It sure sounds like a good idea... get off of oil by using electricity to power transportation. And we Kogs are natural idealists, so we are attracted to these solutions. We like government support of eco-friendly ideas like, say, electric cars.
But when I put on my practical hat, and look at what solves my actual needs, I am unlikely to want an all-electric car. At least not for the forseeable future. All-electric cars like the relatively affordable Nissan Leaf, or the upscale Teslas, are special-purpose vehicles. I'm a relatively friendly user, a fan of small, economical cars, not SUVs or high-performance machines. If it isn't going to work for me, it's not going to work for more than a modest niche market.
Of course there are alternatives.
An all-electric car has a few serious failings, most of which stem from the simple fact of how rechargeable batteries work. A battery converts chemistry to electricity. The internal chemistry of a charged battery is different from a discharged one. There's a certain rate at which it can discharge, and a certain rate at which it can recharge. It can only accept charge at a certain rate, and if you overcharge it, well, the energy has to go somewhere, and it can go thermal... so charge control circuits are critical. This is especially so with lithium-ion batteries, the ones that hold the most charge per unit of weight. The Nissan Leaf, Tesla, and (Chinese-made) Coda are based on lithium batteries; the Prius, which needs much less storage capacity, uses cheaper nickel-metal-hydride batteries.
How long does it take to charge? A Leaf has a 24 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery. It can fast-charge to 80% in 30 minutes, which means 20 kWh in half an hour, or a drain of 40 kilowatts. Think about that... your basic house might have a 230 volt 100 amp master breaker. That's 23 kilowatts peak draw, total. 40 kilowatts is serious industrial-scale power. Some charging stations (like gas stations) might have it, but they're going to require big factory-scale power feeds. And that's per car. If you budget half an hour per car, and there are a lot of electric cars, the station will need a bunch of charging stations. A gasoline station can fill a car in maybe two minutes. So figure maybe 15 times as many positions... now we're drawing over half a megawatt, for the equivalent of each pump! That's more than the average draw of a couple of hundred houses. Siting these puppies won't be easy. Besides, think of the space they'll take up. Much more than a gas station. Where is the demand probably highest? In cities, where land is expensive. Where can these be sited most easily? In outer suburbs and exurbs, especially near big industrial parks that already get primary (100 kV+) power feeds.
One company proposes using swappable batteries: Drive into a charging station, swap your discharged battery pack for a full one, and drive away. They're piloting this in Europe. But different cars use different types of battery pack. There are all sorts of risks involved with swapping the most expensive part of your car (lithium battery packs are very expensive) with a stranger's. It seems rather impractical in the real world.
Oh, but what about charging it at home? You can home-charge a Leaf from a 220 volt home outlet (the kind used for dryers and stoves) in 8 hours. Of course this requires that you put a 220 volt outlet outside, near the car, or in the garage if you have one. So this presumes that you own your home, have off-street parking, and can put power there. Typical suburbia, sure. City dweller with an apartment, condo, or row house? Probably not.
Can the power grid handle this? Sad to say, the American electric power system is fragile. Regulators have helped keep power prices down by letting the distribution companies keep fairly small margins of spare capacity. Hot summer days often lead to popping transformers. If electric cars were to become popular, nighttime demand would rise dramatically, and the local grids would be strained.
So what can you do with a full charge? A Leaf is good for about 100 miles. The far pricier Tesla S claims 160 to 300 miles, depending on which battery pack you buy. That's good for some applications. City runabout? Sure. Nice delivery car. Great for the daytime-only Geek Squad fleet, or Domino's. They never go far, and rarely go all that far during a day, and have a fixed nighttime space.
Taxi? Maybe not... if it's a medallion cab, then the value of the medallion, at least in a place like New York or Boston, is far higher than the value of the vehicle. It needs to be on the road as many hours as possible. Long charges are thus a big waste. Suburban taxi? Maybe. But it's the cities that have the big fleets.
