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There is no secret, there is no argument, it really isn't a change at all. Electric vehicles will not replace our usual means of transportation anytime soon. And when they do, it will be a gradual takeover and it will be voluntary. It will take a lot of time. Many pundits and process junkies are running around caterwauling about the necessity to change the infrastructure and make other accommodations for a change to electricity immediately.
The same is true for electric vehicles becoming a necessity as it is for climate change to occur. Both issues are being approached with a hysterical outlook pushed by the immediate need to fleece the public.
Like an accommodation to a changing climate, the change to all-electric locomotion, divorcing ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuel sources, is not an emergency measure.
We have years – decades – to affect that change-over. Nothing cataclysmic will transpire if we don't change immediately. Nothing cataclysmic will transpire if we don't change for years.
One of the nation's largest financiers understands this, and is putting his money on tradition - not tradition as in sculpting stone or raising horses, but traditional as in petroleum fuels.
Warren Buffett, for all his support for Democrats, is a conservative person, especially when big money is at stake as it is when it comes to future fuels. Instead of being a hedge bet on his part, this writer thinks it is his prime investment philosophy. So the fact that's he's made a major investment in Pilot Flying J truck stops, whose whole business is based on the retail sales of fossil fuels for trucks and food and conveniences for their human drivers, speaks volumes.
We can be certain that at some point, electric cars will become a viable means of transportation. That will happen. It may not happen until we run out of fossil fuel a quarter millennium from now, but it will happen someday. The Chinese government is placing their bets, but their fascist system can make these decisions without regard to convenient (for the populace) results.
What this writer thinks we will be seeing first for our benefit is improved vehicle fuel efficiency, as typified by the Toyota Prius (Pious, as named in "South Park"). That car is a hybrid with electric motors for locomotion powered by electricity generated from a relatively small gasoline engine and stored in large batteries. These vehicles will help us drive battery technology to maturation.
It will be a long time before truck engines and other long-haul vehicle engines become all electric - at that time they will be called "motors" since that's all they'll be. And there will always be a market for "muscle cars" that go racing, although electric cars – with their amazing torque – may find a home there also.
Recently, the New York Times published an article reporting that the long suppressed information about the length of time that it takes for a battery to charge has become a subject of concern. Surprise, surprise!
And the only type of battery that can accept a deep charge – which is the kind of charge needed for heavy-duty use – is the heavy, traditional lead-acid type. That is the kind of battery that has been used in submarines, for instance, since before World War II. All of that is subject to change with new technology, but the new technology that is being developed is not directly transferable from cell phone size to large-scale battery power. That will happen too, of course, but it will take time.
Then there's the creation of the power. Batteries do not create power; they merely store power. Power creation requires fossil fuel or another form of energy. The green bullshit energy sources will slowly gain in capability, but slowly. With all the silly bans on nuclear power – it is used routinely in Europe – this country will probably not use that phenomenal source until it becomes necessary. We will probably use fossil fuels for a very long time.
There is a law pending approval by California's legislature that will require that all California vehicles be electric by some date approximately 20 years hence. Conveniently, there are some facts that are being ignored. The amount of power that will be required simply to recharge the batteries of all the electric cars that will be using power upon the implementation of such a law ignores the fact that the number of cars being recharged at a single gas station replacement, will demand the same power – roughly – as a city of around 30,000 people. Or more!
Think of that – a single gas station replacement! Then consider just how very many gas stations are in the entire state of California.
This will require power plants, and lots of them. These are large buildings with tall smokestacks for exhausting the (theoretically) invisible products of combustion away from the nostrils of our politically-correct kindred. Then there are transmission lines and power poles; there are transformers and distribution centers; there are all the components of the electric grid. Until we can power a high-rise building, or a hospital, or a shopping mall, or a grocery store on solar energy at some point in the very far distant future, we will be using the basic electric grid design that we have now.
Warren Buffett is right, and his purchase of Pilot Flying J is an astute one - is anchored in his long-held conservatism.
It's all about time: time for charging, time for development, time for adaptation to new systems.
There was a TV sitcom entitled "It's About Time," starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. They were the 1960s version of cave-men. We really haven't come very far from that.