Solar panels, electric cars, windmills, biofuels – It’s all been ballyhooed as the next socio-technological revolution. One that would transform our energy supply and ensure “sustainability”, thus saving the earth from climate doom. “Go green” was the motto.All that was needed was a little help from the state. Now it looks as if even a Soviet style intervention is not going to save the green movement. Rather, it looks as if state intervention has doomed it. Everywhere the green economy is in tatters.
It seems everything that the government touches nowadays ends up turning into a folly. We are seeing it with solar energy, see here, here, here and here. The same goes with wind, biofuels and deforestation, and even the toxic mercury-laden light bulbs that are poisoning the land. How much longer before it all goes bankrupt?
Just recently Marc Morano unplugged the Chevy Volt, revealing the folly behind government supported electric cars, see here. No one wants them – even with the massive subsidies. And not even in Green Germany.
Germans opting more for gasoline and diesel engine cars
Here a recent study released by oil company Aral shows that Germans are once again interested in acquiring a new car, read here in German. That’s good news for the economy. The problem is that fewer people are expressing interest in buying electric cars and hybrids. The Aral press release writes (emphasis added):
The preferred drive system remains the Otto engine by a clear margin. After 2009 when only 51% were interested in buying this conventional type of drive system, the number has since risen 10 percent to 61%. Also diesel engines can be happy with a share of 28% (+2%). A significant decrease was posted by cars driven by natural gas. Here the number of potential buyers has dropped by 50% over the last 2 years, going from 10% to 5%. Also electric cars have suffered a setback: Only 28% of those surveyed said they could imagine buying an electric car. Two years ago the figure was 36%.
Right, the 28 % that think they will buy an electric car in the future have no brains.
Or lots of money to waste.
The percentage may include the physically handicapped who need a small car with limited maximum speed. In the Netherlands you may see them on bike roads often with a plate warning you that the driver is handicapped, but not necessarily mentally, as you seem to suggest.
Perhaps the potential customers have started to realise that they will need to be charged, mostly, from a carbon energy source; maybe one of those nine coal/lignite power stations that Germany is commissioning this year.
I still propose we all use Shweebs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxVtUFZVzk&feature=related
The problem with electric cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPltV7Dk7Ck
Electric cars cannot compete [with the internal combustion engine], solar panels are rubbish, the customer knows a bargain, the world over, they can also smell a ‘decaying rat’ – Germans and Europeans are no different, this is the politicians folly.
From the euro to AGW and to the electric car – all of it is ersatz junk, just like the original political ‘thinking’.
Market saturation is easy. The “market”is a tiny subset of the overly-loud squealers who want billions (of other people’s money) invested in development and manufacture of such folly.
But there are few “greens” with the money to buy such toys.
And the few others who get sucked into buying a mobile toxic waste dump get an impromptu lesson in the real world of energy when the folly-mobile’s battery is exhausted and they are stranded in the middle of nowhere.
If the things were so good, governments wouldn’t have to bribe people to buy the junk.
Bummer. The NYT, no less, derides the Obama administration for interfering with Boeing’s Union troubles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/nocera-how-democrats-hurt-job-creation.html
They’re great if you really don’t need to go anywhere.