Posted on 12/01/2020 5:15:01 PM PST by george76
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that electricity consumption will double if the world’s car fleets are electrified, increasing the need to expand nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources.
Increasing the availability of sustainable energy is a major challenge as cars move from combustion engines to battery-driven electric motors, a shift which will take two decades, Musk said in a talk hosted by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer.
There’s no unicorn energy source or free lunch. Currently, electric cars are primarily powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Those are the sources we use to generate electricity, after all, according to the Energy Information Agency. Renewables are growing but still account for less than 20% of U.S. electricity.
There’s no free lunch when it comes to renewable energy source, which may not even be all that renewable. Wind and sun are free, but the means of generating power from them are not.
They require batteries, which requires extensive mining and the use of toxic chemicals.
Mining is a dirty business.
...
Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years.
...
the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet ..
Removing them and transporting them to landfills increases windmills’ energy footprint over time.
...
more electric cars will require more electric generation.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Would have been great if he called this election for what it is but I wouldn’t want to put my life in danger either.
He tells the truth more than 99 percent of those in silicon valley and that’s a start
We can generate lots of cheap electricity from all the excess oil that will be available. Problem solved.
Are you saying it doesn't??
Saw an electric car with the license plate: COALBNR.
That’s my view.
The ChiComs don’t have much oil and they are going toward electric vehicles powered by coal fired power plants.
The world demand for oil should continue to fall.
Maybe we need to think outside the car.
Uh, those of us in the STEM field have been saying this for quite a while. Add to this the fact that in many areas, the grid is loaded almost to max capacity during some parts of the day.
We’ll not mention the environmental costs of mining all that rare earth battery material. Or disposal costs.
Etc.
Although, that Mach E is beginning to tickle my fancy.
I work for a large regional power supplier. I’ve been saying for a long time that if a significant people are plugging in cars, well, we don’t have the grid to handle it. And if you are serious about electic cars, you are a proponent of building lots of nuclear plants.
It’s really just that simple.
Does anybody ever consider just how much electric energy it takes to push a two ton vehicle down the road?
I remember reading some articles about that. According to Musk, the carbon footprint from the rocket fuel is a tiny fraction of that done by ordinary airplane travel. Rockets don't fly every day, but airplanes do. So we shouldn't blame rockets for carbon emissions, we should blame jet airplanes.
Well, duh! He only figured this out now?
Double? Try again.
The cars need an onboard fusion generator. They could call it a “Fusionator” or something.
/s
Time to build a dozen or so 500 GW nuke plants, allow breeder reactors and reprocessing, and open Yucca Mountain.
Those actions would eliminate most power issues for decades if not longer.
Why don’t they dump the blades in the ocean?
Musk oughtta know, he puts on 100s of thousands of miles on his G650 every year
A fabric impervious to weather that stiffens into a shape tailored to the owner’s preferences and capable of unguided transport at any speed from 1-500 mph and altitudes from 0 to 5,000 ft. Collision avoidance included. Travel coordinates subject to restriction. Wheels optional.
“Transformers are generally undersized because they have had very light demands overnite, when they can cool down.”
Source!
Not going to happen until nuclear fusion.
Till then electric cars are garbage and will be junked before there is “clean” energy for any of them.
Please put your tin-foil hat back on.
“The world demand for oil should continue to fall.”
We don’t use oil for electricity.
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