My Intellectual exercise for this week

[Angel]

"how many more power plants would we need..."

Perhaps you all can help =)

Wife and I were discussing alternative fuels the other day, and I got to thinking about electricity, electric cars in general.

Whether or not electric cars are the answer, or an answer is irrelevant to me - none of this is going to happen tomorrow, there are LOTS of problems to overcome that don't need to be discussed here.

BUT if it did, (or 5 yrs from now, or 10 yrs from now), we'd need electric generation capactity to charge them. This is all technology we have done before.

But what got me thinking is this, I live in Cincinnati, which has 3 power stations located near it. Due to deregulation and such, I can't say that all the power they make goes to cincinnati, but for the sake of dicussion, lets assume that cincinnati requires 2 2000MW power plants to operate. I could be wayy off here. I got a job before Cinergy/Duke Energy called me back =)

My wifes subaru has a 160hp (120kW) engine inside of it.
I once heard from a prof. that a good small car takes 3kW of energy to move down the road at 30mpg, 5kW if you want air conditioning =) For the sake of this arguement assume that everyone's car has a 50kW motor, and commutes 20 miles a day. I don't know the population of cincinati. Make and state more assumptions as you need to.

The short question is: If the city of cincinnati and all its people (or the state of Ohio, I think we have like 10 or 15 power plants in OH...) went to electric cars, how many more power plants would we need ?


There are lots of electricians that could run wires to your garage, I must assume that there are a fair amount of linemen that can add high-tension lines to ship this power effectively- its the power plant itself that is the single longest-lead time component in a power distrubution plan. Power plants also have the largest environmental and NIMBY issues. It probablly would never play out that way (It'd take a LONG time to install all those lines, upgrade transformers.... but I was just kinda curious...

If we (as a country) all changed our ways/lifetsyles/car designs/whatever, how many more power plants would we need to run electric cars ?

-John