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There are a few interesting consequences of a shift to electric motoring - I think it is a safe assumption that the standard electric car will have a battery pack that allows you to drive 450 or more km on a single charge - This is what the kolobri prototype managed, and it is sufficent overkill to remove range anxiety as a concern completely, which I think is nessesary to sell the cars. This means, among other things, that public charge stations will only exist, if at all, as amenities along long-haul highways, because outside doing things like driving on vacation, you will never, ever charge the car away from home. So corner "gas" stations dont exist in this paradigm.

Demand management as a strategy for electricity production becomes both much easier, and completely politically impossible - It will be trivial to shift electricity consumption around within the day-night cycle, because of the enormous battery capacity of the veichle fleet, but if you strand people with dead cars because monday->wensday were quiet, cloudy days, you get lynched, politically. Possibly literally too.

I think this favors nukes, but any powersource which is reliable on a day to day basis wins (desert solar, yes. Rooftop solar, no.) Peak producers loose.

by Thomas on Tue Jan 3rd, 2012 at 06:07:54 AM EST
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