McCain Offers $300 Million Prize For New Car Battery - With Video
FRESNO, Calif. - John McCain is hoping to solve the country’s energy crisis with cold hard cash.
The presumed Republican nominee on Monday proposed a $300 million government prize to whoever can develop an automobile battery that far surpasses existing technology. The bounty would equate to $1 for every man, woman and child in the country, “a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency,” McCain said at Fresno State University.
McCain said such a device should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs and have “the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”
In addition, a so-called Clean Car Challenge would provide U.S. automakers with a $5,000 tax credit for every zero-carbon emissions car they develop and sell.
“In the quest for alternatives to oil, our government has thrown around enough money subsidizing special interests and excusing failure,” said McCain. “From now on, we will encourage heroic efforts in engineering, and we will reward the greatest success.”
(AP)
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Hussein will call it all a political stunt, instead of recognizing that someone is actually making an attempt to help America, unlike his feckless party of Democrats.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:19 pmHow many billions have already been spent pursuing the new battery pipe dream? But I can’t help myself — You mean electric cars need batteries and electricity to recharge. No way, I was told they come fully charged up and stay that way. The Chevy Volt is fiction? No way dude, it can’t be, look at all the politicians who have praised it.
There is no heroic effort, there is only hard work, and so far all that hard work has produced zilch. The highest density safest battery source is currently NiMH, which the Chevy Volt was supposed to use in 2010. A whole lot of AA cells. Just today, GM tried to get the feds to pay $10,000 rebates for the Volt, because of battery cost. Guess you won’t be buying a new battery a Walmart for the Volt. Cool marketing though.
Just recently a Prius converted to electric car using Li-Ion batteries went up in flames at the press demo. Tells you a lot about the safety of Li-Ion batteries and electric cars in general doesn’t it.
Electric cars are a future pipe dream, not today’s reality. And no one knows how to fix that right now. What we need is a breakthrough in chemistry, not rhetoric.
So if drilling now won’t do it, does anyone think electric cars will be in production in the next, oh say, 20 years?
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pmLook there is not going to be any relief, any time soon, from the high price of energy. No matter gas, heating oil, natural gas, propane, diesel, etc. Simply put, the situation we are in now would have had to have been foreseen and addressed 20 years ago. Ronald Reagan dealt with energy and spoke about how private companies would be able to handle the issue if they are not obstructed. He was absolutely correct. The problem is that there was and is tons and tons of obstruction. Every single American can see it now (whether they want to admit it or not). Wherever we know that there is oil and we can reach it, we aren’t allowed to drill. Instead we need to go searching areas that are unproven to hold oil and even if we do find any oil there is no guarantee that we would be able to get to it easily enough to make it less expensive to the buyer. Also there has been no power plants and no oil refineries built in years … more obstruction.
I have a question for Senator McCain;
Say there are 100 million battery powered cars that have a range of 1000 miles per charge and they are already built and bought by the public, do we have the electrical capacity to withstand even 10% those cars being plugged in every night?
We use almost all (if not all) of the electricity being produced now. We would be yelling about country-wide rolling blackouts and extreme summer heat when we can’t run our ACs. The end result is the same … until we can increase energy production we are SOL. Now McCain has said he want more nuclear power plants built, Senator McCain, will you remove the red tape and the obstruction to get these plants built within a timely manner. We understand it takes a while but things can be done to speed up the process. We need an ‘Energy Manhatten Project’.
Senator Obama, the slowest way to increase production is to do it by solar and wind. I read in Popular Mechanics that an area the size of Texas housing windmills would hardly make a dent in the energy production the US needs. Since energy is neither created nor distroyed, only transformed, when we transform the wind energy to electricity it is obvious the wind passing the windmill will not be as strong. This would lead to higher surface temperatures on earth.
We would need even larger areas covered with solar panels to make a dent in the amount of energy we need. Those panels heat up more than if the sun was just hitting the ground. This would also increase the surface temperature of the earth.
Put together, higher surface temperatures without the wind to cool us off … what would that do to the environment, Senator Obama and/or Mr. Gore?
I would actually like to hear from McCain, Obama or Gore on these questions. I am not holding my breathe but what I am doing is taking the matters into my own hands by working from home 2 to 4 days a week, further insulating my house and planning on the purchase of a wood burning stove before next winter. Since I can’t count on the government for anything I figured I will at least save my wallet.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:26 pmAs a scientist I can tell you this is nothing more than a play to moderates who have been fooled into thinking there is a realistic “alternative” fuel just around the corner.
The fact of the matter is that our infrastructure is based around a liquid phase fuel source. And if we converted just 10% of cars to battery power is would horribly overtax the already maxed our power grid.
There is no free lunch in thermodynamics. It takes a certain amount of fuel to propel a 3,000 lb car down the road at 55 mph. We can work to increase efficiency but weather its gasoline or electricity it takes quite of a lot of power to accomplish that task. Getting oil out of the ground and converting it to gasoline and diesel is not that energy intensive compared to other fuels that people are suggesting.
For the long forseable future petroleum based fuels will continue to the be far cheaper way to go. Get used to it. And besides, even small elevations of carbon dioxide will result in increased plant growth, which is good for the entier world.
June 23rd, 2008 at 5:42 pm$300 mill??
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:23 pmChump change compared to the $300 Billion wants to pick from our pockets for ‘alternative energy’.