Opinion/Editorial
ALL ELECTRIC HELL
Twenty years ago, the head of a company called Duke (not the university) spoke about electricity and the coming problem of electric cars about to go into mass production. This very intelligent leader of the largest producer of electricity in America (the Tennessee Valley Authority is a distant 7th) discussed the coming problems with electric cars wedging their way into the fossil fuel-driven gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles of the day. The interview went fine until its very end when the interviewer happened to ask a seemingly simple and logical question, “What do you see as the biggest impediment to the development of electric vehicles in America?” The president of Duke Energy made a mistake, although it wasn’t picked up by the mass media of the time or since. The president of Duke Energy said: “Electric vehicles will not be allowed to be a dominant success over gas and diesel until the price of electricity usage can be brought up to parity with that of gas and diesel.” The enormity of not only the cold-blooded capitalistic nature of the comment, without regard for any good reason for making such a drastic increase to electric rates (at the time gasoline-powered vehicles were getting about 15 miles per gallon while electric got about 110 equivalent mpg. Today, gasoline-powered automobiles get about 25 mpg while a base model Tesla gets 132 equivalent mpg.
Simply raising the cost of electricity has not worked so the industry is going in another direction. It appears that the entire electric production industry (two articles in the last NY Times newspapers) has separated electric power from natural gas. Electric is now being considered as environmentally friendly, like wind power or solar, while natural gas is a fossil fuel by reference. Of course, in the real world, half the electricity in the country is produced by natural gas-fed plants. Also, new laws are coming that will convert all home and apartment stoves from natural gas to electric, along with home heaters and water heaters. A base amount of charge is also being applied in some places to all electric bills.
What Duke Energy and the rest of the producers are doing is making sure that as electricity powers just about everything it becomes rarer as a power source, and therefore the cost of electric power can finally live up to the Duke CEO forecast. Natural gas is an unfair competitor to electric power in many ways. Natural gas is a waste product when oil wells are successfully drilled and capped. Hard to compete with a product that’s all but free to get. Second, natural gas is much more efficient in heating anything and quicker and more tangibly controllable. Finally, when electric power fails because of overland delivery interruptions from weather and other causes the underground pipes delivering natural gas keep on delivering.
Electric companies have been quietly successful in requiring all home heating units to have electric igniters instead of a small eternal flame so that if the electric power fails then the gas heat or stove cannot be ignited. Also, nobody discusses the extremely low emissions of vehicles that use natural gas to power them, like almost all indoor forklifts. Those vehicles, handling extremely heavy loads, only average .5 percent carbon monoxide and dioxide while average brand-new cars put out just over 10 percent, with older cars even less efficient. Heat pumps are used as a persuader for all homeowners to replace their home heaters. Heat pumps don’t work in real cold weather, however, but the industry lies and says they do. Electric cars don’t work well, if at all, in extremely cold weather either, but nobody talks much about that. The cost of heating an average home with gas in winter (north of the Mason-Dixon Line) is about 120 a month, while the same amount of electric energy that it would take to equal the job gas does would cost about 200 dollars a month.
The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful on earth. That industry did not want to lose its nearly obscene monopoly profits to nuclear power, so nuclear power was killed off. The industry opposes wind power, so wind power installations are in trouble. The industry is trying to kill off the natural gas delivery companies. Do what you can to keep them from succeeding…again.
