I don't know how much lower the total carbon footprint of an electric car will be than that of a conventional gasoline-powered car, and I don't know how much cheaper refueling will be. True, it's cheaper to generate power on a large scale than a small one, but there are losses in transmission and in the battery, and manufacturing that battery has a hefty carbon footprint itself before it even gets into your car.
But there's another reason why we should all look forward to the day when we will have batteries in our cars: innovation.
The future will be an energy polyculture. We will generate power not only from traditional sources but also from a variety of new renewable sources. We will expand wind and solar production; we will leverage a variety of biofuels. We will use natural gas in new places. Some may even turn to hydrogen power (although there are significant problems with hydrogen as a fuel source). The question is, how do we get all of this energy into our vehicles?
Cars on the market today are inextricably tied to their primary fuel source. The power train is driven directly by the gas engine, and the battery is too small to do much more than run the radio without constant recharging from that engine. Now suppose we wanted to encourage competition between different fuel technologies to drive down prices and increase efficiency. If we built the cars of the future the way we've built cars thus far, we'd need engines running on each of these fuels powerful enough to move your Suburban but safe enough to sit a couple of feet away from your body while your car is racing down the freeway at 70 mph inches from other vehicles. Then we'd need parallel world-wide distribution systems for all of these fuels. Supposing that competition was very great: multiply the number of engine designs in the world today by 5, and divide the sales volume of any one of them by 5.
I think it's safe to say that the expense of such an endeavor would prove prohibitive. The situation today is instructive: engines exist that can run on biodiesel and/or ethanol in addition to gasoline, but most cars don't have such engines, because they're more expensive to develop. Although much of the distribution infrastructure can be shared with gasoline, E85 and biodiesel refueling stations are few and far between. Imagine the situation when we try to add more unusual fuels to the mix, like natural gas or hydrogen.
There's a saying in software design that any problem can be solved by adding a layer of abstraction. That's what we need here: a secondary power source on which to run all our cars that can be replenished by multiple means. This secondary power source should be readily available, and a distribution system should exist already or be relatively easy to develop. And while this new system is developing, it should be possible to continue using the system we have today with little or not disruption -- which brings us back to "replenished by multiple means."
Electricity, stored in and delivered by a battery, is this secondary power source. We have a power grid already, and it can be fed from multiple fuel sources. When grid power isn't available, a vehicle can generate its own power from one or more fuels it carries with it -- for now, gasoline. But changing the type of this fuel no longer requires redesigning the whole car, because this fuel doesn't have to power the car; it only has to power a generator attached to the car's battery.
It's a simple principle: reduce diversity where it adds less value in order to expand diversity where it brings more value.
A case study for the nerds among you:
There were many kinds of communication networks: packet-switched vs. circuit switched, wired vs. wireless, token ring vs. CSMA/CD, switched fabric, and many others. Once upon a time, each of these networks required custom hardware and custom software in order to use them. Connecting one network to another was therefore very difficult, because chances are that network worked differently than yours.
Then came IP, the Internet Protocol. IP was simple enough to run on top of all of the other packet-switching technologies, and therefore any system that spoke IP could talk to any other (at some level, anyway), even if they were connected to different physical networks.
Today, there is as much diversity in networking hardware as ever, and software has never been more inter-connected -- and all of this technology speaks IP. At last, even our telephones and televisions are becoming merely applications running on this common data fabric. Why should your house be wired with one kind of network to transmit your voice, a second to transmit your favorite programs, and a third to handle your digital files? Rip it all out; let there be only one network, and let it transmit only IP.
Two hundred years after the invention of the electric light and the internal combustion engine, we still power our light bulbs and our cars differently. But what IP has done for information delivery, the electric power train will do for power delivery. Why do I have to go down the street to get fuel for my car when I have power available for my TV and refrigerator in own home?
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