Quote:
Originally Posted by motorhead
I'll ponder on them today while I have my guys out keeping people warm, their water hot, their food cold and their ability to process and cook it working. There are a lot of fossil fuels involved with all of those processes. Are they all going to change to electricity or run off batteries too? Wow! That's alot of power usage. Lol
Dont you just love the idea of having all your eggs in one basket? I dont. That is a recipe for failure every time.  |
Some of it will, it will take a long time for all of it to, that's where we see the more gradual transition over many years, maybe longer than any of our lifetimes. I think many countries, and even ours, have made great progress in diversifying sources of energy and harnessing some of the things that are "there to harness", like solar, tidal, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, and so on. These don't work everywhere or in some cases all the time, but they are sources of energy and they work. Then there are fossil fuels, that can be burned relatively efficiently when the combustion is tightly controlled, such as a modern gas-turbine power generator. It practically makes a lot more sense to change over to a grid that can support charging vehicles at every home and place of business, because you will save having to truck so much petroleum to the ends of the earth and you can directly harness these sources of energy. Less reliance on petroleum is more for reserves, the military, outlying communities that can't easily generate electricity, etc. Compared to competing technologies in cars like natural gas, or hydrogen (including cells), ultra-clean ICE, electric is the one that doesn't care where the energy actually comes from. That flexibility IMO is the real winner, along with the efficiency. It's kind of the opposite of "all of your eggs in one basket", if at some point there's a nuclear break-through, well, perfect. If we use scalable gas-turbines, that works too. Somehow we can figure how to replace the entire damn cell-phone network every few years and now they work better than any wall-unit ever did, so I'm sure we will overcome.
As far as using electric for everything, some houses do, some houses use gas, doesn't seem to be an issue. I lived in a rural area growing up where the power would sometimes go out, and we would use the wood stove. I don't think any of those things are changing. Most of us would be just as screwed if the gas was turned off for some reason.
I think I'm going to pick up an electric chainsaw for clearing trails this year, is it a replacement for gas for sawing through cords and cords of wood? Not yet, but the technology of electric motors and batteries has advanced far enough to make this practical for purposes that would have required a gas one a few years ago, and that's the slow march towards electric.