RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!

tomman58 wrote:

LindsayRichards wrote:
Saw $1.97 yesterday. Looks like OPIEC is finally out of the drivers seat thanks to American ingenuity for inventing horizontal drilling and fracking.

Looks like America and other parts of the world have begun to make the change to renewables in a huge way. Cars are far more miserly and soon the driverless electric will be in everything. Natural gas is being installed and coal has died. Even China has begun changing from coal to solar to natural gas. The only thing now is a needed push by America to lead in the new world, we will see.

Good morning. Although I share your enthusiasm I think we have to remember that natural gas is not a renewable but it is a huge improvement over coal obviously. Coal is losing ground everywhere now but the push to eliminate it will be more economical based and not environmental (sadly). But it is now cheaper to produce power from solar than coal. The challenge is still night time storage but that is also a very fast moving field. A couple decades from now there will be a lot less energy produced from coal than there is now. I'm not up on American numbers but I know 2030 is the phase out date for coal power in Canada. Canada already is under 16 percent so not far to go. I think china will be the leader in this area.

I think china will also be the leader in replacing gas cars with electric. Korea and Japan are also offering a bunch of choices this year and of course the USA has Tesla. Model three production starts next month in Fremont. Total Tesla production between the three models may be north of 180000 cars in 2018 and 250000 in 2019.

We only drive about 16000 km per year in our two electric vehicles but we could never go back to gas burners. The electric drive is just superior in every way and every time someone drives one of our vehicle they are immediate converts.

However, the present offerings of cars is not the answer for everyone's needs. First, they are not trucks and many need a truck. Especially RVers. People who make regular long road trips have limited selection of electric cars that could suit their needs and those ones are expensive. But for those of us with commutes of less than 150 km the amount of models that will do the job is doubling every couple years. Most are 25 to 35K but I would consider that affordable for many. Once they get down to that 20,000 point look out though.

Interesting times.