EVcast #63: Interview with Dr. Lyle Dennis, Editor of GM-VOLT.COM

An excellent, bonus Friday interview!  So many tangents to this story- EV's in general, GM the killer of the EV1 and their possible comeback with the Volt, the power of the Internet, blogs and grassroots campaigns raised to another level, the vision of an everyman (well, if you can consider a neurologist an everyman;-) -actually, he comes across very much the everyman, which makes this story even more compelling.  Oh, can I see a best-selling book come out of this!

After listening to the pod cast, I want to ask if anyone is considering the lack of electric energy generation and what effect this will have on any of the EV Automobiles that you have been talking about including the GM-Volt. Thanks, Joe Bellisario

Electricity generation, expecially in the short run, will be impacted negligibly by EV's coming on the market- additionally, there have been several studies that show if EV's are charged at night, the CURRENT infrastructure could handle anywhere from 60-80% of the current cars on the road if they were converted to EV's.  That said, we do need, in the long run, newer power generation and new power transmission infrastucture whether we go to EV's or not- and of course, what would be ideal, is if we went 100% to EV's and had the ability to charge those EV's in several minutes- and for that we would need more in the way of Electricity generation and transmission.  But, alas! this is several years away, at a minimum- some predict anywhere from 15 to 30 years- again, I hope sooner;-)

You should never have to worry about electricity capacity.  Mainly because they could burn the oil directly at the oil field, and the electricity generated would give 100 mpg equivalent at a cost less than $1 a gallon.

And it is not the battery technology that is needed.  There are plenty of battery tech out there.  My favorite NaFePO4 which when you are done with the battery you can bury it in your vegetable garden as fertilizer as the components are too cheap to recycle.

What is needed is to put 100,000 electric cars on the road annually, even if it takes $50,000 rebate.  Even if the $50000 rebate was made that would only amount to $5 billion annually.  Which is basically nothing compared to the cost of gasoline on the environment.  The war in Iraq costs $6 billion for 2 weeks.  Just put 100,000 quality EVs on the road and see all the cheap new battery technologies developed.