Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
eh, this is actually not nessesarily true - Ligher cars would very strongly reduce the minium quality of batteries needed to give good preformance, but the supply of electricity is not a limit on how big cars we could use under an all-electric paradigm, because the total size of our electricity infrastructure will be at a minimum big enough to service average daytime comsumption, and there are no current zero-carbon solutions to that problem that do not end up also producing quite ridiculusly large surpluses of electricity at night. If your grid is all-nuclear, the marginal cost of running the reactors at full throttle at night as well as during the day is near zero, and a wind, wave, geothermal grid would by nessesity be overbuilt to a degree that would invariably result in very large amounts of spare electricity at night. which means that if you have a battery that can keep a 3 tonne limo going from dawn till dusk, everyone could drive one with a clean concience as far as fuel consumption goes (less so as far as embodied energy goes.. but then again, if the electricity supply is clean, aluminum bodywork suddenly has fuck-all enviormental footprint.)
by Thomas on Thu Nov 11th, 2010 at 05:58:11 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Wake me up when we're there, Thomas.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
by eurogreen on Thu Nov 11th, 2010 at 06:40:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
doesnt have to be free, just cheaper than gas. and gas costs a tonne.
by Thomas on Thu Nov 11th, 2010 at 06:56:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Maybe you could waste all that lovely electricity by lugging around scrap metal encasing self-loading bulk freight. But you'll want to use that night time energy to synthesise phosphates, thus displacing non-renewable sources of phosphates that are currently being depleted at a rate that would have them gone completely within the forecastable future.

Personalised transportation is optional. Synthetic fertiliser is not.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Nov 11th, 2010 at 06:57:45 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Thomas:
if the electricity supply is clean, aluminum bodywork suddenly has fuck-all enviormental footprint.)

wasn't that red toxic mud catastrophe in hungary the other day the waste from alumimium production?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Nov 11th, 2010 at 07:09:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Thomas:
everyone could drive one with a clean conscience

It would still be a stupid waste of energy, raw materials and work compared to mass transportation. And there would be even more traffic jams in big cities, wasting time and space and creating stress.

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

by Melanchthon on Thu Nov 11th, 2010 at 08:26:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series