, electric cars need to burn about four times as much to fuel at a power plant compared to burning it in your car. 75% of the heat energy of combustion is wasted converting heat to spinning motion in a power plant, converting that motion to electricity, transmission to your home, storage in a battery, and conversion back to motion in your car, all with more heat losses over simply burning the same fuel in your car to make that motion directly. Yes, power plants burn much lower grades of oil and/or clean, safe nuclear power, but we still would need about four times as much energy at a power plant to get the same "go" in our car as just burning the fuel in our own cars in the first place — and those 360 kV powerline towers are going to have to go in someone's backyard.
Electric cars are just another way to get some people richer, using everyone else's money.
