energy, electric vehicles, hydrogen and carbon tax

The latest energy crisis has really made me think about my personal use of energy resources, especially when it comes to driving. The idea of an electric vehicle really appeals to me - it's such an efficient way of travelling. The electric drivetrain absolutely trounces an ICE for energy efficiency even if you factor in the generation efficiency and retain the transmission with all its losses. Performance-wise, all that torque from essentially a standstill would be amazing. The batteries are still the problem though - they are still either heavy with a low energy density, or incredibly expensive with a reasonable energy density. As my daily commute is about 56 km, I'd probably want a range of at least 100 km, which starts to get expensive (and heavy if using lead-acid batteries).

There are obviously plenty of other people who feel the same, judging by the size of the EV community on the web. A couple of people that are heavily into converting and doing it well are evdrive and metricmind, both in the USA and and New Zealander Gav (kiwiev) from New Plymouth. I'm very impressed with their commitment and results so far, especially Gav, who has been driving his home-converted Mitsubishi for months now.

I'm not convinced about the economics of it though - it will still cost a great deal (probably in the order of NZ$10,000) to convert a conventional car to electric power, and once you factor in replacing the batteries every so often, the payback period gets quite lengthy. There is only so much the feeling of smugness can offset the cost! It would be a great idea for the government to introduce a subsidy for converting your car to electric power, as I believe they do in some parts of the USA.

In my eyes, one of the main reasons to do the conversion is to reduce your impact on the environment, but there is currently no financial incentive to do that. This is primarily because environmental costs are only very indirectly applied to vehicles (or any industry, really). I support the theory of a carbon tax, but it only addresses a small part of the problem of producers transferring their environmental costs unchecked onto the present and future public. Someone along the line will have to pay in the end. It also seems that bureaucracy is making it an increasingly unwieldy tool. What is clear to me, global warming or not, is that to ensure we can keep living on this planet, we will need to change the way we produce things a great deal.

Getting back to the electric vehicle thread, one of my pet hates at the moment is all the press given to fuel cells. Leaving aside the manufacture of Hydrogen from hydrocarbons; What a ridiculous concept to take electrical energy, convert it into chemical energy (Hydrogen) through a loss-prone process, have trouble storing the unstable fuel, and then covert it back into electrical energy to power your car. How the hell is that better than plugging your car in at home at night? I suppose you could do that too. Sure, batteries aren't perfect (and still convert electrical energy to chemical energy) but they sure seem a better proposition than a hydrogen fuel cell. It's telling that you can't read an article on fuel cells without finding mention of setting up a network of hydrogen refuelling stations. It all smacks of the oil companies (et al) trying to establish a new oligopoly (oiligopoly?) on the supply of hydrogen fuel. That really bugs me.