And sure, it's a nice commuter car. But who can afford to dedicate that much money for local commutes? It's the rich celebrities who can afford multiple cars, and who show up in Hollywood with the halo cars and statement cars. A liberal celebrity can drive a Tesla, a rightist one a Hummer, and thus make a statement. But that's not the rest of us. Most of us normal folks use the same car to commute to work, to take the kids to school, to buy groceries, to go to the big box store out on the highway someplace, to go away on vacation, to go on ski trips, and do all sorts of things that don't end up at home within 100 or even 200 miles. Now a hard-core eco-freak might just buy an all-electric car and go to Hertz for weekend getaway cars or special purpose trips, but somehow I doubt that this solution will draw more than a few percent of car-owning households.
So what is a practical answer? There may be a few, but mostly they are spelled "hybrid". Full hybrids like the Prius (whose drive system is being used by other cars too) are far more efficient than conventional gasoline cars, at least for city driving (the main electric-car market), and plug-in versions could use household electric power to charge up for short trips. The challenge is cost; plug-in hybrids need large battery packs plus full engines.
Then there are fuel cells. Think of these as batteries where you recharge them by changing the chemistry, rather than by adding power. Basically they take a flow of hydrogen and turn it to electricity. Trouble is, hydrogen is a lousy fuel -- it's incredibly hard to store, and the cheapest way to get it today (still much costlier than gasoline or LNG) is to make it out of natural gas. And they're outrageously expensive -- space shuttle stuff, not ordinary car. There are fuel cells that take alcohols or hydrocarbons and break out the hydrogen in "reformers". This technology has some promise for automotive use, but most reformers run at very high temperature, making them costly and slow to get going. In other words, not ready for prime time, though worthy of research, both to lower the cost and make them more practical.
Another approach is the extended-range electric, like the Chevrolet Volt. It is capable of running on batteries alone, for 40 miles in the Volt's case, but also has a gasoline engine whose sole purpose is to recharge the batteries. A gasoline engine is most efficient at a certain narrow range of speeds. So by running at that pace in order to generate electricity, overall efficiency is still better than a conventional car, and again short trips and commuting can be done with overnight charges. The down side is price: The Volt is far costlier than a conventional hybrid, about $40k before subsidies. But then it's the first of its kind, not the ultimate answer, so let's cut GM some slack.
What other extended-range electrics could be made? There's no reason to stick to gasoline or even internal combustion, since the engine just has to turn on fast enough to recharge the battery. Diesels are practical. External-combustion engines (steam!) could work. Research into small, mobile electricity-generating engines could make this cheaper and more efficient. Alternative fuels, like the alcohols, could be used where they're cheaper (which corn-based ethanol isn't). Any kind of liquid can be pumped pretty quickly, as can LNG, which is fairly cheap and plentiful.
Yes, these hybrids and extended-range cars do create some CO2. But less than a straight internal-combustion engine. And they have the advantage of being able to do what every conventional car can do, including take a ride up to the mountains.
What would be the incentive to get them built? Honestly, there's just one that would work. Higher fuel prices. The US subsidizes gasoline; we should instead tax it. Of course this is a political third rail, but we have to get over it. I suggest that the feds simply declare that the tax on motor fuel, including on electricity used for the purpose (metered via the odometer, perhaps), be raised by about 5-10 cents/gallon per year. After using the first 10-20 cents for balanced transportation improvements, the rest should be dedicated to tax reductions: Every dollar of fuel tax goes to raise the personal exemption on the income tax. So Joe Taxpayer who has a long commute because he can't afford to live closer in will get the money back, and still have a big incentive to make his next car more fuel-efficient. And it will be a big drag on suburban sprawl, which is bad in so many ways. It will help promote higher density development which in turn makes public transportation more practical.
I'm not saying that this will happen. But I am pretty confident that all-electric plug-in cars are not about to take over the US market. They're really just a side show.