WHO'S FOOLING WHO?

    First, lets get the definition of “range” out of the way. When an electric car dealer assures you that the all-electric car you are thinking of buying has a range of, say, 160 miles, he doesn’t mean that you can drive to a city that is 160 miles away with assurance that you will get back without charging up at your destination. The range is really only half that distance.

    In the article titled “Everyman’s Electric Car,” posted Feb. 18, 2013. the range, specified as 500 miles, means that you can drive 500 miles and return without refueling with biofuel, and the batteries are still fully charged upon arriving home.

    There’s a lot of research and development going on to try to come up with batteries far in advance of anything presently in existence. Let’s say that company X has made a breakthrough, producing a long lasting, light weight, fairly economical battery that charges in the time it takes to fill a gas tank, (Graphene Supercapacitors?) and that promises to double the range of the best that Tesla can do with its thousands of lithium-ion batteries. Let’s say that the development is so good that the entire driving public switches to electric cars. But there is no compelling reason why  such a change would do anything toward abating climate change.   

    Indeed, such a development could make things worse. A life cycle energy balance will invariably show that losses exceed  gains with all existing battery powered cars.  The energy for charging the batteries would mostly come from central generating sources, some of which are the biggest polluters of the environment. In accordance with the energy generated by various processes (US data for 2011):

41.9 % of the electric cars would be coal burners.
24.8 % of the electric cars would be natural gas burners.
19.1 % of the electric cars would be nuclear powered.
7.7 % of the electric cars would be hydro powered.
4.7% of the electric cars would be powered by renewables (photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, etc.)

    The solution, as I discussed in the article, is an on-board, advanced biofuel burning Diesel engine that operates at its optimum speed to keep a modest complement of batteries charged. An engine that operates at efficiency above 50% is possible. One feature might be to build it to be steam cooled, using that steam to drive a turbogenerator for extra power.