A recently aired Australian documentary by local eccentric millionaire Dick Smith about alternatives to fossil fuels has stirred quite a hornets nest of feedback, both positive and negative.
While on the whole the Doco was fairly interesting and we here at EV News noted Dick's enthusiasm for electric cars, the facts seem to have been seriously cherry picked.
The EV segment starts @47 mins with Dick enthusing about an EV powered only by renewables and which has Vehicle to Grid Technology (V2G) that can held smooth the intermittency of renewables.
The cherry picking starts @50 mins when to close the segment Dick holds up a flask containing 1 litre of fuel stating that it weighs 700 grams and will take an average car approx 10km. The bad news for EV's, we are told, is that the equivalent battery would weigh 25x as much! End of argument apparently and the story moves onto bio-fuels.
What Dick failed to mention was that the equivalent of the 1 litre of fuel stored in an EV battery can propel an electric car 10x as far (100 km)... surely a worthy trade-off in energy efficiency Dick?
Of course, battery power may not be a solution for his Helicopter any time soon although Dick was so impressed with EVs he is now the proud owner of a solar powered Nissan Leaf
