Plug-In Vehicles: The First Great Fraud of the New Millennium

Seeking Alpha ^ | 16 Mar 10 | John Petersen

[shove_it]

[...]

PT Barnum would have been proud.

While hype-masters loudly proclaim that plug in cars will save the planet by slashing oil consumption and CO2 emissions, the numbers tell a different story; that plug-ins are all sizzle and no steak. The result is the industrial equivalent of a snipe hunt, a wild goose chase based on flawed assumptions.

Let me explain how I reached this conclusion. On December 31, 2009 Forbes published an opinion piece titled System Overload that questioned whether the battery industry was overbuilding global manufacturing capacity. The third paragraph noted:

“By 2015 the new factories will have the global capacity to produce 36 million kilowatt-hours of battery capacity, enough to supply 15 million hybrid vehicles, or 1.5 million fully electric cars, says Deutsche Bank.”

While the article went on to question whether there would be buyers for all those batteries, the capacity estimate got me thinking: “In a world that wants to save fuel and reduce CO2 emissions, but can only make 36 million kWh of batteries per year, what is the highest and best use for the batteries?”

[...]

The calculations were simple but the answers were amazing — at least to me. The sweet and simple summary is that the venerable Prius-class hybrid is five to six times more effective at reducing global gasoline consumption than its plug-in cousins and, in the US, it's seven to 10 times more effective at reducing CO2 emissions.

In other words, plug-in vehicles are not the effective albeit expensive saviours of the planet that have been sold to credulous reporters and intellectually lazy regulators. They're unconscionable waste masquerading as conservation.

[...]

[wendy1946]

If there is any future in electric vehicles at all, it will involve super capacitors and not batteries.

[SuziQ]

MIT has been working on capacitors using nanotube technology. I know that some Australian company was working on super-capacitors.

[wendy1946]

There’s a Dallas firm called EESTOR which was supposed to be marketing one such by now and all I can find is conspiracy theories as to why we haven’t seen it.