Posted on 08/13/2009 3:53:47 AM PDT by Scanian
Edited on 08/13/2009 5:27:26 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
SORRY, the new Chevrolet Volt does not promise a "green" revolution -- indeed, the car could trigger a whole new wave of blackouts.
Chevrolet notes that the key to high-mileage performance to the tune of 230 miles per gallon "is for a Volt driver to plug into the electric grid at least once each day" to get "40 miles of electric-only, petroleum-free driving."
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The concept of “total cost of ownership” or total impact of use is lost on today’s “journalists”.
The energy has to come from somewhere. Nothing is totally green.
Well, we’ll just shut down those dirty coal burning plants and charge our Volts with solar and wind energy which means we’ll only be able to drive when it’s sunny or windy....
Another person in anothe forum posted the truth the other day. The Volt is a coal-powered car.
One would have to be crazier than a loon to propose closing coal powered electric plants and then place so much confidence in a coal-powered car.
I believe that describes the Democrat party.
I thought that electricity was produced primarily by coal, not oil.
I read somewhere that 2% of electricity came from oil, so that using electric vehicles doesn't affect our oil imports much.
Am I missing something?
unintended consequences
Great article title - HA!
Of course, for the government, it is a gain if the Waxman-Markey monstrosity puts the government in charge of "carbon credits," and collecting revenue from the sale thereof.
Interlocking $crewing of the American people, bills achieving synergistic power-mongering by the federal government, and enhancing their 'courtability' status with lobbyists.
Where does it stop?
Will home solar power be enough for one full daily charge?
I remember reading about one scumbag who had an electric car. He said that if he was running low on juice, he could just pull over anywhere and plug it in for an hour or so. Great concept, except he was stealing electricity from someone!
Yeah BO, where is all this extra energy going to come from? Solar — right//sarc. The Prius’s new solar panel roof provides enough electricity to power only the vent fan. Big friggin deal.
Electric cars without a serious addition of nuke plants is a stupid idea, especially as the “greens” oppose every other type of energy production.
But hey, most of them like the idea of blackouts, especially a permanent blackout.
Yes. In many urban areas and other densely populated areas, electricity is manufactured primarily by generators powered by diesel engines. Think of the diesel engines that power locomotives.
I worked at a major wireless carrier. Its main data center had a backup, on-site emergency power backup. It was comprised of 4 of these type of “locomotive engines” and their generators. Even with its massive fuel supply, it could only stay up and running for about 48 hours. That electricity was just to keep a data center up and running.
They burn a LOT of diesel fuel. And, yes, the output was not nearly as clean as the tailpipe of an auto with a catalytic converter.
“Where does it stop?”
Chains or implanted bio-monitors, combined with a cashless, all-digital, GLOBAL currency run by a global bank.
'GREEN' CAR? TRY BLACKOUT CITY
I've been saying this since day one. Our grid can't handle the load.
Absolutely true except that it's about 3% but let's not pick nits.
The other inaccurate statement in the article:
you could actually add millions of pounds of dangerous, dirty, unregulated pollution and carbon into the air we breathe
Electricity generation is very much regulated. The general point of the article is true however with some caveats. There is excess energy available at night that is simply spun off. I could see a system where your home car plug doesn't get energized until peak loads are off. This would work like thermal electric storage that many electrical utilities have been offering for years.
Noo, you are correct. This article is full of misinformation, but, boy, it sure has good rhetoric. Now, if only reality matched the rhetoric....
According to the Energy Information Agency, which is part of the US Department of Energy, for 2008, the following amounts of electricity were generated by the following sources (units are thousands of Megawatt-Hours
Coal 1,994,385
Petroleum (liquids) 31,162
Petroleum (coke) 14,192
Natural Gas 876,948
Nuclear 806,182
Hydropower 248,085
Total 4,110,259
I haven’t included smaller sources. The Petroleum (liquids) contribution is less than 1% of the total.
I don’t know why the author of this commentary thinks that the emissions from all of these myriad petroleum-fired power plants are unregulated. Apparently, he has never heard of that obscure organization, the Environmental Protection Agency.
How long will it take to fully charge a car after it has gone 40 miles, with a gas engine you stop and get gas and good to go...
I just don't believe your statement that "In many urban areas and other densely populated areas, electricity is manufactured primarily by generators powered by diesel engines."
There's a reason you used that as a BACKUP, not a primary source.
No - Adam Victor is.
First, most users will not be in urban neighborhoods. Most urban car users park on the street or in parking garages, if they have a car at all. Plugging in a Volt will not only be inconvenient for them, it may not be possible at all. I would predict that most Volt owners will live in the suburbs where garages are plentiful until a commercial recharging infrastructure is built, which will take decades to do.
Second, most cars will be charged in the evening, well past peak usage when power plants have ample excess capacity.
Third, this guy, who is trying to build a gas fired energy plant, has a vested interest in painting the darkest picture possible so as to promote his business interests.
And ZERO could not care less. He’s in the Owner’s Box watching down into the Coliseum while we struggle daily and he gets fanned and eats grapes along with Senators.
If you walked up to that main data center on an ordinary day when commercial power was available, were those backup generators running?
I seriously doubt it.
People instead of siphoning your gas will sneak around and hit you up for a charge on outdoor outlets.
