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Originally Posted by deserth3
yellow power day...
... The coal fired power generating plants can not handle the load.
And we do not want a red air quality day because of the extra coal needed.
Again we are only trading one form of polution for another. Tree huggers seem to think electricity arives at the outlet by the process of J.F.M.
I'm sure the idiot who made this film is very proud of him or herself.
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Exactly. I read a while back that an electric car actually produced MORE pollution than a comparable one with an internal combustion engine. This makes sense. An internal combustion engine converts essentially raw fuel into energy to drive the vehicle. When you convert one form of energy into another, there is always some energy lost - because, in the practical world, a transfer of one form of energy to another involves some inneficiency. For example, if you had a gasoline powered electric plant (hypothetically), when the gas was burned, there would be a reduction in its energy relative to the electricity converted at the plant. This would then be reduced further when transmitted accross the wires. Again when converted into battery power in the vehicle. And again when converting it into the power to drive the car. Essentially you have multiple reductions in the energy contained in the original fuel rather than simply the one instance in burning it inside the internal combustion engine. I'm probably mistating or oversimplifying a little (of course the gasoline must be transferred to the gas pump as well), but that's the basic flaw with electric cars: Extral fuel must be burned, creating even more pollution, than if you just burned fuel inside the engine.