[Townhall] Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.But that's absurd.
"Batteries leak, and they don't hold a lot," says physicist Mark Mills.
Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that "oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline."
But future batteries will be better, I point out.
"Engineers are really good at making things better," Mills responds, "but they can't make them better than the laws of physics permit." Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.
"Because nature is not nice to humans," explains Mills, "we store energy for when it's cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you'd need to build about a hundred trillion dollars' worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world's battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries."
Politicians don't mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don't mention that the electric grid is limited.This summer, California officials were so worried about blackouts they asked electric vehicle owners to stop charging cars! Worse, if (as many activists and politicians propose) we try to get that electricity from 100% renewable sources, the rationing would be deadly.
Yet today, few of California's cars are electric. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all new cars must be electric by 2035! Where does he think he'll get the electricity to power them?
"Roughly speaking, you have to double your electric grid to move the energy out of gasoline into the electric sector," says Mills. "No one is planning to double the electric grid, so they'll be rationing."
This is just math and physics. It's amazing supposedly responsible people promote impossible fantasies.
Math B hard, especially when elections are involved.
"It's been an extraordinary accomplishment of propaganda," complains Mills, "almost infantile ... distressing because it's so silly."
Even if people invent much better cars, wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and batteries, explains Mills, "you're still drilling things, digging up stuff. You're still building machines that wear out ... It's not magical transformation."