I'm not against Electric cars! I just have some very real down to Earth questions for you though. And this isn't as a conservative or a liberal or anyone else. This is just a guy that is scratching his head, because it doesn't make any sense.
You make this claim that electricity can be produced all these different ways and it would be a no brainier to just set all this up pronto. The rolling black outs that states already have without having everyone and their brother having an electric cars tells you we can keep up with the need how exactly?
How often are these outages happening and how many people are affected? From what I can gather they only happen at peak demand and would not affect cars being charged over night.
The best battery we can produce and recharge are lithium the last metal they can find to do this with. The less dense the metal the better the battery. Thing is that's the last in line... And even then... They don't last long enough for transportation needs of anyone that isn't within 50 miles of their home and don't have kids to take here there or the other. And they take 8 to 10 hours to recharge.
Now if you want to convert gas stations so they carry tons of batteries like a store carries replacements for natural gas for the back yard bbq so every whatever miles someone is on a road trip or even just out to the other side of town can just swap em out, then sure. But no battery is the same these days. So you are stuck basically within a short distance. Add to that the issue of what's going on around your car. How would people in Michigan heat their vehicles in the winter? People in Texas cool their vehicles in the summer and even go 20 miles? How will people in Seattle that have to run their windshield wipers probably the most of anyone in this Country even do this? What if you do all this and would like to listen to some tunes?
Everything you use draws from the battery. There is no way to recharge as you go that doesn't burn the battery already down. Here's my example
I live in Texas. In the summer it can get to 110+ and has for days and weeks straight. I am having a hard time believing that any electric car would be able to stay around much less cool in the summer efficiently enough that it wouldn't run down my battery before I even got to work or went to the store and back.
An electric car is not the best solution for everyone, but to dismiss them because they do not fill every need would be absurd.
Sure in the future we can all have pink bunny rabbits and eat candy canes, but right now in the real world. We have neither the infrastructure in place, any sort of thoughts on long range travel for shipments or going to Grand Ma's for Thanksgiving, or any sort of a thought of how if the weather isn't perfect or you want to just sit in your car and listen to the radio, how that will effect the battery life.
Part of the movement toward EVs is to solve these problems. When cars were first made the infrastructure was not in place to properly handle them so we worked on creating it. To dismiss EVs simple because we cannot handle them yet is not a reason to completely dismiss them.
if everyone just said, OK I'm an electric vehicle man today, the cost of everything would blow up as there is absolutely no way to ship anything over a long distance with electricity.
no one expects everyone to jump into an EV today, they just want you to consider it if it can fulfill your needs. The more EVs we have on the road the more push there will be to create cheaper EVs, create EV infrastructure, and enable EVs to drive long distances.
And to touch on your things that produce electricity...
Hydro/Wind/Solar make up about 8.5% of our energy production
Coal/Natural Gas/Petroleum/ 71.8%
Nuke is 19.4%
The EPA is pushing to close every Coal/natural gas/petroleum plant they can find and you think we can keep up with having to recharge every car with Nuke plants that no one wants near their house, with wind mills no one wants by their house, with solar panel farms that no one wants by their house and Hydro plants that only work from dams on rivers that have become unstable as floods etc etc happens?
This is more an issue of figuring out how to replace our energy sources with cleaner forms of energy than an EV issue. Having individual power plants operating at 20% efficiency is far worse than using coal and petro power plants. The 20% of electricity created by natural gas plants will not be touched by the EPA because it is a domestic fuel source and burns cleaner than coal or petro.
When I buy my next vehicle it will not be an EV because it does not work out for me economically and the limited range is too much of a hindrance. I will keep monitoring the EV market until then but I do not forsee a big enough change for me to go that route at this time. Fuel consumption will be one of my primary concerns for the next vehicle and I am strongly considering a hybrid, though a non-hybrid with great fuel economy will work for me if I like the car and it has a better price.
The idea here is that they want you to be conscious of the fuel consumption of the vehicle you are going to buy. Don't discount the EVs or create unsubstantiated problems for them because of your political beliefs. Be open-minded about your selection and don't get the biggest baddest engine with the worst fuel economy when you don't need it. If you like driving big trucks that need to be filled up daily you should probably be championing the EVs and hybrids so the demand for fuel will continue to drop.