Slamland 2

The US Dollar dropped below 0.92 CHF (Swiss Franks), yesterday. It is still there this morning at 0.918 CHF. In a way, that’s a hidden inflation. A McDonalds burger costs over 8CHF here, that’s over $8 for a burger that costs under $2 in the States, even at California prices!

On other fronts:

My Electric Vehicle study got bogged down in research. Many electric vehicles were announced this past quarter and from all the major manufacturers. Many of the releases were game-changing. No, not for the better but they do change the matrix; for the worse.

The recent quake in Japan is causing a re-evaluation of Nuclear Power plans. This isn’t good either. Two huge political issues are coming to a head Global Warming and Energy Production. Fundamentally, Green Peace and others want us all to reduce our CO2 production¹ but they also want to eliminate Nuclear Power as an option. The unannounced elephant in the room is global food production, which needs energy and land² . That is yet another thing changing the matrix. The thing is if; we cannot generate CO2, we cannot build nuke plants, and renewables aren’t there either then; How the Fuck will we generate the power to grow and process the 70% more food that we will need by 2050?³

The Greens smugly sit back and smile when asked this question, leading one to think that they confidently expect the rest of us to off ourselves in the interests of the common good.

The world is not headed to a nice place and it’s our own stupid fault.

1. Not that it’ll make a fart-in-a-hurricane’s worth of difference. [↩]
2. As an example; if you grow a hectare of crops, the most profitable is corn, mainly for ethanol production. This raises the prices of food. Castro was correct, bio-fuel is stupid and it is one of the Renewable Energy resources that Green Peace likes to rant on about. [↩]
3. Based on recent UN studies on Global food production requirements. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Part I

This is actually the kick-off article for a series of articles that explore the ramifications of bringing electric vehicles into the realm of daily use. Specifically, this involves their impact on our ecology, our energy grid, and the sustainability of their continued use¹ .

There has been a lot of marketing hype, from the EV manufacturers, about the benefits of Electric Vehicles (EV). While it has been trimmed down from the Zero-Emissions hyperbole of a few short years ago, the true story has been obfuscated from the general public. Please don’t mistake this for an anti-EV rant. I like EVs. However, implementing wide-spread EV use without understanding the total impacts could be detrimental unless our infrastructure were properly prepared² . This preparation will take decades of concerted effort and will have an associated cost. The question then becomes one of whether we really want to go there after all.

This is actually an article that was planned last November, when I did the original analysis. However, the broad range of inter-related issues involved requires far more space than a single blog post could give it. In reality, the subject is worthy of an extended paper or even a smallish book³ .

Methodology

I’ll start with the vehicles, including two that I have already written about. They are the Ford Mustang GT, Ford Probe GT, Tesla, Aptera, and the Prius. I will give the relevant statistics on each one and I might even provide pictures. What I will also provide are normalized specifications in both European and American standards. Note that, automobile engine output is now rated in Kilowatts and not brake horsepower. This provides the much needed common standards reference for this study. Once I have those, we can move on to the next bit.

What I will not d is cover manufacturing costs and impacts. The main assumption here is that an automobile, regardless of type, is going to cost the same impact to build and construct. In most cases, the infrastructure is already there as a sunk cost. The same would be true for base energy delivery infrastructure. What would change are the delivery capacities and the impacts of those capacities. The only thing that I am not covering are hydrogen fueled vehicles. There is no serious infrastructure for those and it would have to be built, seriously skewing the numbers and complicating this study.

What I only lightly touch on here are gasoline-electric hybrids, in the form of the Prius. They present a complication and are really an efficient form of the gasoline powered automobile. The complication comes with plug-in hybrids where their drive energies can be augmented by plugging them into the power grid over-night. As such, they share their load over both gasoline and electric infrastructures.

Once I have established a common baseline for the vehicles and their demands then I can look into the impacts of those demands and derive proper emissions data, such as pollutants per mile/kilometer. We can then also look at the cost of infrastructure development. Again, the delivery systems for both gasoline and electricity are well-know and fairly standardized.

Finally, I will take a brief look at meeting those demands, deferring most of that discussion to yet another paper.

ciao

1. I am hesitant to call this one at the moment, even now. I will be completing the analysis as I write each article. Although, I have a fairly good idea of where this is going [↩]
2. Preliminary studies show that we would have to triple our electrical generating capacity. [↩]
3. Once the series is completed, I intend to edit, compile, and publish it into a book. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.