Shakey Stevens Wrote:I like the idea of an electric, or battery car, unfortunately that eliminates the ability to travel more than ~250miles in a day. With the electric powered car would also have to be more electricity at disposal, a solution to that would be further develop geothermal power plants.
The easy solution is to develop quick change universal battery modules, kinda like the way you can plug pretty much any monitor into a computer.
Battery stations along the road would charge these up, and you'd just pull in, switch it out, give them your depleted one, pay a bit (for the electricity) and drive off.
There's no issue of energy availability, the night-time excess energy production of current plants in America is enough to power a fleet of approximately 70 million cars. It's just a matter of when you plug them in to charge - if they're in off-peak hours, it's easily within capacity.
Electricity from a power plant is by no means "just as bad as" the energy being produced by internal combustion engines. Most power plants are capable of 3-5 times the fuel efficiency of an IC engine (I believe the Prius is on the low end of this due to hybrid nature - it doesn't have to run the engine when it would be less efficient to do so), and far easier to regulate. Would you rather have 5 smokestacks to check for CO2, or 500,000 car exhausts? The fuel itself being burned is also less of an issue with power plants - anything from garbage to coal to nuclear fissiles can be converted into usable electricity, and swapping out a coal plant for a nuclear power plant is again easier than changing 500,000 cars.
I'd put ethanol right off the table, it's simply not viable without props and hasn't even been shown to produce more net energy than it costs to harvest. Sugar cane and other crops are much better, as well as some groups of plankton, but it's still not a great solution because then fuel crops replace food crops, and food prices rise.