All so often I read that it is impossible to move to predominantly EVs any time in the next 5 to 10 years. All so many people (and/or vehicle and petroleum insiders) are telling us it is impossible. I assert it is simply that they don’t want to put forth the effort to make it happen.
Let’s go back in history to the Apollo program. President Kennedy inspired the US to land a crew on the moon in the decade of the 1960s. Let’s look at just one piece of the Apollo project, the computer. You can read a detailed description of the Apollo guidance computer on Wikipedia . Here are some of the specifications:
- 2048 words (15 bit plus parity) of RAM
- 36,864 words of ROM
- Clock speed of 1 MHz but far slower per instruction
- A very restrictive instruction set
If those numbers don’t mean anything to you, your cellular phone is likely to have thousands of times more calculating ability. But, Apollo was a success in spite of the fact that it seemed “impossible”.
If we want electric vehicles we need to have this same “we can do it” attitude. The cars themselves are happening with companies like BYD and Tesla. Other companies, with an attitude change, could get on track.
You are probably thinking, what about the electric grid? The answer there is mostly more local generation of electricity. Rooftop solar is an obvious example. A typical EV only consumes 200 watts per kilometer. A two square meter solar panel is rated for around 500 watts. Assuming six hours of maximum sun (that will really be more like four hours of maximum and another four hours of lower power) that means around 1500 watts per square meter. Thus, around 15 kilometers of charge generated for each square meter of PV panel. Just covering your garage roof or a parking space where you work with PV panels would likely generate more power than your EV consumes.
It’s not hard — it is just an attitude change.
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