The Dymaxion post is correct about most stuff, with a couple of qualifications. There are efficiency losses in conversion from grid to storage battery, and while those will improve it's thermodynamically likely, I think, that any conversion is less than 100%. There are also losses in transmission lines, and these are very significant in the overall efficiency calculation. So the end-stage high efficiency of electric motors has to be divided down by the losses before the electricity gets to the motor.

If there was a new, neat-trick storage techinique better than batteries, an all-electric car is the market for home solar, parking lot solar, warehouse solar, etc. But the way it will go is likely the opposite of the electric-car booster's scenario.

It is very likely that replacements for fossil electricity will allow some freedom in liquid fuels for cars. Here in Illinois ComEd, the electric provider, runs its truck fleet on, not batteries, but biodiesel. 

A word on coal, though. There are secondary and tertiary heat-exchanger designs that their developers claim could extract and extra few hundred gigawatts (read few hundred power plants) for free from the high-temperature exhaust flue. The added payoff is that the low final temperature of smokestack exhaust means nasty metals like mercury and cadmium just "rain" out, also for free. This is where we need new-source review to come back.

James Kunstler makes the point, and I paraphrasing here, that you have an oil based manufacture industry building alternate fuel (electric, fuel cell, etc.) devices. When post-PEAK production cost sky-rocket, the cost of alternate fuel systems will sky-rocket also. And you can't build wind turbines with wind turbines. When natural gas resources crash the resulting dislocation, especially agri-business dependence on NG-based fertilizers, will make it almost impossible to have any kind of orderly transition to alternatives to cheap oil and NG.

Yeah, I want more numbers. It may be better for Global Warming--and I suppsoe that is the big problem--but it sounds a lot crappier for lungs.

FOREIGNID: 89434
FOREIGNPARENTID: 0
FOREIGNCOMMENTERID: 11848
AUTHOR: mikeheinz
DATE: 02/03/2006 04:35:25 AM

Actually, Saheli,

I'm pretty sure that it would be much, much more preferable to have even the dirtiest coal-fired plants generating electricity to run cars from a public health perspective -- it's simple, you're producing less pollution and you're burning it a lot further away from most people's lungs.

Also, as another commentator mentioned upthread, there's no reason to assume that most of our electricity has to come from burning fossil fuels. Once we switch to electric cars, then we are going to expand the discussion tremendously because so many things can be used to generate electricity, from solar to coal to nuclear to hydro to wind. At the very least, it will encourage us all to slap a solar panel on anything which is  exposed to the elements.

Another advantage to electric cars is the reliabilty and ease of maintenance. Not an environmental advantage, to be sure (unless it extends the life of the vehicle), but certainly a plus for consumers.

I still think it's safe to say that electric vehicles are not an obvious panacea. You could probably improve things that way, but you'd have to get a bunch of other things right. Coal generation can be made a lot cleaner, but you still have the problem of carbon dioxide emissions. This is such a large component of emissions that I don't think there is a way to just filter it out (but there was a recent story on NPR about new coal technologies, and now I'm confused again).  There are schemes for carbon sequestration, and that assumes centralized energy plants. The other problem with coal is the environmental impact of extracting it and transporting it.

I would also wonder about the EV disposal question. Aren't the batteries filled with toxic metals?

In my wild fantasies, I imagine a nanomachine or genetically engineered strain of bacteria that could somehow carry out coal liquefaction at the source, turning West Virginia into the next Saudi Arabia.  I have no idea if there is some obvious barrier to the existence of such a thing (energy would not be the limiting factor).

 If the only problem you want to solve is improving air quality around population centers, electric vehicles would help.