I love the electric car idea, I really do, but I always kinda' laugh when people suggest that it's a "clean energy" idea. I think someone forgot that we get our electricity from burning coal:
That may be right, but you're missing on two important facts here:
1) coal power plants have a lot more energy conversion efficiency than car engines.
2) processing oil to gas produces a large amount of greenhouse gases aswell
You can close your eyes as much as you want. Electric cars
ARE the future. If this electricity comes from batteries or from fuel cells is debatable, both have their advantages (my bet is on fuel cells due to the higher range and no recharge time).
There is another issue with the electric car - batteries don't last forever and they make for very toxic waste. Assuming we were to find a way to supply most/all electric cars with electricity generated through environmentally clean means we're still left with the challenge of developing clean and/or recyclable battery technology. We're not there on either front.
This is more a political than a technical problem. If there was a closed recycling concept for batteries, this wouldn't be that much of an issue. It would also eliminate the problem of requiring rare materials if we force recycling. But yeah, that's pretty much why I also think that fuel cells will win the race in the end.
It's been documented that the energy used in the mining of rare earth elements to make electric cars, along with the manufacturing process, then the act of charging them is NOT better for the environment ATM. I hope this changes but for now it's reality.
Just as natural gas fired power plants that are being promoted so heavily now only produce 50% of the green house gas of coal. When you take into account the 6% plus that is lost into the atmosphere, the green house gas effect goes beyond what coal produces.
It's all political and about $$$$, when those things are out of the way then we will see change, but will that ever happen? Probably not until its too late to reverse what we've done.
Please do not make such claims without a source. This is just NOT correct. A battery does NOT generate more greenhouse gases to produce than it saves by using centralized energy conversion (power plants) compared to local energy conversion (combustion engines).
This is just popular nonsense.
Hydrogen power vehicles, via cracking water molecules down, is the future, if we survive long enough to get there. What could be better than filling your tank with your garden hose and the emissions being O2?
What? Hydrogen Fuel Cells don't work that way.
The thing with hydrogen fuell cells (PEMFC) is: it takes
a lot of energy to split water into hydrogen and O2 via electrolysis. More energy than you can get out of the hydrogen again. So fuel cells and hydrogen engines are merely a transport tool to turn electric energy into hydrogen and back into electric energy. Without clean power plants, hydrogen is not feasable. So it suffers from the same problem as battery engines minus the range disadvantage.
That's why modern research focuses on direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs). It takes a lot less energy to synthesize methanole than it does to split water into hydrogen. The drawback is that this synthesis requires oil again (doesn't have to be fossil oil). A nice side effect is that methanol is liquid on room temperature (so the gas station network can be kept unchanged) and has a higher energy density.
Hydrogen more or less stays and falls with the hot fusion research. If
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER is successful, we might be there in 20 to 30 years.
Except that is very energy inefficient...Basic laws of physics won't change in the future.
It isn't. Remember that the energy conversion ratio (that is already lower than that of a fuel cell, btw) of your combustion engine is not the only thing that has to be taken into account. It also requires a huge amount of energy to synthesize gas from oil.
EDIT:
And let's not forget that electric engines do wonders for user comfort aswell: it eliminates the need for gears, as the momentum of the engine is always the same and there is no bias point. Electric engines also cause less vibration and are quiet as a cat. Have you driven an electric car already? I did. And it's awesome.
You might miss the engine roaring. But there's already synthesizer modules in electric sports cars for that. Not kidding!
