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Where will all the electric cars be charged?
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Someone doesn't know what British (European) streets are like.
I don't need to. Is there a way to charge EVs there? Then EVs will likely be charged there. Is there not a way to charge EVs there? Then EVs probably won't be charged there.
Well here's a photo I took in Oxford where the cable is coming out of a lamppost. I'm all for electric cars but I can't see a reasonably safe solution to all the cars on the street being connected.
Which is the truth, pretty much everywhere. There simply won't be enough chargers, likely ever.
It's a repeat of what happened to biofuels. It was hyped as the magic solution for fossil fuels, until people began to realize that we weren't in any position to scale up production of biofuels to the levels needed. After a brief period when we fantasized about ideas like cellulosic ethanol or algae oil, which never really happened BTW, we ultimately just gave up on biofuels.
Battery powered cars are likely to do the same thing. We are at the point were we are realizing that this won't scale up. There's going to be a brief period of fantasy solutions to the problem too, but those probably won't happen either. After that, we will move on from BEVs.
This is a very Western (US especially) argument. All across major cities in the East, China specifically you're already seeing major cities becoming increasingly electrified far far beyond what is both being done in the US currently and what is capable of being done by the US in the next 10 years.
Then China is just repeating Brazil. Brazil was one of the few countries that could pull off biofuels in a real way. But it was a unique situation, and it doesn’t work elsewhere.
The problem is that biofuel costs ballooned some years ago and I don't know a single person that still uses it since you get more km with regular gas, biofuels had a sweet magic price for some time but it has gone way up.
That's true of ethanol, but not biodiesel. High cost is a consequence of insufficient supply. Basically, it was how the market stopped further biofuel growth.