Electric cars

Usually I wouldn't blog about cars, because cars=pollution, right? Well that depends on the fuel. If a car runs on electricity, the co2-emissions are a lot lower than when a car is fueled by ordinary petrol. Though this depends heavily on how the electricity is generated. In some countries, more than half of all electricity is renewable (Norway, Austria). But in the Netherlands for instance, about 85% is fossil fuel (and a little nuclear). Still an electric car is better even if all electricity would be generated by fossil fuels. Especially when you drive the car in a city: this reduces air pollution in the streets, and they make less noise.

Oh and some electric cars look very good too, check this out:

This Tesla Model S is a good example of the progress that's being made in electric cars. The cost of this car is only half of its predecessor, the Tesla Roaster (price down from $90,000 to $50,000), while its capabilities are the same.

Electric cars seem to be have a quicker start than hydrogen cars. Also biofuel seems to become less popular recently, probably because of cases in Brazil where rainforest was destroyed in order for soya to be grown. It is unclear though what the main source of fuel of cars will be in 50 years from now. Biofuel, electricity, hydrogen, or still petrol?

Some statistics

Hi guys, back to inform you more about green energy.

Let's look at how we're progressing in implementing more green energy. Got most of this from wiki ;)

Which countries use the most solar power in Europe? Germany is on the lead here, mainly because of their guaranteed feed-in tariff, which is a government rule forcing energy companies to buy solar energy at normal electricity rates (the cost this is generally paid by consumers of electricity). Number of Watts per capita in 2009:

1. Germany - 120
2. Spain - 76
3. Luxembourg - 52
4. Czech Rep - 44
5. Belgium - 34
6. Italy - 17
All others are below 10 watts per capita, with low numbers in for instance the UK with 0.5 watts (no surprise there, little sunshine in England and Scotland, they had better focus on wind energy) and Sweden and Denmark with 0.8 watts.

Having not much to do, I made a piechart of wind power generated in Europe in 2010:

A country with most notably low wind power is Russia. They need to sell their gas and oil to Europe and probably don't like the rise of green energy (the more gas we use, the more money they make). In about 25 years from now, most gas and oil fields in Europe (mainly in UK, Norway and Netherlands) will be empty and we will need to import it all from Russia. Before that happens we really need to build way more windmills and solar panels than we do now (about 85% of all energy in the EU comes from fossil fuels) otherwise hundreds of billions of our euros will disappear into mr Putins and mr Ahmadinejad's wallets.