The Electric Car Fantasy 

One of the best accountings of the fallacy of electric cars I have heard and read. [Ed]

The Electric Car Fantasy

Oct 9, 2017

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, climate change is a big issue on this program, and has been for the entirety of this program. It started, this whole climate change started as actually part of the animal rights movement, if you want to know the truth. It started with such things as Earth First and spotted owl, all of those issues were tied to climate and environment. They ended up being mixed and melded as time has gone on.
But for as long as these people have been attempting to deter and stop progress in America, I have been on the case. Now, one of the things that’s being touted today and has been touted for a long time is clean, renewable energy. And one of the elements of clean, unreasonably, sustainable — you have to use that word — if you use that word right now, you will own many Millennials. That is a word that’s very important to them. Sustainability.
Remember Millennials, 18 to 34 year olds, have been raised with the idea the planet will not support human life by the time they reach 60. Don’t smirk. They are told this. I have been astounded to discover that many of them believe this. Many leftist Millennials, in journalism particularly, be they my tech blog buddies or wherever, they really believe it. They grew up on Captain Planet, the Ted Turner Saturday morning cartoon where corporations were destroying the world. And they bought all of this. And so anything that will make the planet habitable they support fully. And sustainability, whatever it is, sustainable environmental policies, sustainable economic policies, whatever it is, if the proponents say it’s sustainable, that’s half the battle in persuading the left.
And one of the elements of this is the electric car. And the electric car has a very powerful character who has achieved all world star status. His name is Elon Musk. And people who believe in climate change, sustainability, believe Elon Musk is the savior of the human race. He owns Tesla — well, SpaceX, the rocket company, and he believes that we’re gonna have manned missions to Mars to be able to colonize and save people from having to die on earth. And there are people who believe this, even though, ladies and gentlemen, we do not have a propulsion system yet that would get anybody to Mars and back. It just doesn’t exist.
In fact, Musk is building a rocket that he claims will be used to get people to Mars, and it’s about the same size as the Saturn V rocket that was used to launch astronauts to the Moon. But ostensibly it’s 10 times more powerful than the Saturn V was. But it doesn’t exist yet.
Anyway, all of that is a pipe dream within but yet people believe it. The same thing with the electric car. The electric car is, to me, one of the great contradictions and ironies. It is nowhere near clean energy. In order for electric cars to operate, evil coal has to be used to provide the electricity to charge them. And coal as you know is hated and sacrificed by the sustainable, clean, renewable energy crowd. They hate it, and they want to wipe it out. They want to get rid of it ’cause it’s ooey, it’s filthy, it’s black and sooty. So they want to get rid of it.
I ran across an absolutely fantastic post yesterday on the Power Line blog by Steven Hayward. He’s a Reagan biographer, a well-known media raconteur. He’s an academic, he’s a professor, he’s a lecturer. And he, like me, is on the case of these phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ rollers in the so-called save the planet, madcap militant environmentalist movement. And he ran across a story and I saw it last week, too, the state of California is going to ban gasoline powered cars by the year 2040, which is 23 years from now. They are going to ban gasoline powered cars. This is after they implement state-run single-payer health care that will triple their existing budget.
And Steven Hayward writes, “I certainly hope California follows through and tries this. If nothing else, it will provide wonderful black market opportunities. Think of all the meth labs that will convert to mini-refineries, not to mention the smuggling.”
Because it’s impossible. It’s impossible to get rid of gasoline powered cars by the year 2040. It’s simply undoable. And I want to tell you why, and it’s a great post for detailing this. “Such a scheme assumes widespread availability of electric cars.” I mean, if you can’t buy a gasoline car, you’re gonna have to buy some car, and so it’s assumed that the electric car is going to be widely plentiful, widely available, and very affordable, none of which is true now.
Tesla can’t make anywhere near enough to satisfy the demand, and they couldn’t make any if there weren’t subsidizes. And they couldn’t run if it weren’t for coal. But that’s not even half the story. “Has anyone considered how to supply the massive amount of electricity to charge 25 or 30 million vehicles in California? It’s not just the total amount of electricity, but also transmission and fast-charging capacity that will need to be built at our current filling stations.” We’re gonna have to get rid of filling stations and replace them with charging stations.
