>>>>If I were elected President -- yeah, like that's going to happen -- my first challenge to the nation would be to come up with an affordable alternative to gasoline and/or oil. We did the Manhattan Project. We put a man on the moon. Why can't we do this?
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>>>No viable business plan, which would lock consumers into services in the long run. If we sell everybody solar panels, they'd become independent from us. What would we charge them every month? Same with local windmills - no, we'll build huge windmill farms, so we'll have a center which would produce and we'd sell power, not domestic power plants, and we'd control the distribution.
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>>>If everyone had an electric car, the unimaginable would happen: the big oil would lose its power, and we can't allow that, comrades, can we?
>>
>>I just don't get this electric car business. Surely one of the problems of global warming is the polution caused by electricity production; that's why there's popular pressure to build wind and wave farms, solar panels, roof windmills, etc. So if elec is used to power the cars, presumably they're plugged in in the garage overnight, or whatever. Where does this magic elec come from? Surely that's just shoving the polution from the roads to the air around the elec generating stations, increasing their output.
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>The energy efficiency of electric engine is far above that of internal combustion engine. The latter is generally not going above 30% - i.e. the loss is around 70% or worse. With electricity, I've heard of losses being around 10-15%. So to me it does make sense.
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>And then, the electricity can be produced in many ways - dams being among the more environment friendly.

Yes but when you plug your car into the garage socket (outlet) you can't stipulate that only renewable elec. goes in :-)

>Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the bottom line would be less overall carbon fuel consumption. Add to that the reduced consumption of electricity if only governments would give tax breaks to those who insulate their homes well (so there'd be less energy consumed for heating and cooling).
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>>When it comes to hydrogen-driven cars, I don't know, but strikes me there's a lot of energy used in manufacturing H2?
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>Depends how you produce it. The way GW(2)B's administration wants to do it, it seems to be using, guess what, oil. On Iceland, they use thermal energy to produce electricity, and then use that to electrolyse water, with oxygen as a byproduct.

Cool if you live in Iceland.

Saw a prog last week about this British oil magnate, who used local peat to create some kind of useful oil. The peat went into a furnace and the oil was distilled from the peat. This kind of economics baffled me - you've got to burn stuff to produce stuff to be burned. Why not just cut out the middle-man? Admitedly, after a while they realised that like methane was coming off as a by-product so they piped it back into the furnace and burned it to help fire the furnace