"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in
message
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Ed Huntress wrote:
"F. George McDuffee"
wrote in message
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On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 19:51:07 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
snip
So principle, yes, possibilities -- I'd have to see. It's easy
to say that this is what we have to do. It's much harder to say
how we can do it, in terms of politics as well as money.
http://tinyurl.com/ylkbqga
Gosh. A $189.00 book, and only five left! g
If I need another topic, I'll look into it. Meantime, it looks
like a subject just as big as the one I'm working on, and more
difficult because it's moving faster.
Can you tell us the Reader's Digest version? d8-)
I don't have a crystal ball.
There are, however, several clear trends that are increasingly
obvious though.
One that you have probably noticed is the shift in emphasis away
from personal transportation.
Kids today, for example, are far less concerned about squiring
themselves around. Increasing numbers of teenagers and young adults
aren't bothering to
obtain a driving license until doing so can't be avoided. Personal
transportation is an expense they avoid and an annoying use of
capital once
they can't. Purchases are based almost exclusively on functional
value blended with the desire to minimize any outlay of capital.
This, for American's, represents a fundamental cultural shift. We
are maturing as a society and our economy reflects this.
Government has always lead the way into the future, not just in
America, but
the world. Silicon Valley was built by entrepreneurs but they
leveraged technology that flowed from the investments made in basic
research funded or
encouraged by Uncle Sam that was leveraged by the private sector.
Cisco, for
instance, is the result of the transfer of intellectual property
from the public to private sector.
For the record, here's the kind of junk that starts populating my
mind when we start talking about a subject like this. You mention
all-electric cars; my question is, with lithium-ion batteries?
Maybe. Maybe not. And fuel cells -- they've been working on them
for over 40 years. When are they going to make one that someone
could actually buy?
You could buy a vehicle powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology
today. Ford has been running a small fleet for several years now,
for example. What
is lacking is an application of national will.
Tom Friedman wrote an interesting piece about his experience at
Davos this year. Did you see it?
Yeah. I'm a skeptic about command economies, even hybrids like Japan
30 years ago, or China now.
The San Francisco building code will soon be revised to require that
new structures be wired for car chargers. Across the street from
City Hall, some
drivers are already plugging converted hybrids into a row of charging
stations.
In nearby Silicon Valley, companies are ordering workplace charging
stations
in the belief that their employees will be first in line when
electric cars
begin arriving in showrooms. And at the headquarters of Pacific Gas
and Electric, utility executives are preparing "heat maps" of
neighborhoods that
they fear may overload the power grid in their exuberance for
electric cars.
"There is a huge momentum here," said Andrew Tang, an executive at
P.G.& E.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/bu...ctric.html?hpw
--
John R. Carroll
I'm sure I don't have to remind you about gushy media reports about
helicopters in every garage. g
No, LOL, you don't. Do I have to remind you that no city or company ever
ordered the installation of the necessary infrastructure?
It looks encouraging. At $0.20/mile for battery replacement cost,
we're not there yet. And it's disconcerting that it's taken so long
to get even close to a viable battery. It makes me question what
kinds of brick walls they're really running into. They should have
had this one licked 20 years ago, and it shouldn't have taken
billions of dollars to get there.
Necessity, and it's relationship to invention.
We passed a law here in California at the end of the 90's requiring car
companies to sell 10% of their fleet as zero emission vehicles.
That would have meant 500,000 vehicles on an anual basis. No auto maker
would have been forced to do this - - unless they wanted to sell in the
California market.
There was a constitutional challenge, which failed, and then the first
thing
the incoming Bush administration did was get the Atty. General and EPA
involved to kill the law. That did succeed. GM destroyed their rental
fleet
of EV1's at the same time.
People are already looking back at thise two decisions and shaking their
collective
heads.
Operating costs for the rental hybrid fleet in the SF Bay area are working
out to $.025/mile.
It's an interesting system and obviously subsidized. You subscribe by the
month and never own a car. You use it and leave it.
But, in the long run, of course. Fuel cells, maybe. Batteries,
probably.
Like I said, these things nearly always begin with a law or ten. It's
going
to take public financing to do this but industry will be able to make the
engineering side work. That's the way it's always been Ed, and you know
it.
Do you realize how many jobs something like this has the potential to
create
Ed?
Do you comprehend the effect this could have on our relationship with the
Saudi's and other petro producers?
When I mentioned the comments at Davos about American leadership, this is
the sort of thing I was referring to, not some path out of the woods for
the
world to follow. What the world is concerned about, a lack of stability in
America, comes down to concern that we are too stupid to do what is so
obviously in our own, and coincidentally the worlds, best interests
because
of the power of corporate lobbyists in our society.
You put money on the table along with a big market, even if that market is
commanded, and someone will figure out how to sit and eat.
Just look at the space program in the 60's. Nobody knew how, exactly, to
do
that one either but we did.
--
John R. Carroll
I'm not here to argue about the inevitability of electric cars, which I
believe is true. Nor would I question whether we could enforce their use
through command.
I have two cautions about the whole thing. First, if the engineering at
market-determined prices was possible, it would already have been done. This
is not the atomic bomb or even landing a man on the moon. Some natural
limits must be gumming it all up, or making it prohibitively expensive.
We've faced the same thing with solar-thermal generation, ceramic automobile
and turbine engines, and several other technologies that looked compelling,
doable, and inevitable -- but which stalled over the limits of what
engineering could accomplish to overcome physical facts. The cost curve,
economies of scale notwithstanding, appears to be quite high.
Second, if we command the implementation of the things, we're likely to find
ourselves trapped in an uneconomic technology, with little gained except to
prove that we can do it. In that sense, it's like going to the moon. Having
done so, the question now is, "yes? And now what?"
At some point in the future history of fuel supply and technological
development of electric cars, they truly will be compelling. I wish it were
right now -- for the same reasons you cite. There's a value in decreasing
our dependence on foreign oil that I happen to think is quite high. The
payoff, however, is a mixed one of current economics and future world
politics. Given our economic system and our competitive position in a global
economy, I'm not prepared to judge the relative values of these things now.
So I'm a supporter, and I favor limited command economics to develop the
technology. We need to see what the economies of scale really are. A lot of
it is speculation, and what we need is some practical experience, by
ordinary drivers and with large enough numbers to accumulate some useful
data. As for the employment potential, it appears to me that most of it will
be replacement of one job with another. How this could stimulate an
*addition* to employment escapes me.
I'll buy one when I can afford it. My family is a natural for even a
short-range electric. One of my neighbors in town has a Corbin Sparrow, and
she loves it. But I paid only a couple of thousand more for my Focus ZX3.
And I can drive that thing 400 miles on a tank, and often have to.
--
Ed Huntress