Coalpail.com Forum

Aperently an electric car driven 10,000 miles a year can use as much power as an average house, any way you slice it, it takes energy to move those cars.
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20101123/BIZ/711239927
I guess we need a few more coal power plants, to be green.
If you have 40 mile round trip to work, you get 10,000 miles a year, probably longer than most ecofriendly comutes, but not unheard of.

Newton's 3rd Law: Every action has an equal & opposite reaction.

Everyone wants to save the world, but they think energy comes out of thin air.

I'll stick with my 330HP V8, thank you very much!

newton's 3rd law ,, and I thought he just made cookies

I thought he made figs ... then I did a Gooooooooogle search.

good luck getting one of those cars to hold a charge in the winter north of florida .

Exactly....how it that saving the planet....You could add solar panels to your roof of your house and charge it that way...

Consider the Tesla Roadster....(http://www.teslamotors.com)...Very Nice!

The Tesla Roadster consumes about 200 watt-hours per mile. Suppose you drove 35 miles per day on average (12,775 miles per year). You would need to generate 2.6 MWh/year.

Monocrystalline solar panels generate about 263 kWh/m2/year in the USA. So you would need about 9.7 square meters of solar panels (a square about 10 feet on a side) to completely offset the energy consumed by your Tesla Roadster...

There you go! (Except if you travel or at work...you would have to plug it in...go figure)

HTG Hyfire,

The stupidity goes much further than that. Remember on average the efficiency of the nations power grid from power station turbine to wall plug is about 24% so multiply your numbers by 4. IF we replaced all those nasty gas cars the grid would crash or take trillions to upgrade. Despite all the nonsense the majority of that extra power would come from coal. I have a great new idea that I will patent - much more efficent. I will develop the energy from a coal fire to generate steam and run the car directly from that. I have it under development as we speak.In fact I have a name for it I will call it the Stanley Steamer. There - look at how much progress we made in 100 years thanks to the greenies. Gotta run and plonk down $45,000 for a Chevy Volt - I bet I have to elbow the crowds out of the way _ I hope there is some left ---DUH.

Actually I've seen some pretty good ideas for these cars, firstly a lot of people would charge it up overnight when power demand is low so capacity won't be that great an issue.

One of the main issues with the power grid is no storage capacity, if you had millions of electric cars you now have storage capacity. One pie in the sky idea I heard was charging it up overnight when rates are lower in many areas. If you weren't going to use the car you could get power from it for your house reducing your electric bill. That won't happen because they'll drop the lower rates....

Short Bus wrote:Driving 10,000 miles on electricity will use about 2,500 kilowatt-hours, or 20 percent more than the average annual consumption of U.S. homes. At an average utility rate of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, that’s $275 for a year of fuel, equivalent to about 70 cents per gallon of gasoline.

LOL... How many people do you know with electric bill less than $275 per year? That number is not even close, do any of these journalists ever research anything?

http://www.eia.doe.gov/ask/electricity_faqs.asp#e ... y_use_home

In 2008, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 11,040 kWh, an average of 920 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per month. Tennessee had the highest annual consumption at 15,624 kWh and Maine the lowest at 6,252 kWh.

They only advantage I see is not having to stop at at gas station. I often wonder what the real carbon foot print is given that most of the electricity comes from bit coal anyways.

THG to you Richard,

However you slice it you can't get away from the 75% loss before it gets to the car. Spain made a big push in alternative energy and look how competitive it made them. PSST, wanta buy a whole country cheap -- so they have a few debts on those solar panels, nothing that a few trillion wont fix.

The biggest loss of energy from the internal combustion engine is heat loss. There were experiments with ceramic engines without a radiator. If there were only a way to capture the energy lost while driving and park in the garage, hook into a hydronic system and heat the house for free.

I haven't read anything specific to cars but I did read a study on lawnmowers, the gas powered lawn mower had a substantially larger amount of emissions.

But as with everything you need to consider all aspects, they ranked the battery powered lawnmowers less environmentally friendly because they were using lead based batteries.

it kinda makes ya think that the horse and wagon transportation wasnt so bad after all.

horse used for schleping
horse manure used for fertilizer or fuel
companionship
many jobs for those shoveling the streets??

I have another idea ban cars from all metro areas. Then I will take a big truck and extend the chassis, in fact I have invented a name for it - I will call it a bus. Massive energy saver.

Well, here's another idea that I saw on the Discover channel awhile ago. Build Algee farms close to coal fired powered generating plants. Algee farms produce non-poluting bio-diesel fuel for vehicles and the algee eats CO2 for breakfast, lunch, and dinner reducing the polutants produced by the electric generating plantes. Two poluting problems solved. Now I wonder why we aren't hearing more about this? Oh-yah... the oil companies probably already bought them off and stuffed the idea in file 13.