John Lounsbury
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PHEVs and EVs: Plugging into a Lump of Coal [View article]
Thanks for your comment in reply. I was hoping you wouldn't tell me to go read the whole report. I'll bookmark it for later. (Sigh.)
PHEVs and EVs: Plugging into a Lump of Coal [View article]
Thank-you for keeping the latest in front of usd.
The McKinsey chart was eye-opening. I am reminded though, as I read the comment stream, that the debate often evolves to two sides: (1) the views of those grounded in the present and (2) the visionaries.
The McKinsey chart is an excellent snapshot. But it is no more. It is a snapshot with a time stamp. The snapshot in 10 years will be radically different, and in 20 years totally changed again. For those who wonder what I am talking about, think about what would have been the 10-year plan for computer technology in 1975, then 1985 and again in 1995. The three plans would seem to have come from different planets.
I think that making even five year projections for utility energy, as well as transportation energy, is particularly difficult at this time. I do think that nuclear energy expansion in the U.S. is not a difficult thing to support because it is a relatively small portion of our electrical generation capacity currently and we can always use it through plant end of life, even if other generation technologies become more widely utilized.
It would be interesting to know what assumptions went into the McKinsey analysis. I doubt that they included the ancillary costs (such as environmental) of each of the options, because no one knows (as far as I can determine) how to do that in Euro or dollar terms. However, whatever the assumptions, many will be totally obsolete and incorrect in a few years. (Refer to my computer technology analogy.) The menu for cost of carbon reduction is a moving target. I expect the target is moving far faster than most of us can imagine today.