“A Canadian engineer has walked through the math of the subject, and concludes that to match the energy equivalent of a typical gasoline filling station today, an electric filling station would have to have the 30 megawatts of capacity.” Now, 30 megawatts of capacity is equivalent to the electricity use of 20,000 homes. So you have your average gas station in California which is gonna go (raspberry) because gasoline powered cars aren’t going to be legal. You have to replace them with fill-up stations for electric cars, which are charging stations. You’re gonna have to have such powerful charging stations, 30 megawatts per gas station.
In other words, each charging station will have to have enough electricity to fully provide power for 20,000 homes. Now, it goes on. “Factoring in the aforementioned credit card transaction and washing of windshield that might extend gasoline refueling to five minutes, it would still require 600 of those 50kW chargers for a roadside station to service the 2,000 cars those gas pumps could service in a busy 12-hour period.”
So let me run the numbers in a different way. You have your average gas station in California. The numbers have been run here. Two thousand cars stop in a day to fill up. The equivalent of that in electricity, 600 50kW chargers at each statement. And that’s a conservative estimate. That would require $24 million just to buy the charger. So whoever owned the service station, the filling station, would have to spend $24 million to provide 50kW of electricity every 12 hours to fill up or fully charge 2,000 cars. But that’s not all.
They would also need 30 megawatts of power. Now, for those thinking that that’s a hell of a lot of electricity, you’re right. “Thirty megawatts, for perspective, is enough to power about 20,000 homes. In other words, powering these service stations of the future will require about the same amount of electricity as a city of 75,000. Oh, and by the way, all that electricity, unlike off-hour home recharging, happens during peak-usage daylight hours.”
That’s when people go to the gas station. You couldn’t afford to have all of this in every home. “In other words, all that extra power, at least for intra-city travel, will have to come from new sources.” We’re getting rid of gasoline, and we do not have the electricity generating capability today to replace it. In California is the example here.
So the existing ability to generate electricity for people in California does not include the alternate to charge all of the cars that will need charging because every legal car on the road will be electric and need to be charged. So brand-new power plants will have to be built “At the most optimistic prices posited for the future cost of solar panels — about a buck a watt — that’s another $30 million,” per charging station. “If you want to go the windmill route, you’ll need 10 of them, each costing roughly $4 million. Just as further reminder, that’s for each and every roadside station.”
The point is, it isn’t possible. And this story doesn’t even mention the use of coal to provide all this electricity, which people who think they’re engaging in renewable, clean energy don’t even stop to think that all this so-called renewable, clean energy is generated by a product they literally despise and are trying to get rid of.
So the point is, it’s not possible. It simply isn’t possible. It’s also not possible that in 23 years we will not have the capacity to manufacture enough electric cars that people want to replace gasoline powered engine in California.
Holman Jenkins had a column in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Let me read this little segment to you. “Fiat admits to losing $20,000 on every electric vehicle it sells in Europe. General Motors loses $9,000 on every Chevy Bolt. Even Tesla is partly sustained by selling zero-emissions credits to conventional car companies that actually make money (unlike Tesla).”
Synthesize all of this down and it simply isn’t possible. It would not be clean, by their current definitions, and it certainly wouldn’t be renewable. It would require massive new power plants. It would require 24 to $30 million investment for each existing gas station in California to convert to a charging station. Each charging station would need the ability to power 20,000 homes.
Well, that power’s already being used to power those 20,000. You’re gonna have to manufacture brand-new power plants. And let’s see how that goes with the environmentalist wackos and their environmental action reports trying to delay your structure building by 10 or 15 years.
So you see, it isn’t sustainable; it isn’t even doable. And even if it were doable, the cost is absolutely stupid. There simply isn’t anything that is available to humanity in this current era that comes anywhere close to the efficiency and the power derived from the internal combustion engine fueled by fossil fuel. There’s nothing. There’s nothing even close. And let’s talk about making every airplane electric. You couldn’t get one off the ground. You couldn’t get a jet off the ground. You couldn’t get a cargo jet off the ground.
Let’s talk about we’re gonna ban electric cars. What about giant semitrailer trucks? Those giant Peterbilts, what are we gonna power them with? It’s not possible. And yet there are people seriously pursuing this, and they’re getting votes, knowing full well it isn’t possible. It’s simply yet another pipe dream brought to you by the left lying to your face about the supposed problems of today which don’t exist and the magical solutions for tomorrow which will never exist.