- JoNova - https://joannenova.com.au -

Britain can have electric cars or turn Scotland into a wind farm, which will it be then?

AA class Mercedes, battery powered car.

Who wants to wait for charging? Instead, just dump the flat batteries, pick up a new set. (See the youtube below).

Having a nation full of electric cars is fine as long as you don’t want to drive them.

Wind Farms would need to “cover whole of Scotland” to power Britain’s electric vehicles

By Paula Murray

Jack Ponton, emeritus professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, said another 16,000 turbines would be required in order to replace petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles.

“If you want to do this with wind turbines, you are talking about 16,000 more wind turbines, four times as many as we have at the moment, and I’ve estimated that would occupy some 90,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Scotland.”

The academic – a member of Scientific Alliance Scotland, a group which promotes open-minded debate on issues such as climate change – believes the plan is “unworkable”…

The UK plans to phase out combustion engines by 2032. What happens when surges of holiday tourists arrive in a town without enough charging points? “Charge-rage” and long queues. Lets spend our holidays waiting for the car to fill.

Sure, eventually, with a lot of money we can build enough towers and wires and plug-holes, but if we want cars running on wind turbines we need to store the amps in batteries that stand still, so they can load it into batteries that travel.

UPDATE: Lionell Griffith in comments:

“Obviously, the only solution is to have car owners certified and to have get permission from a newly formed government bureaucracy for when, where, how long, and for what purpose they can use their cars. If you don’t have permission, it will be a felony to use your car for any purpose.

We can’t have the public going just anywhere anytime for frivolous trips to nowhere in particular. Clearly, it is a public health issue.”

Remember this great Saturday Night Live parody (The AA Class Mercedes) with Julia Louis-Dreyfus (of Seinfeld fame).

h/t Pat

POST NOTE: The headline is tongue-in-cheek. I can’t take the idea of converting a nation-to-electric-cars in just fifteen years seriously. Assuming we want to run a nation on electric cars, and assuming we can’t use nuclear power (for no good reason) and assuming we are are doing this to reduce CO2 and “change the weather”, only then does it make sense (in a fragile way) to use wind power.

 

9.5 out of 10 based on 68 ratings