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16 comments on Energy Policy: SER-2 [01] Introduction

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Carolus Obscurus on January 9, 2009 - 7:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

BeyonGreen,

Thank you for the recommendation. I've just ordered a copy -- but I must confess I am a priori skeptical about its economics.

If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV's instead had plug-in electric drive trains, the amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of North Dakota.

Extravagant claims like this automatically set my bullshit detector ringing -- on the assumption that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. But I'll suspend judgment until I've read the book.

Perhaps there is a magic bullet after all ... :-)

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RobinPC on January 9, 2009 - 11:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV's instead had plug-in electric drive trains,

...we'd be in the land of flying pigs, because it would have taken an impossibly huge investment to achieve that changeover of so many machines, regardless of the economic climate in which such investment is all the harder. So the continuation of the sentence become irrelevant.

My experience of these sorts of official plans is that their worthy generalisations fail to be supported by compatible details (such as contraction of air transport). And in respect of energy projections, they cannot be allowed to admit that the sums are simply not going to add up.

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HvyOilGuy on January 10, 2009 - 2:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

All I hear is what a "savior" Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles will be. Does anybody say how much they will weight, because weight, and aerodynamics are the major determinants of their efficiency. It takes just a much Exergy to power a given car, independent of its power source. Exergy is what we have to stop wasting.

The AVE captures Exergy lost in unconstrained expansion (updrafts) in the the troposphere. See http://vortexengine.ca

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16 comments on Energy Policy: SER-2 [01] Introduction

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