Do me a Lemon.... Electic Cars?
Electric are - in anything like the short term - a dead issue. Everyone talks as if we could just start buying the darn things and plugging them in. Unfortunately there isn't anything like enough capacity in the power grid for that. Electric cars require a truly spectacular amount of juice to charge them up quickly enough for them to be a practical proposition. We're pretty close to generating capacity and distribution capacity as it is (in fact, we've been reducing it for "environmental" legislative reasons). We can't have every Mondeo man in the country come home at 6pm and plug their car into the mains. The power stations couldn't cope with the demand, and the grid would actually bloody *melt* trying to distribute all that power. In real terms it's about 3 amps (of 240v domestic supply) per BHP you need, so in real terms a 13 amps domestic plug can supply 4 hp (12amps), so if we say a car nominally uses an average of 40bhp throughout it's commute, you can charge it at a tenth of the rate you can drive it. Not entirely impractical, if you have a short commute. However that would mean a every plugging in a totaly new 13 amps at the same time of day... And charging virtually continually until the next morning. HMM. And the fact is a lot of people would get 30 amp superchargers, making the charge less of a problem for them, but the drain on the grid much greater.
SO... before we're all pushed to drive Renault Zoes we'll need a reliable, clean energy sorts (and a metric expletivetonne of cables!). Well, the only real candiate is Nuclear, and I don't think the hippies are going to like that idea one bit.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
