Are electric vehicles the answer to high gas prices? – Yes

From 3arf

Electric vehicles are not the only answer to high oil prices, but they might be the best. As a transportation fuel, electricity has some definite advantages over other alternatives.Obviously, the production and delivery systems are already in place. We could "fill up" at home right now.Unlike the crops used to produce biofuels, the production of electricity doesn't depend on suitable weather. We all know that crop failures happen. We just saw massive losses caused by flooding. The next time it might be drought.You can't beat the price. Depending on where you live, the cost of recharging an electric car (including the high performance "Tesla") is about two cents per mile. Compare that to the cost of driving a car that goes thirty miles on a $4 (soon to be $5) gallon of gasoline. For the benefit of any skeptics, that figure of two cents does not come from textbook theory or some kind of computer model. It comes from real cars that are driven daily on real roads by real people in the real world.Some people believe that battery powered vehicles have a short range. Certainly some do, but this is by choice. The distance an electric vehicle will travel without a recharge is limited only by the size or number of batteries the manufacturer chooses to install. Most of today's electric vehicles have a range of over 100 miles. Some will go 200 or 300. It's just a matter of how much "battery" someone is willing to pay for. Consider this. People who study things say that only a small percentage of us drive more than 40 or 50 miles a day. This means that short range is actually a non-problem for the overwhelming majority of us. For the rest, there are hybrids. In a year or two, car companies will be offering plug-in hybrids. They will go far enough on battery power alone so their gasoline engines will kick in only after 20 - 40 miles. If you own a current hybrid, there are a few aftermarket companies selling kits to convert it to a plug-in.Some people also believe that electric vehicles underpowered. Yes, some are, but this too is by choice. Pound for pound, Electric motors produce far more power than the gasoline engines we are driving today. Electric vehicles can have as much power as their builders want them to have, and they can have this power in a relatively small package. The above-mentioned "Tesla" has more power than a Ferrari.Electric motors are extremely reliable. As long as they are built by quality people using quality materials, they will last a very long time. The world is full of electric motors - large and small - that have been running almost non-stop for decades.There is another important issue that needs to be addressed. A few so-called "experts" claim that nothing is gained by using electric vehicles because we are simply burning fuel in generating plants instead of directly in our cars. The majority of generating plants burn some kind of fuel, but the issue here is oil, and the US does not use any significant amount of oil to produce electricity. Nation wide, only 1.6% of our electric is generated with petroleum, and most of that is in Hawaii. We use coal, hydropower, nuclear power, natural gas, and an ever-increasing amount of wind and solar power. In the very near future, the US will have power plants using concentrated sunlight to produce the steam that drives their generators. At least one of these systems is producing power in Spain right now, and more are under construction. (Yes, they have a way to store heat so they can generate at night). We are also building ocean wave generators, and river bottom generators. We even have some geothermal generating plants, with more in the works.These same people often claim that a large number of battery-powered vehicles would require a large increase in our generating capacity. Apparently they are unaware of the massive amount of electricity (and natural gas) it takes to produce gasoline. Not only for the refining process, but for the manufacture and operation of everything else involved - from getting the crude oil out of the ground, to getting the finished product into you car. People who have studied this say it would take less electricity to run a country full of battery-powered cars than it does now to keep them fed with gasoline. And that's without considering solar recharging.Photovoltaic technology is advancing very rapidly, and so is battery technology. We will soon be able to build long-range electric cars and trucks that are affordable and won't necessarily have to be plugged into the power grid at all.

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