Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, had a editorial in todays San Jose Mercury News about electric vehicles. He says: "Energy independence is the wrong goal...." Many politicos use this phrase as a talking point and it sounds likely, but... he suggests instead "We must strengthen our energy resilience by increasing our reliance on electricity." The problem is, as he says, to the extent the U.S. "energy" is derived from oil which is increasingly only available from unstable regimes in the middle east, it is folly for the U.S. to be addicted to oil (as G.W. Bush said). 'Energy' security is probably best done, as he says, by improving 'energy resilience' but let's look at what that means.
Electricity can only be transported over land? Uh, yes, that's generally true... but it's begging the question of how to generate the electricity. I agree wholeheartedly with two further things he says "Equally important is that electricity can be produced using multiple sources of energy. ... Most everything today runs on electricity. A big exception is the transportation sector. " Since 'transportation' uses the huge percentage of petroleum used in this country, it is transportation which is the low hanging fruit. Doing something to change the form of energy used by 'transportation' would affect the amount of petroleum usage and would directly improve the situation with 'energy insecurity' in the U.S.A.
But then he veers off into the weeds ...
Uh.. "current technology allows electric cars to run only 100 miles or so before their batteries need to be recharged" well, this depends totally on the battery technology. Ask Tesla Motors how many miles their car delivers per charge. (hint: 200+ miles) "Few drivers can live with this limitation all the time" UUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! The majority of drivers have an 18 mile or less daily commute. Even if an EV were delivering 100 miles that's far more than the typical commute.
"Start-ups ... have begun to experiment with all-electric cars" ... uh, maybe he doesn't know his history, however the electric car has a very long history going back into the 1800's.
"We must sharply accelerate the conversion to electricity." I agree.. and he suggests 'dual fuel' cars, as if 'electricity' is a fuel. What a misappropriation of the word 'fuel' because 'fuel' implies burning and you do not burn electricity. Hybrid vehicles (the correct term he should be using) are an interesting idea, but what should be done is for them to be plug-in hybrid vehicles. The existing hybrid cars are not plug-in because it seems the car companies believe we're too feeble minded to understand how to plug in a car.
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