eclipse wrote:Probably all true, and as a New Urbanist I don't really like cars that much anyway. But can you imagine how fast the shift to electric trucking could be (even with current limitations) if oil prices start to rise, permanently? Even if there was a half hour fast-charge every 500 miles. Even if there's a third reduction in freight capacity. This is national infrastructure - even national security! Who knows? Maybe some company would smash together a hydrogen
burning truck and manufacture hydrogen at their warehouses, after all all you need is electricity and water.
I guess the main point I'm making is that it's almost viable today, and the technical reality is not anything like this strange gal's vibe.
http://energyskeptic.com/category/books ... p-running/
The collapse sites' strong point has never been focusing on reality or data points which contradict their "religion", IMO. "Strange", re their views and predictions, is pretty much par for the course.
First, no question that if oil prices rose a lot and stayed a lot higher that the economics on a lot of things would change -- and could produce massive change rapidly, given the incentives that would cause. if that had occurred a decade ago, HEV's would be fairly popular already, for example.
That's why so many people who recognize the dangers of AGW would welcome significant CO2 taxes, to bring that about, and incent far less fossil fuel burning. Not that this idea ever gets traction, even with switching income taxes to CO2 taxes, meaning total taxes wouldn't have to rise.
There's no reason hydrogen couldn't be produced lots of places. You're right -- just electricity and water can do it. However, to do it at scale takes a lot of power and that isn't cheap. It comes back to economics. Until fuel cells are CHEAP, the incentive to create a widely available and convenient public hydrogen supply doesn't exist. Until that happens, fuel cells are a non-starter (outside parts of CA where govt. provides more incentives than elsewhere in the US) since without convenient hydrogen, no economic fill-ups, and game over.
One thing though -- if the electricity to crack the water to produce the hydrogen isn't green (solar, wind, etc), i.e. if it's done with natural gas, then that's not any better than charging BEV's with electricity produced from natural gas (or worse, coal).
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To me, as you say, this is all technically viable now. The remaining big item is for the tech. to get good enough to make things like fuel cells and BEV's truly as good or better than ICE's or HEV's in terms of economics. I think it's just a matter of time. There will be a transition period, even when the economics is clearly favoring green tech, since ICE's don't suddenly become worthless (despite bizarre Musk claims), though their resale value could diminish significantly.
But I think it's really exciting that now, instead of just greatly reducing economic activity, we can respond to long term "high" oil prices with using smarter, greener tech.
Of course, the doomers will object that since it's not all economic today, it "can't happen", it "won't work", etc. No one rational ever claimed a major transition like changing the bulk of the global vehicle fleet could happen over night. Huge physical and economic constraints must be dealt with to mostly transition such a huge fleet of vehicles.