Environmentalists “electric car” dream smashed by reality, but saved by nuclear
From the Govt Accountability Office via Hotair.com
“It’s a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.
“If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country’s electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?” asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: “Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy.”
The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely.”
Currently about half of American electricity is made from coal plants. If you increase the demand for electricity with cars, the pollution will decrease on the streets, but will simply increase at the coal plant. Its hilarious! Environmentalists hatch plans with no concern for the consequences or even a plan of action.
The funniest part is there is a way to decrease the eeevil emissions on the road AND at the coal plant. You mean we create the electricity with wind and solar? Nope, sorry, those won’t get the job done. The solution to the environmentalist dream of electric cars with clean production emissions is NUCLEAR. That’s right. Nuclear power is clean energy, and it can fill the electricity demands of electric cars.
So now environmentalists are in a dilly of a pickle: do they keep pushing for electric cars with evil coal-burned electricity, or do they bite the bullet and abandon their psychotic opposition to nuclear power?
Why not solar and wind? Rush Limbaugh’s Limbaugh Letter addressed the issue in an article about nuclear power.
One reason oil and coal work so well as energy sources is because energy companies can control their use to meet demand in real time. As energy expert William Tucker explain in National Review in March, an energy grid “is not a machine for cranking out electricity, but a highly tuned instrumentl; because electricity travels at the speed of light, it must be consumed as it is generated. If electricity drops more than 5 percent, brownouts or blackouts may occur. If it surges by an equal amount, it can damage electrical equipment.”
Wind and solar are notoriously erratic. Even if wind energy could magically be tamed tomorrow to meet instantaneous demand, notes Tucker, “Our 345 kilovolt (kV) transmission lines cannot transport electricity more than 300 miles without excessives losses to heat and friction. The only way to reduce line loss is to upgrade to 765 kV. That means building an entirely new national grid… The cost will easily surpass $1 trillion.
The ignorant masses who hold clean energy up on a pedestal have NO CLUE about the physics of electricity. They “know” that we can switch to clean energy at any time… we just have to put our mind to it… its total nonsense. You can’t argue for wind power without having researched the realities of replacing the entire electric grid. Unbelievable.