4 ms·
Do you mean that if you get electric cars running off coal power plants now, then that frees you up to replace the coal with e.g. solar power later on? (From a
by pure-awesome 7y ago
Do you mean that if you get electric cars running off coal power plants now, then that frees you up to replace the coal with e.g. solar power later on?
(From a programming perspective - since this is Hacker News, after all - we could view electric power as an "interface" which hides the implementation of how it's generated from the car, as opposed to petrol which is "tightly coupled" to the car)
- abraae 7y agoAlways love the car analogies. They're really both interfaces, for petrol you get energy and CO2 emissions for a given quantity. However you don't know that the CO2 emissions are net - the fuel might have been produced via some synthetic process driven by renewables. Unlikely, but as an interface you can't really know the details of the implementation behind the scenes.
- dTal 7y agoTechnically, this isn't a car analogy - it's that rarest of creatures, the reverse car analogy, which uses programming concepts to explain things about cars.
- JulianMorrison 7y agoYes exactly, or natural gas plants, but same thing. Electricity is a universal interface. EVs free up their upstream to change at whim. That freedom means that greening of the power supply can be solved at a societal, rather than personal level.