Quote:
Originally Posted by jmg
Get creative. The wind is always blowing somewhere. Water is constantly flowing, the amount of sun in the day depends on the season and your latitude. You know... use science and common sense.
The ability to get it out of the ground faster and more efficiently does not magically make more oil in the ground. It's finite.
You are arguing against an argument that I am not making. Besides, it's not completely coal powered:
So, a Tesla is only 30% coal powered. Overall that's 64% fossil fuel driven. That's in contrast to the ICE, which is 10% fossil fuel driven.
So I'll repeat AGAIN the advantages of the EV, which is that it has an intrinsic advantage in that it will accept power from the grid, which can be sourced by any way we see fit. Hopefully in the future, it can be more skewed towards clean renewable sources than it is today. An ICE, however, only takes gasoline or diesel. |
I did some calculations a while back on land use per kilowatt-hour and posted it in another thread on this topic. While solar and wind are virtually free energy and "renewable" they take massive amounts of land mass and still don't produce anywhere near the power levels generated by coal, natural gas, nor nuclear. In Mt. Storm West Virginia there is a 3-generator coal plant built in the 1960s. About a decade ago the power company began building a wind farm around it on the ridges of the mountains. While a serious eyesore, the 100 or so wind mills produce about one coal generator's worth of electricity and the land footprint is massive. It's nice for renewable energists to love wind mills because the unsightly things are not in their backyard. Solar and wind will never meet the capacity the US needs on a daily basis and are just feel-good exercises.