DiscoSlug
Well-Known Member
You bring up excellent points, but we can't make gasoline in the garage. We can purchase used solar panels with 80% of original 100 watt production on eBay for $40.The hummer stats are designed to be eyepopping to a consumer but really its not a shocker to anyone familiar with the potential of electric locomotion. Just look at trains.
i wonder if anyone touting electrification as the future has really examined the social and infrastructural costs. For example what if 50% of california’s 40 million people all plugged their cars in to charge at night after depleting them from the stop and go commute, while millions more fleet vehicles those californians would depend on for sustinance and supplies also charged and placed power grid demands. What do we think would happen to the cost per kw/hr? What does that do to cost of goods? Cost of electricity? Consumer choice and freedoms?
Some states like California cant even support their own power demands today. So imagine you had to go to hospital or to a job interview on a rolling blackout day. Are you really comfortable with the control state, municipal, and corporate utilities would have on basic needs? What about all the millions of people driving old cars due to choice or maybe affordability. Do you disenfranchise them from transportation?
Electrification is a good thing. But, In the technology rush I’m wondering what the social and economic impacts of electrification are. Thats why it makes me laugh when these fads with big power come out to target big wallet first movers. Honestly speaking what would be more impressive is demonstrating how a 200hp electric platform could go 1000 miles or more without a charge and also have a way to generate power on its own reliably from existing fuel. sources. Or, show how that same 1000hp source could reduce fleet maintenance costs, last the million or so miles a detroit diesel will last, and carry the same 1000 mile range.
The hummer hardly ushers in the electrification revolution. I’ll take my 6.4L gladiator in silver.
The future is going to also rely on local production and storage. And as those prices plummet, solar is starting to look good even in my state (ky), where coal and natural gas are cheapest and its not sunny that often.
Despite these things too, what's stopping the some similar disaster from wiping out the fossil fuel supply?
Diesel and gas get wiped out quick during natural disasters, none is coming in due to disasters we know are coming, compounded with people fleeing and/or hoarding, and then you gotta get the stuff back into an area that might not have infrastructure anymore.
Places that are seeing more frequent natural disasters are evening moving MORE heavily into solar (ex. Puerto Rico)
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