Posted on 04/25/2011 9:24:03 AM PDT by Qbert
President Obama’s plan to put one million electric cars on American roads by 2015 is a boon for makers of expensive advanced batteries—especially in Korea and Japan.
Although U.S. researchers have developed advanced battery designs, the U.S. has lacked manufacturers who can produce them. That situation is changing thanks to a stimulus-funded initiative to build battery plants in Michigan, but the change has been slow—and battery manufacturers in Korea and Japan are not sitting idly by.
“The Asians are ramping up the capability to produce batteries at a scary rate, actually,” said Mark Peters, Argonne National Laboratory’s deputy director for programs, on Thursday. “We’re following that very closely. Because we’re developing advanced technologies, but there’s no U.S. industry to really take hold of what we’re developing.”
The batteries for the lauded GM Volt are assembled at new plants in Michigan, but those plants are sited near airports that receive the lithium-ion cells from Korea.
[Snip]
But a million electric cars means a million batteries—and America may not win the race to develop lighter, less expensive, more reliable ones. Obama has been pushing batteries since his first presidential campaign but with renewed energy of late.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.forbes.com ...
A million by 2015?
With the crap electric cars out there, they will be lucky to have 50,000 out by 2015!
That would also produce whole bunch of brownouts. We don't have the capacity to supply that much electricity.
We would need several more nuclear power plants to be able to handle that much demand.
heres a gift.
OTC:blqn
“A chicken in every pot and a Chevy volt in every burned out garage....”
Plus, if there is a million, who will be paying for roads and road repair since that million isn’t paying gas tax?
Can GM's quality be high enough to outpace the demise of models sold and on the road? My bet is on the road end of reality versus the pace of battery and chasis production.
That is the real sales risk of the Chevy Volt. History repeats itself.
www.ev1.org/
One government sponsored battery bubble coming your way soon
WTF is so hard to understand about the inefficiency of rechargeable batteries?
Obama hates coal but loves electric cars. Makes no sense whatsoever.
In other word, he's taking taxpayer money to build battery plants in a leftist state full of Obama voters, welfare recipients, and union workers, not to mention Muslims.
No doubt this will be a union-run plant, with minority hiring, astronomical salaries and benefits, and incapable of making a "profit" without continual subsidies.
Just another present to his supporters.
I am sure we will have a mileage tax instead.
A chicken in every pot, cooked in a GM Volt parked garage.(p)There......Fixed it.
Yep, think they should rename the little sucker *The Sparky*.
And then to sell these turkeys, there will undoubtedly be a huge tax credit for people who buy them. Financed by the rest of the taxpayers.
Government economy.
I don't think the dufus knows where electricity comes from.
“So when someone buys an electric/hybrid car and then plugs it in to charge it, is he or is he not using electricity that was produced mainly by burning coal?
WTF is so hard to understand about the inefficiency of rechargeable batteries?”
—The Left ignores that inconvenient truth, and believes that windmills and solar will somehow solve the problem. Consequences be damned.
Is it true that lithium batteries lose 20% capacity per year?
So a three year old volt will have only 40% of the range of a new one? Why is Obama pushing this thing?
“A Standard (Cobalt) Li-Ion cell that is full most of the time at 25 °C (77 °F) irreversibly loses approximately 20% capacity per year.”
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Cell_life
Everything he does is calculated to funnel money to his supporters. The objective of these plants is to create as many union jobs and funnel as much money back to the unions in dues as possible. That means making it take as many people and as much time as possible to build them, and designing them to require as many people as possible to operate.
And then there’s the administration’s billion dollar loan guarantees to foreign-based joint ventures to build solar plants and provide for global wealth redistribution.
Actually, they are thinking about that in Washington state.
I also wonder how much it’s going to cost to replace the battery in one of these cars - down the road. Besides, batteries are already a huge environmental issue - creation and disposal......Nader should also step up and declare electric cars “Unsafe and any speed.”
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