Are Electric cars good?
Is an electric car good? Is your 3 year old good? Sometimes, but mostly you might love him because of the way he makes you feel and because of his potential. When you look at him you see what he might become. An electric car can have electricity transmitted to it like subways, trams, and even mag lev trains, it can store the power on board in batteries, ultra capacitors or flywheels and it can make electricity onboard with a petrol engine, solar panels or a sometimes hydrogen (or other chemicals) fuel cell. All of these are electric cars. They are electric because they use electric “fuel” for power which does not have to necessarily come from the electric grid. When the electricity does come from the grid how much is it? I posed the question recently. If 100% of our cars were (battery) electric it turns out that that this would only be an increase of about 12 to 16 % of our electrical usage.1 If a 3 year old were only trouble 12% of the time this may seem fairly good. In truth, we use
