Electric Land

I could never understand how electric cars were supposed to get something for nothing.  Sure, they could almost do it if we had a rational power production system, with much smarter nuclear power and less government monopoly control.  But with the system we have now?  Never made any sense.

Of course, electric cars aren’t in mass production yet. And the technology is bound to get better and cheaper. Right?
Not so fast, says the University of Manitoba’s Vaclav Smil, who’s among the world’s foremost scholars of energy economics. Electric cars, he says, aren’t microchips, and Moore’s law doesn’t apply. “The myth that the future belongs to electric vehicles is one of the original misconceptions,” he writes in his book Energy Myths and Realities. In an interview, he notes that recent history is filled with energy breakthroughs that turned out be duds. Electric car crazes have come and gone before. Perhaps some people may remember a Canadian company called Ballard, which claimed to have developed a breakthrough fuel-cell technology. Many brainy people swore that Ballard was the future. It wasn’t.

Here’s another catch: Electric cars aren’t necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles require large amounts of electricity – so much that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he doesn’t know how he’d get it. “If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails,” he said recently.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/the-shocking-truth-about-electric-cars/article2149465/

A jolt of lightning set's me back a pace
Feel like a visitor from outer space
Please excuse me if I don't quite understand
I'm just a stranger in Electric Land
Bad Company, "Electric Land"