A columnist on Maine Today points out a large amount of power that goes wasted each night on the electricity grid that could be better used to power vehicles (or anything else):
Each night across the Northeast, there is a large percentage of renewable power generation capacity that sits idle. This means there is a large amount of unused and under-used capacity in the existing electrical grid.According to a recent U.S. Department of Energy study, there is so much excess capacity that if every light-duty car and truck in America today used plug-in hybrid technology, 73 percent of them could be plugged in and “fueled” without constructing a single new power plant
He doesn’t link the study; I’d like to find out exactly how “renewable” the power production might be. Plug-in cars come with their own set of problems—battery recycling, for one—but I’m all for trying out alternate methods of powering our vehicles. We’re not going to decrease our oil use with a single solution.
[MaineToday.com via GroovyGreen.com]
