The world is really on the way of getting rid of oil.
Electric cars, bioplastics, solar panels getting exponentially cheap.
From my point of view the only thing that stops us all from switching to electric cars is the battery technology.
When it comes to the industrial use of solar energy, we already have the technology of storing energy - flywheel (google Beacon Power).
The vast majority of people don't buy a brand new car more than once or twice in their life. They simply don't have the money. The rest of the people buy a car used and drive it until they sell it to someone else to buy another used car. Cars can last 200+k miles which is often 15-20 years in the life of most vehicles.
The adage has been that "Americans buy, on average, a new car or truck every 3 or 4 years."[1] That's like a dozen new cars in a lifetime.
I was going to call bravo sierra on your assertion, but I decided to try a back-of-the-envelope calculation to check the plausibility:
Roughly 10 million cars are sold each year in the U.S., the U.S. has 230 million adults, and they'd likely buy their cars between ages 18 and 65 (a span of 47 years). That means each adult has a 1 in 23 chance (230M/10M) of buying a new car each year, so over a 47-year span they'd buy 47/23 = 2 new cars.
There could be all sorts of ways my calculation could be wrong, but it agrees surprisingly well with your claim.
I'm wondering now if the "new car every 3-4 years" is a myth propagated by auto makers.
Without doing a lot of research, I couldn't decide how to deal with questions of:
- Including or excluding light trucks
- Including or excluding cars that are new but being leased rather than sold
- Large year-to-year variations in sales (esp. of low sales during the recession)
But I think 10 million is reasonable rough estimate.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite... [2] http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/story/2012-01-17/...
33.8% of cars were older than 10 years as of 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit... http://www.nada.org/Content/NavigationMenu/MediaCenter/NADAD...
If you run the statistics as median number of lifetime purchases by person (rather than average), you'll likely get a lower count as well. High-volume purchasing is likely concentrated among wealthy (or exceptionally unlucky) drivers.
I think the numbers are heavily skewed by people who do buy those new cars every few years.
Also, I think the car rental companies - who would have massive annual turnover of vehicles - further skews the average[1]. The top 4 companies have ~2M vehicles and if they never have a car more than 3 years old (probably more like 2 years), then they buy ~700k/year or 7% of that 10M in annual new car sales.
1 - http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/13/surprising-...
Solar is following an exponential fall, but the tail has long been wagged
http://io9.com/solar-powers-epic-price-drop-visualized-51044...
* They're unreliable.
* The intermittency makes it impossible to use.
* It's unfair on the monopolistic power companies.
We can do the battery storage right now, it's just not as great as what we'd like.
If you switched all cars over to electric tomorrow, the grid would melt down in every country that attempted it. There is not even remotely enough power available to handle it. Most first world countries are running their national power grids with a very modest buffer (and for countries sub first world, forget about it, they're still dealing with routine rolling blackouts).
By the time all autos are switched to electric in 30 years, hopefully self-driving cars have wiped out at least half of all vehicles in the first world.
"From my point of view the only thing that stops us all from switching to electric cars is the battery technology."
My obvious point was that, in fact, that is not even remotely the only thing stopping us from switching to electric cars. My scenario was extremely useful in highlighting the fact that we do not have the capacity to switch to an all-electric car approach, and not primarily due to batteries.
We can do the battery tech and manufacturing in the present, to build very effective electric vehicles. Building up the grid to support ~500 million cars in the first world would cost tens of trillions of dollars and take decades. It makes the battery challenge look hilariously minuscule by comparison.
"By the time all autos are switched to electric in 30 years"
You ignored what I said, and proceeded to tell me how the shift will take decades.
Batteries are not a $30 trillion and 30 year problem, not even remotely close. Batteries are an order of a magnitude smaller of a problem.
We can build the Tesla S already. Musk is going to spend $5 billion building a plant that can produce 500,000+ car battery systems. We can already make effective battery systems for mainstream electric cars, the challenge now is to make them better and scale up manufacturing (which has already begun).
It costs $5 billion in the US just to build one major nuclear power plant.
I rarely see anybody discussing where the trillions of dollars in new spending is going to come from to boost energy supply and grid to handle 100 million electric cars in the US. It'll cost trillions just to maintain what we already have now over that time.
As for where the money comes from, doesn't that just fall out of supply and demand? As demand for electricity increases, prices will go up, funding the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate the increased demand.
The solution may not even lie in the grid. Batteries can solve the grid problem as well as the battery problem. Give every electric car customer enough solar to cover his charging needs and a fixed storage installation to keep the power for when the car comes home, and the grid won't even know the cars are there.
I'm sure this will all be wonderfully challenging for those involved, but it doesn't look like something to worry about from the outside.
Looking forward to oil-shareholders claiming how expensive electric cars for the elites are making electricity unaffordable for the poor.