Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.
But that’s absurd.
Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.
“The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.
But here’s inconvenient fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy.
“Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.
Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that “oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline.”
But future batteries will be better, I point out.
“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”
That’s inconvenient fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.
“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”
Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.
This summer, California officials were so worried about blackouts they asked electric vehicle owners to stop charging cars!
Yet today, few of California’s cars are electric. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all new cars must be electric by 2035! Where does he think he’ll get the electricity to power them?
“Roughly speaking, you have to double your electric grid to move the energy out of gasoline into the electric sector,” says Mills. “No one is planning to double the electric grid, so they’ll be rationing.”
Rationing. That means some places will simply turn off some of the power. That’s our final inconvenient fact: We just don’t have enough electricity for all electric cars.
Worse, if (as many activists and politicians propose) we try to get that electricity from 100% renewable sources, the rationing would be deadly.
“Even if you cover the entire continent of the United States with solar panels, you wouldn’t supply half of America’s electricity,” Mills points out.
Even if you added “Washington Monument-sized wind turbines spread over an area six times greater than the state of New York, that wouldn’t be enough.”
This is just math and physics. It’s amazing supposedly responsible people promote impossible fantasies.
“It’s been an extraordinary accomplishment of propaganda,” complains Mills, “almost infantile … distressing because it’s so silly.”
Even if people invent much better cars, wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and batteries, explains Mills, “you’re still drilling things, digging up stuff. You’re still building machines that wear out … It’s not magical transformation.”
Even worse, today politicians make us pay more for energy while forcing us to do things that hurt the environment. Their restrictions on fossil fuels drive people to use fuels that pollute more.
In Europe: “They’re going back to burning coal! What we’ve done is have our energy systems designed by bureaucrats instead of engineers,” complains Mills. “We get worse energy, more expensive energy and higher environmental impacts!”
I like electric cars. But I won’t pretend that driving one makes me some kind of environmental hero.
“There’ll be lots more electric cars in the future,” concludes Mills. “There should be, because that’ll reduce demand for oil, which is a good thing. But when you do the math, to operate a society with 5 or 6 billion people who are living in poverty we can’t imagine, when you want to give them a little of what we have, the energy demands are off the charts big. We’re going to need everything.”
That includes fossil fuels.
Government fantasies can’t necessarily lead to the technology needed to implement them.
Reminded me of the 5 year plans in the USSR and Red China that never came to pass. That actually may be a good metaphor for the Globalist Green Energy projects, all projected 5 years or more into the future.
That point about electric power generation is something I keep asking people. If the gov’t is planning on greater EV usage, where’s their crash program to increase the production of electricity? Most people think for a second and realize that there’s no talk of such a program.
Rationing energy is one possibility. Another is forcing people to use mass transit and live in high density locations. Europe is made for that … not us.
Most of our ancestors left Europe to get away from that kind of living conditions and have a bit of land to call their own. And now the (European) bureaucrats want us to give that up and live in 200 square feet in a high-rise hive. Don’t they understand that we left the Old World to get away from them and their grandiose plans for us, and to have some freedom?
Thank you for an article that references the laws of physics. Some people seem to believe that energy is produced by magic and can be carried around in a top hat and pulled out whenever needed.
And what happens when your EV runs out of power on an 8 lane hwy.? Does it slow down like a cordless drill and 10 MPH is your top, speed while you look for a charging station?
Interesting point. I never thought of that. What happens when the EV runs low on power?
It stops, and you push it.
Don’t they have a trap door that you can open and use your feet like Fred Flintstone?
Looking at the picture of those little EV’s I thought it would be a good idea to have handles on the back, like a baby buggy. That would make them easier to push.
Have a horse to pull it.
It’s a lot more than “almost infantile.” It’s completely infantile.
“There’ll be lots more electric cars in the future,” concludes Mills. “There should be, because that’ll reduce demand for oil”
Hang on, didn’t you just say that we need to get the power from somewhere? How does that reduce the demand for oil?
No oil power stations?
Whenever we change one form of energy to another, coal to electricity, electricity into charged batteries, we LOSE energy, feel your phone charger when it is charging, it gets warm, that is energy lost (unless the house is cold and needs heat)
Could it be that pushing for electric cars is a financial benefit for someone ?
It is obviously impractical.
I have referenced electric cars as the scam of the 21st century! I have a friend who is on his 2nd Tesla in less than 3 years or so because he couldn’t fit in his Tesla 3. This guy, an engineer no less, once replied to my query concerning where will the electricity come from when 50% plus of all vehicles are electric. His reply: “from the grid”! Magic indeed.
Aren’t the COVID vaccines designed to sterilize the 6 – 7 billion people living in poverty? = Poverty problem solved?
Nope. It’s designed to kill them.
Rev. Roy…….<
A one-liter bottle can only hold one liter of fluid. Likewise, a battery of any particular size can hold only so many electrons.
And now we have people on battery bikes who call themselves environmentalists. While forgetting that the whole point of cycling is to pedal.
No more watching Monty Python, it’s in real life now.
Ministry of silly walks : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeeovY4qNU
Their living in Lala land if they think there going to put us all in those four-wheel Firetraps Biden is as delusional as person on a LSD trip
The ‘plan’ was to dumb down society so they could bring on all these ‘dumb’ programs to achieve their goal of de-population by destroying anything and everything that is smart or efficient that would in turn destroy society and mankind.
“They’ have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. The world is now so dumb that they believe it’s a blob of flesh, not a baby. They believe you can change a man into a woman and a woman into a man. They believe that open borders is great. Come one, come all. (Leave your door unlocked and open next time you leave your house).
They are so dumbed down that they can’t think for themselves anymore. That is why Klaus Schwab George Soros, Bill Gates, King Charles etc, under the command of their mentor and leader, satan,, have been and will continue to be so successful in achieving and implementing ALL of their nefarious plans, UNTIL the Supreme Judge says ‘nough’. That time is at hand, Jesus and His Judgments are coming upon this sin sick, Christ rejecting world, as soon as He removes His bride from harm’s way and takes us to Heaven for a 7yr. Marriage Supper of the Lamb, the greatest Wedding feast of Eternity.
Soooo long folks. Hope yer coming along. Gonna be a wild ‘trip into eternity…..
Rev. Roy………..<