Posts by Aonghus Shortt

ugh

Looks fine, but really just a duplication of the flash platform, only predictably more closed and less polished.

Electric cars pollute, but in the future..

While it's true that battery electric vehicles (BEVs) produced now would most likely draw their energy from polluting sources, the idea is that they don't have to.

Car powered by regular engines are forced to burn hydocarbons and are always thus going to be air polluters.

However, BEVs will most likely in the future derive much of their energy from renewables, and the rest will be from efficient non-renewable sources. This energy source is a lot cleaner than petrol, diesel or bio-fuels.

Ugh, misinformed article

There's quite a string of nonsense in this article.

You dismiss battery technology in a sentence and go on to extol the wonders of hydrogen ICE and fuel cell technology.

Hydrogen technology is not nearly there. Everyone knows that, but what a lot of people miss is that battery technology IS there. All the engineering problems that troubled battery electric vehicles have been overcame. We now have fast recharge times, very high energy densities (e.g. Lithium-Sulphur) and if we can get the economies of scale, then battery technology can be the energy solution for our cars.

We already have an electricity distribution network, why develop a hydrogen economy when it's not needed. Who does that benefit?

(Battery link: http://www.a123systems.com/html/news/articles/051102_news.html)

Also, to add another point against bio-fuels, the argument that they are carbon neutral is non-sense. Apart from the vast amounts of processing involved in producing the fuel, the land used for growing these crops most often already has carbon absorbing vegetation that is already part of the carbon cycle. In this way, we are not taking any more carbon out of the atmosphere in growing the fuel and we are releasing carbon on burning the fuel.

Finally, bio-fuels do little for our air-quality. This is an important issue and any genuinely green approach should look at cutting down on the burning of hydrocarbons.