**Written by Doug Powers **Barely missed defined as about 826,000 cars: Back in the good old days when President Obama didnt have so many dings on his record, he promised that by 2015 thered be more than 1 million electric cars on the road. Well, with just days to go, hes only about 826,000 or so cars short of that goal. Instead of 200,000 Nissan Leafs on the road today -- as Obamas Department of Energy predicted in 2011 -- there are less than 70,000. And while Obama forecast 375,000 Chevy Volt sales by 2014, just a bit more than 71,000 have made it off the showroom floor. Fisker, which was supposed to be selling 85,000 electric cars a year by now, went bankrupt last year. Add it up, and there are a grand total of less than 180,000 plug-ins on U.S. roads today. Worldwide, there are only 400,000. To sum up Obamas 2011 prediction: The kumquat-powered vehicle in every driveway politicians cant admit how nearly impossible their green visions are, because if they did even fewer people would support dumping money into that particular pit: The problem is that mass-producing better batteries is, put simply, really hard. Batteries are not good at storing energy compared to a steel gasoline tank. (We know how hard it is, in part, because the Obama administration spent $2 billion on stimulus subsidies for companies to build new battery factories in America. That experiment yielded neither a technological nor a domestic production revolution.) We also know how difficult it is because of the inherent differences in the physical chemistry in the molecules used to store energy. Pound for pound (and pounds matter) the chemicals that comprise gasoline store 40 times more energy than the best chemicals in batteries. Gasoline is not only more dense but also remarkably safe, easy to store, and portable. Ask a chemist: if you started with a blank slate to design a near-ideal way to store energy for a mobile platform, you’d invent the oil molecule. But since the green stimulus efforts were mostly about funneling money to cronies rather than developing new technology, the Obama administration considers them successes merely because the money was spent -- not that the expenditures didnt yield much of anything. **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 14:32:42 +0000
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