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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (22574)	7/30/2008 9:58:23 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

The best auto engines are nowhere near as efficient as big power stations. What do you mean? Also, when you calculate efficiencies, what matters is miles per gallon not efficiency on a dynamometer. When an electric vehicle is stopped at traffic lights, it uses no fuel. When your highly efficient car engine is waiting, it's burning fuel. You could turn the motor on and off which is a wear and tear process itself. An electric motor just stops rotating and simply starts rotating again. But what really matters is dollars per kilometre, whether the energy source is a nuclear reactor, coal power station, hybrid vehicle, electric, petrol or diesel. Other factors such as range, noise and all the rest come into it too. My point was simply that as fuel prices rise, power stations become a more economic way of producing the electricity. The improvement is something like from 22% to 45%, even without the benefits of 70% combined heat and power plants. That's just a very boring fact. We don't need computer models on teraflop climate computers to get the wrong answer. It's not a miracle, just an economic fact which will or won't have an effect on how many all-electric vehicles there are in any particular area. But it will make it more economic for all-electric vehicles. Mqurice