If 20% of Ontario car owners drove electric cars to work every day...

If only 20% of Ontario cars owners drove electric cars to work every day, it would make such a difference in reducing our oil consumption and carbon footprint.

Great idea - I agree!

So, what would that look like?

• 1.6 million cars: Ontario has about 8 million registered cars. 20% = 1.6 million
• 6600W electricity to charge: Electric cars charge with a 6600W electricity supply (220V * 30A) at the fastest-available home charging rate. Nissan Leaf uses a 6600W charger
• 1,600,000 * 6600 watts = 10,560,000,000 watts

Unfortunately, Ontario only produced about 17,000,000,000 watts at its peak for the overnight period 8:00pm last night to match consumption.

So, to maintain current consumption and add the load of 20% of Ontario vehicles charging overnight, we'll need to bump overnight generation by 62% to support our goal. Ontario has that capacity, but would likely not generate it at current overnight rates as more expensive generation would need to be activated to get there, so it potentially turns the overnight period into "peak consumption" period.

Unless you think the world will never run out of affordable oil or gasoline (I don't know what you'd reference to support this), shouldn't this be enough to convince most people that we need to deal with this problem, and that it might be better to look at our living/working arrangements to remove the car from the equation as much as possible?

Nuclear energy: not only clean, but safe, too.

No doubt inspired by Japan's recent problems with their Fukushima nuclear plant, Seth Godin presents this interesting graph and accompanying post:

This type of thing is so difficult to measure, and he is a marketer, but having a bit of a think about it should lead you to believe that it's probably at least accurate in abstract and/or proportion.

Wind turbine propellers already kill a lot of birds. I doubt they kill many people (if any at all), but if one flying wind turbine propeller decapitated someone some day as a result of an earthquake, it'd be one more death than this Japanese issue has caused so far (but note that the wind energy installation in Japan survived the earthquake without any problems).