Electrify the Roads

Rasmussen Reports ^ | June 22, 2010 | Froma Harrop

[rottndog]

agreed.

[GOPJ]

Good one, ml/nj.

I've also seen liberals who want electric cars standing four square against nuclear power plants. Is that rich or what?

Where or where do they think electricity comes from? My guess? They really do believe it comes from "the wall"... no smoke stacks coming from the wall - no coal mining - or drilling or any of those ugly conservative realities... sticking out of their wall. Just a plug and an outlet... soooooo clean. So simple. So stupid.

[norraad]

Not such a traveler anymore, but it's up for it, I keep it well maintained.

Which isn't hard at all, the Toy's of that era were built uber-tough, the quality dial at the factory was really dialed up high.

[Greg123456]

Better still, lets make giant electric conveyor belts for people to drive on, ha ha! They’d shut off their cars while on the belt. I’d have to go slow enough for people to enter and exit, or have entrance and exit ramps of succeeding speeds. The cost to build it would be horrendous, though. I don’t know how much electricity it would use.

[BitWielder1]

That's because cars plugged in overnight employ unused capacity in the current electric system.

Uh, if a hundred million cars are using "unused capacity" every night, it's not really "unused" anymore, is it?
Which means it will become just as expensive as daytime electricity. If not more.
And it still has to come from somewhere.

[LibFreeOrDie]

Electric cars have unique safety issues:

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/767422-196/electric-cars-have-unique-safety-issues.html

[Nip]

In my college days (1965-1969) my professors would have graded an effort like this as “GG” - glittering generalities and I would have to re-accomplish the paper with the minimum requirement being twice the original length.

Loads of fancy good sounding words and NOTHING to back them up. Magic Wand my.... What does she think sits in the White House.

No more glittering words and nice ideas - just the facts and nothing but the facts.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***Which means that you won’t really have to burn coal to produce the electricity to power the car. ***

Your sarc tag has meaning. Some turbine dirven gas fired plants can shut down after the peak load drops. Coal plants are so complicated to start that they NEVER shut down in the evenings.

Also, there is no “unused’ power being produced. If you plug in electric autos after the peak load the plants must still produce more electricity to charge those batteries.

[TopQuark]

" But it's not politically possible. "

No, silly: it's not yet economically possible for us to maintain our lifestyles on batteries.

I am not going to address the rest: the author's argumentation is at a sophomore level.