Scotty, we need more power...

My wife signed us up for a magazine call Red Herring -- it was labeled as a magazine for 'the business of technology' and since I'm a bit of a techno-weenie, she thought I'd enjoy it. Turns out, it's really a magazine for technology business investors (the NASDAQ crowd basically) so it's somewhat less than a "cover to cover, read it all the day it shows up" for me. Still, it has it's points.

Recently they featured an article on new hybrid and electric cars (written from the perspective of you average eco-techno-weenie), and how much better the country will be once all cars are electric, yada yada yada (zippety boom de boom). The latest issue featured a letter to the editor from a self proclaimed inventor dealing with the subject. He pointed out that the only way to make an electric car feasible is if the 'refueling' process works like gasoline powered cars. His solution was swap out battery packs -- you pull into a service station, and your exhausted battery pack is pulled out of the car and replaced with a fully charged pack by an automated robotic system. It takes about the same amount of time as a fill up (as opposed to the 6 hours or longer to recharge a battery pack. OK, this system works more like what people do for their gas grills than their cars, but it's the time element that matters. That would allow you to travel in an electric car without having to worry about range. Then he mentions the real kicker -- he runs the math on replacing a nation full of gas guzzlers with eco-friendly electrics, and discovers that we would need about 210% of our current power production to accomplish that. That means more than twice the current number of electric plants that we have now. That also means twice the pollution output from coal and gas fired plants, twice the nuclear waste needing to be stored, twice the number of lakes and rivers dammed for hydro-electric power, twice the acreage of land covered with solar and wind collection (and twice the number of animals affected by the new hydro, solar, and wind plants).

Maybe we should think about this some more...