Build a couple of wind farms and they can even pretend that their energy is 100% renewable. You can even charge them a premium for the illusion. In the meantime the bulk of the energy will be produced by coal and (Canadian?) nuclear power.

This makes hybrids sound like perpetual motion machines. By their standards my bicycle gets an infinte number of miles per gallon when I strap a bottle of gas to it when I ride.

All this is showing is that the "mpg" measure is not only flawed, but being used inappropriately and deceptively. If you really want to make the comparisons, you need to convert the number of gallons of gasoline to kilowatt/hours and add to that the number of kilowatt/hours that comes from the wall.

If you're powering your house with a gas generator.

What happens if he gets rear-ended?

What kind of mischief is the battery going to cause in a nasty accident?

Sandy;

What kind of environmental damage is it going to cause? Batteries wear out and both their manufacture and disposal involve some very noxious chemicals. But as with the fuel used to generate the power stored in the battery, "out of sight, out of mind".

Chicks are all over this guy, though.

oj is in favor of this development, even though it might help sustain car use, or even increase the number of miles driven????? Color me confused....

Define "fuel."

Cars aren't going away. Gas can though.

How do you think that electricity got into your wall in the first place? Time Zone Gnomes and Railroad Hobo Fairies put it there? What about the cost of all that coal currently being used to produce that electricity, and the effects of charging all those cars will have on the present grid infrastructure. (For example, the grid currently assumes much smaller loads at night, and having tens of thousands of these batteries being charged is going to change that.

And I would assume that these hybrid batteries are not your ordinary single lead-acid DieHard. How much do they weigh and how does that extra mass effect the mileage and efficiecy? And as pointed out earlier, what about the environmental effects for collisions or just normal wear and tear. Batteries have lifetimes, with only so many charge cycles, and must be replaced as their efficiency decreases. Is the cost of the battery refit every year or two being factored in? I doubt it.

But hey, a basic tenet of environmentalism is that you get to live in your very own fantasy world where you are morally superior to everyone else because of the things you buy, own and use. (Or don't buy and use, like gasoline.)

Not from burning oil.

Additional night load is good, because nuclear power plants are best operated under constant load.

All we really need to know about plug-ins is that both Honda and Toyota have concluded that they are not commercially or economically viable.

Basically, the conversion to plug-in involves putting a large (350-500 lb) battery in the trunk. That battery, unlike the hybrid battery, is meant to be the sole energy source for the car for the first 25-30 miles of driving. It is drained, and then it is just a heavy weight in the trunk until recharged. It also gives off a lot of heat and takes away storage space.

What really makes it not commercially viable, though, is that serially draining and then recharging a battery cuts the battery's life drastically. In order to make buying a hybrid viable in the first place, Toyota and Honda had to warranty the batteries. However, because the hybrid battery is never allowed to fall below a half charge or charged to more than 80% of capacity, they are very long lived. Plug-in batteries, on the other hand, are going to cost $3,000 to $4,000 every two or three years. Honda and Toyota aren't willing to pay that price, and neither would anyone else.

For a while, and then we'll innovate better batteries.

Oil is not going away. There are probably a dozen major industries that utilize petroleum products from various degrees of cracking. Construction material (like asphalt for roads), petro-chemical industries, color dyes for printing, all plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, carpeting, some pharmaceuticals, etc. It would be great to replace some or all of that oil, but so far the proposed solutions are mostly fantasy (and many of the proposals make the situation worse).

It doesn't need to go away, just be cheap enough to end the petrostates dependence on it.

You'd be surprised how many small oil fired powerplants there are out here. (Mostly for peak load, 'cause they're easy to start and stop.) Then again, the Eastern Time Zone (especially it's northern part) is the only part of the country left that seems to be dependent on "heating oil", which is conveniently ignored in all these environmentaloid petroleum-based rants.