Can the world economy recover with rising oil prices?

[Squilliam]

bdbdbd said:

Squilliam said:

A Chevrolet Volt has an 8.8KW battery pack good for 40 Miles of purely electrical running. Since it takes 8 hours to charge the power draw would only be a little over a KW. It would be no worse than a small heater running through the night in terms of electrical consumption. I doubt that even a whole street of Volts would strain the grid locally. I hear theres plenty of coal/nuclear/hydro power to go around at night so it shouldn't be an issue. Also charging a Volt would cost only 80c which is a pittance next to the cost of gasoline.

Solar power is pretty useful, but only in places with a lot of illumination. However its really expensive to install unfortunately and at this time except in corner cases its worse than a typical coal/gas fired power station.

 

It's not a lot per car, but when we have millions of cars charged simultanously, we are talking about gigawatts. The heaters are on only an hour or two due to timer, so there's not that much of an overlap.

One of the issues is the long time it takes to charge. It's not practical and causes huge overlap to charging. But, as i said, grid wouldn't be a problem in a long run.
It would be much more practical, if the battery would be charged in less than an hour and you could drive hundreds of kilometers without charging, instead of staying overnight at every gasstation.
The second generation hybrids would be optimal at this point of time. You could charge them out of a wall and they would charge while driving, making the car more practical overall.

There are lots of rather simple and practical solution using solar power or reneweable energy sources, just that every time the power issues are discussed in public, everything that has anything to do with the word "practical" is thrown away.

The battery technology is improving extremely rapidly. They can be charged a lot faster now than they were several years ago. You're from the U.S. right? Since a lot of people have more than one vehicle it would be extremely practical for them to offer an electric only vehicle for people to use within a set radius for their daily commute etc. So long as the price remains within reach of a comparable gas powered vehicle as people tend to purchase their vehicles on finance they can appreciate a lower running/servicing cost of a purely electric vehicle as it would probably save them money on the longer term. Its not the solution for everyone and hybrid plug in vehicles may be the way to go for at least as many people but long term the market will probably satisfy everyones different needs.

Haha but yes I can see your pain when it comes to public debate. Im lucky that I live in a country with 70%+ renewable electricity production. We're having a big push for wind power with dozens of sites coming online between now and 2010 which should help us rid ourselves of dependency on fossil fuels. Personally the reason why im so for electric cars is because my country can produce so much renewable electricity already. In America they have a tonne of space available for Solar and Wind power its insane, especially in places like Texas/Arizona/California and even things like the Geothermal capacity is underutilised from what I can see.