Ah, the insanity of the electric car future, didn't work out first time around, won't work out the second time around.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...-royce-car.html

If they can't keep the lights on in Houston during a one or two day cold spell then the electric car future is patently obviously a non starter.

A simple calculation should confirm the hypothesis.

Take the number of cars during the Houston Rush Hour and multiply by the average power consumption of an average vehicle used during the rush hour then add the total GWhr to the installed Electric Grid capacity that flow into Houston.

Multiple that by the number of cities around the world and then work out how many 1250 MW Nuclear power stations would be required to take care of the 90 Mbpd per day that is currently extracted. To put things into perspective you probably wouldn't have enough copper available to transmit all that electrical power to all those electrical vehicles.

1 bpd = 1.7 MWhrs

90 Million bpd = 152,000 GWhrs

over 24hrs = 6,375 GWdays

6,375/1.250 = 5,100 Nuclear Power Station operating at full load every 24hrs 365 days of the year to take up the energy load requirements for todays peak oil.

As the US consumes around 20-25% of that peak oil load this would require around 1000 Torness sized Nuclear power stations to be built. To take care of the duty cycle and peaks, 2000 nuclear power stations would be more realistic.

And we even haven't started on the battery technology



This is a more realistic future than the electric Rolls despite what even Dr Michio Kaku has to say on the subject. Gotta love his optimism on the subject though...