I want an electric road. Inductive charging on the fly can work says Stanford experts. Say good bye to multiple millions of large, heavy, expensive short-lived batteries and replace them with an electric road.

I want a new 100% renewable energy Federal Electric Utility. I want us all to share in the up-front infrastructure costs and all share in getting all our energy needs satisfied by virtually free electricity. Too expensive you say? It would cost no more than about 5-7 years worth of what we squander paying fossil fuel companies.

And that is based on 2011 figures ($1.2 Trillion a year). A Federal Electric Utility should save Americans about $3000 for every person in their household. Every year. In your pocket. Think voters might go for that? Oh, yeah – that would pretty much end CO2 emissions as well.

Wait, what? I would expect places with very cold climates (like northern Minnesota or interior Alaska) to be favorable for introducing electric cars, because they already have a big piece of the infrastructure in place. That’s because, if you drive an internal combustion vehicle up there, you need to plug in an electric engine block heater so that the engine will be warm enough to start. When I was in Fairbanks, it was standard practice in winter to plug in your (IC) car, and radio announcers would remind listeners that plugging in was recommended whenever temperatures were below +20 F (for comparison, average January temperatures in Fairbanks are about -10 F, but anything within the -50 to +30 range is not unusual). So switching to electric in those places is easy: you plug your electric car into the socket you would have used for the engine block heater on your IC car.

Good question. First, I can tell you that we bought our new Prius just as the Polar Vortex was setting in. Now, having compared mileage between daily highs well below zero for weeks vs normal chilly cold (hardly ever above freezing but generally above zero) I can say that there was about a 2 mpg gallon loss during the really cold days, which may be from a lot of factors (ALL cars, no matter what the fuel, seem to lose a couple MPG when it is super cold, so we should avoid making electric DBIH by ignoring that) .

Having said that we were not able to buy a plugin because they don’t bother to sell Prius plugin (which is a new model) in the north because they (Toyota) does not like the cold.

The thing is, these are all engineering problems that have been solved. If the batteries like to be warm, heat them up, using a bit of energy to bring efficiency to nomral. For the Prius, exess engine heat is stored in a thermos bottle deep inside the car, and that stays hot for days. That is used to warm the parts that need to be warm very efficiently.

People with EV in Minnesota or other cool places. How well does the car work on those really mind numbingly cold days in the winter? I hope to have a garage to park in overnight soon but have to park outside during the day for work. If I go the EV/plug-in Hybrid route will the darn thing get me home at night?

IC engines are pretty efficient, and they don’t lose that much efficiency as they are moved down in size. The reason for this is because they are heat engines, and the combustion occurs very rapidly so it reaches a high temperature and the work is extracted at that high temperature, so there is good Carnot efficiency.

Also, IC technology is pretty mature, the cost of an engine is mostly the cost of the raw materials.

Battery technology has no where close to the same level of maturity. There are many more degrees of freedom in choice of chemistry for batteries than there are for choice of materials for IC engines.

IC engines never had to contend with whole mature business sectors trying to crush them the way fossil fuel producers are trying to crush renewable energy. Also, the electric utilities are trying to crush local electricity supply by charging outrageous hook-up fees.

Electric utilities are regulated monopolies. The regulators need to simply tell the utilities to accept it.