It’s already too late to prevent rolling blackouts.
The current depression only delays the inevitable.
Vince
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Jamais reculez á tyrannie un pouce!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! Never give an inch to tyranny!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
No you are not. He had his facts wrong. As another poster nailed it, the Volt is a coal-powered car.
How is it saving energy when you have to plug it in...does it come with a solar panel?
The “inconvenient truth” is that the powerplants have to produce the electricity for the cars (unless you rely on the miniscule solar panels on the roof). Powerplants will be regulated by the government and final users taxed to death, while the convenience store owners and power companies will extract their pound of flesh. The government WILL find a way to keep road taxes the same or higher. If by some miracle, there is a cost savings to the consumer initially, after the purchase of your over-priced green machine, it will be eaten by buying replacement battery packs, charging units and solar panels.
Who wants to wait in a mile long line at the “pump” while your neighbor takes an hour long fillup? Prepare to see these cars and their drivers on the side of the road- alot. Imagine hurricanes, family emergencies and other natural disasters when you only have 60 (light-footed) miles of juice. Great idea. Tesla and Edison would be proud, but DaVinci and Einstein are spinning in their graves...
People will be buying outlets that can be padlocked, probably.
I don’t see these cars making much of a hit...they’re expensive, not convenient, and environmentally are no help at all.
The Volt is projected to cost $40K, a mid-range Prius is about $25K.
So, you would be paying $15K extra for the Volt.
At an Obama-endorsed $4 per gallon, that would be 3,750 gallons of gas.
The Prius is said to get 50 mpg. on average. That means, before you even drive the Volt, for the same money, the Prius could have gone 187,500 miles.
Oh, one more thing- who doesn’t think the 230mpg rating was a freebie for Government Motors so they can average that number in to reach the EPA’s ridiculus average? The other car companies will of course be held to a different standard....
He said that if he was running low on juice, he could just pull over anywhere and plug it in for an hour or so.
A large number of suburban dwellers actually reside in apartment complexes which have the same problems as urban residences - insufficient electrical outlets near the parking areas. I was thinking of that very issue recently and drove slowly through a brand-new apartment complex a few miles from my house - apart from nicer architecture and more "green space", the place is just like those built thirty years ago - rows of covered parking with very few outdoor outlets.
How would an update even be possible? Sure, they could dig the place up and run a bunch of electrical conduit and put a weatherproof outlet box by each parking space, but would that be off a single meter, with the cost divided evenly among all residents? That seems more likely than trying to meter each parking space separately. These are problems that will not be resolved easily or quickly.
As for charging in an office garage, some woman who worked in my building had one of those teensy urban electric cars about four years ago. I noticed that she was always one of the first to arrive in the building - and then I noticed why - she was getting there early to park by one of only three wall outlets in her parking area.
The building management caught on soon thereafter and covered all the parking area outlets.
Does the Prius also qualify for the $7500 federal income tax credit? I heard some GM spokesman talking about that.
From what I've seen, EVs have three weak points that have to be resolved in some fashion before they can fully replace their gasoline-fueled counterparts:
1. Range
2. "Refueling" time
3. Environmental control
On the second point, I can refuel my family car at the gas pump in about five minutes, and go maybe 600 (highway) miles on that for the next 12 hours or so. How would an equivalent EV do?
They will be a hit because the government will tax our good cars out of existance. Bet on it.
Ping for later
Dontcha just love it?
Are you talking about total output nationally to all consumers? I don’t dispute coal is far more prevalent. But diesel-powered generators have their hooks set in firmly.
Of course not.
What are you talking about?
When the power switched off, the UPS switched to a huge room full of marine batteries, which powered the data center until the diesel engines were running at speed, at which point the UPS switched the power over to the diesel generators.
40 miles per charg leaves alot of people out of the loop...like i said how about a solar panel.
Not to mention that electric cars and series hybrids (as opposed to parallel hybrids like the Prius) don't idle. A car at idle gets zero MPG.
The article is pretty stupid. We won't get a bunch of Volts overnight. Most of the country is powered by coal, natural gas or nukes (I can see the Byron plant from my house!). The electricity cost will be a fraction of gasoline costs.
If the cost and emissions are the same for a gas-electric hybrid as for a conventional car, it's still a win -- a small one, but a win. It's lot easier to roll out new and cleaner technologies to hundreds of power plants than to millions of vehicles, and to monitor and regulate their emissions. It's the difference between point-source and non-point-source pollution.
On all of these threads, I see a tendency -- including the article at the top of this thread -- to dismiss out of hand any new technology that won't solve every energy problem at once. Truth is, there ain't no silver bullet, and kicking the imported oil habit is going to require every practical solution out there.
At one time, the Prius could get you a tax credit of $3100, but that appears to no longer be the case because the model has reached a target production number of 60,000.
http://www.hybridcars.com/federal-incentives.html
This may be changed once Cap’n’tax becomes law.
So, if the $7.5K tax credit is true, then the Prius gets to go 93,750 miles before you plug the Volt in the first time.
Interestingly, I discovered on the IRS site a nasty little gotcha that if you leased a hybrid car, the tax credit would be taken by the leasing company, not the lessee.
I wonder if that will apply to the Volt?
Greenies haven’t figured out what is required to produce electricity. It doesn’t just magically happen.
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