edsnova posted:Conceptually, I like the hybrid electric cars that use a small engine (a turbine maybe?) to self-charge when needed.
If batteries can be made light and compact enough (they're basically there) without overheating (not quite yet) and cheaply enough to work in the market (??) you could turn over the whole fleet in about 10 years and save 80-90 percent of the of the current hydrocarbon emissions burned on the road while maintaining or extending present day automotive range and potentially reducing maintenance time and costs substantially.
But, as Stan often points out, the energy has to come from somewhere. You'd still need to convert the power grid to like 95 percent wind/solar/nuke with just a few gas peakers (and maybe vast arrays of these batteries?) to manage load.
AFAIK it could be done right now—and should be, given what we know about how carbon emissions affect the climate—but it's not like I or anyone else could just snap our fingers and make it so.
We agree nearly 100% here, @edsnova. The pure EV gets all the love (and credits), but it is the plug-in series hybrid that has the actual chance of working in the real world. If we removed the range limitation, electric starts to make a lot of sense for service and delivery trucks especially.
The wind/solar/nuke grid will take more than a few gas peakers, but just accepting that it's going to take nuclear power to get to a grid that is less reliant on carbon is a huge step, and one that most people just refuse to believe. Nuclear scares the crap out of most people, but there's no other way to get where they say they want to go.