December 24, 2023

Supposedly, electric vehicles are almost totally efficient—that is, 96% efficient in using energy. That assumption is beyond disgraceful. Gas power vehicles are vastly more efficient than electric vehicles when considering all of the factors involved.

A law was passed requiring electric motors to get 96% efficiency, with a concern to increase it to 98%. When something as simple and provable as technology can be corrupted so wantonly, it tells how removed from rational constructivity society has gotten.

The claim of 96% efficiency traces back in its logic to the measurement of resistance in the wires for electric motors. Resistance in wires creates heat as wasted energy. Well-designed motors will have about 3-5% energy loss due to resistance in the wiring.

Ignored in that analysis is the transformation of electrical energy into kinetic energy. It can never be more than 40% efficient and will typically be 25% efficient under operating conditions.

That's because the transformation creates an inductive force that acts upon electrons in the motor causing the electrons to push against the nuclei of the metal. Only 40% of those metal nuclei will get pushed in the right direction, while 60% go in odd directions creating randomized motion as heat.

Bureaucrats and legislators missed the inductive force and went by the resistive force only.

But even that problem is not the worst problem for electric vehicles. The worst problem is that electricity is such an inefficient use of energy that it is only practical for unusual circumstances. Of course, the public is led to believe the opposite—that there is no waste of energy with electricity. Their proof, as always, is, seeing is believing. They can charge an electric vehicle much more cheaply than filling a gas tank—that is, several years ago they could.

Several years ago, electric vehicles were being connected to a system designed for toasters. It was a small and cheap system. Power plants were set up on the edge of cities to eliminate transmission lines. Petroleum or coal could be moved to the edge of cities for next to nothing compared to the cost of transmission lines.

Those rudimentary electrical systems are already being overwhelmed. In the recent past, there was six times as much energy being used as hydrocarbons as electricity. Converting the hydrocarbons to electricity would superficially require six times as much electricity. But no one is allowing six times as much hydrocarbon-based energy to be moved to the cities.

So there are two major problems developing. One is that the so-called renewables are hundreds or thousands of miles away from the users, which requires massive increase in transmission lines. Transmission lines have 50% loss of energy built in so as to reduce the amount of metal required. The cost of transmission lines becomes equal to the cost of the source of electricity when about 300 miles long.

The second problem in replacing fossil fuels with electricity is getting the electricity to the vehicles. So far, charging at home is almost required; but city systems cannot increase significantly to meet even those demands.

Then getting the electricity to vehicles on highways is so preposterous that no one can even conceptualize the task. Charging stations will never exist significantly along highways due to the impossibility of spreading that much electricity over the surface of the Earth. There isn't enough metal on planet Earth to even begin the task of distributing electricity on such a broad scale.

For a perspective, the whole purpose is to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That means creating electric vehicles for the one percenters isn't going to touch the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Then there is the impossibility of building the transmission lines. If the line length changes from one mile near cities to a thousand miles near renewable sources, there would need to be a thousand fold increase in line lengths. If all hydrocarbon sources were replaced with electrical sources, six times as much electricity would be needed. That's 6,000 times as much transmission line length, without considering how to distribute electricity along highways.

The expense of the lines is overwhelming already. Anyone who trys to produce so-called renewable energy must tap into existing lines, because constructing new lines is too expensive to even consider.

Existing lines were already too few because of the extreme expense in constructing new ones. Can you imagine what a thousand miles of wire one inch in diameter is? If you bought a foot of it at a hardware store, it would be heavy and set you back a ways. Can you imagine building a steel tower that costs a million dollars every half mile for a thousand miles? That's two billion dollars. Endless numbers of those towers would be needed to replace hydrocarbons with so-called renewable energy. There isn't enough metal on planet Earth to begin the project.

There is already an absence of suitable locations for so-called renewables. Someone said the Gulf Coast, until they were informed that there is no significant wind along the Gulf Coast. Someone said, floating windmills off the California coast. The expense and clutter would be absurd. So more windmills were planned along the New Jersey coast, until the expense became impossible to meet.

Who is supposed to pay for the so-called renewables? The rate payers, of course. When renewables hit their maximum at 15% of total electricity, the cost increase is a factor of ten—from 5¢ per kilowatt hour for coal to 50¢ pkwh with 15% renewables. There is no price too high to pay for saving mankind from carbon dioxide; and the fake greens don't want to mention what the cost does for the needy let along create assistance.

Of course, the 5¢ pkwh for coal becomes 15¢ when buffering for renewables; and the 50¢ pkwh for renewables becomes "on par with coal," when looking only at the manufacturing cost for the blades.

There are many places where loss reduces efficiency for electricity. In generating electricity, no generator gets more than 40% efficiency. That means using a diesel generator for electricity has 60% less energy per gallon of diesel than pouring the diesel fuel directly into a truck tank. Gas powered cars have the same 60% advantage over electric vehicles.

Inside the vehicles, a gas powered motor typically gets the same 25% efficiency as the electric motor of an electric vehicle. So the gain or loss is determined before the energy enters the vehicle, where electricity is wanton wastefulness for large-scale purposes.

The unbelievable pretense is that so-called renewables are carbon free. They are extremely expensive; and every dollar spent puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It takes a hundred truckloads of cement under a windmill on land. Creating cement is extremely expensive and energy intensive, because very high temperatures are required to remove carbonates. Creating the huge amounts of steel also requires much energy. Over sea-coasts, the material and expense are multiplied vastly.

That means the unbelievably huge expense of so-called renewables, to a point of impossibilities, is putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than using fossil fuels for the same purposes. But more significantly, there isn't enough energy that can be captured from wind or sunshine to significantly reduce the use of fossil fuels, because the sources are extremely dilute. Concentrating the energy is so demanding that there aren't enough metals or space to get significant energy from those so-called renewable sources.