Electric tech is clearly developing and generating buzz.
And yet oil probably won't get too much more expensive for decades, while solar is ridiculously expensive without any clear prospect of becoming cheaper (currently parts are only as cheap as they are because the Chinese government is subsidizing their production, which can't last forever). Burning gasoline is not going to stop being economical and reliable any time soon.
Also, given the expensive reality of solar and the way we generate electricity, electric cars would still be getting their electricity from plants which burn coal. Perhaps in 20 years we will be using more natural gas than coal, which at least means we're not depending on the Saudis - but still we'll be using hydrocarbons, fracking, etc.
The only way electric vehicles will become mainstream is if the government mandates this. Seeing the way the Obama administration's "clean energy" agenda has tanked (even among the liberal base preoccupied with drones and Manning), there isn't going to be anybody to support this kind of action when it makes all transportation more expensive and thus makes everything more expensive. In a country which is physically very large, with an economy driven by domestic spending.
It was my understanding that one of the reasons that electric cars are greener is because power plants (oil, coal, whatever) are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than cars are, so even though electric cars run on fossil fuels indirectly, they do so much more efficiently. The other benefit is that the source can easily be exchanged for something renewable, while for a gasoline car, that is impossible. I don't have the numbers on this though, so if I'm wrong please correct me.
On a naive per-mile basis, for short trips, electric cars kill gasoline powered ones. The "fuel" cost for overnight charging is approaching the golden age of $1/gallon. The real question is TCO. Whoever has the better TCO in the long run is going to win, and electric cars have some strong fundamental advantages in their favor here. The biggest stumbling block is the battery. A 40% improvement in TCO of batteries for electric vehicles seems likely, and would enable near future electric vehicles to be competitive on a TCO basis. I'm limited to short trips, but my vehicle becomes maintenance-free? Sold!
We're going to need something as fossil fuels run low and coal becomes increasingly stigmatized. Solar is an interesting field to explore, as is wind, hydro, tides, and other non-fossil energy sources. Sooner or later, one of those fields is going to generate electricity efficiently, even if only because fossil fuels (very eventually) get more expensive. Researching these things now means that there will be more options later.
There are lots of good arguments for electric cars. Fossil fuel supply is not one of them. At a bare minimum, we have 64 years of oil left, but that assumes that we will never be able to find any more or wring more oil out of fields than expected. History shows that both assumptions are not good ones to make.
Emissions, cost & the environmental impact of tar sand mining are better arguments for electric cars.
Unfortunately it seems to be more politically rational to invest in existing inefficient green technology than R&D (see: Solyndra).
Fossil fuels can last a very long time. America's largest shale oil reserve isn't in North Dakota, it's in California in the Monterey Shale formation, currently unexploited.
I'm actually more worried about flying than about individual transport. I'd argue that affordable intercontinental flights have had a tremendously positive effect on the world's society as a whole. The intensified relationships make war between industrialized nations very unlikely for the time being. Yet we don't really have any feasible alternative to fossil fuel there at the moment. The sooner we save it for those important matters the better, but unfortunately that's not how free market economy works. I expect we'll have a period where flying is a privilege again.
Wind is already cheaper than nuclear would be in Denmark (using prices from the UK). Solar is getting cheaper too. Whether they're viable or not depends on location, e.g. solar isn't really too great in Denmark, we're too far north. Storage is a problem, but not quite as big as you would think, and a multitude of solutions do exist.
Denmark has a plan of getting rid of fossils over the next decades, and we're well on our way. It's not a research plan, it's an investment/building plan.
Furthermore, while some subsidies are currently needed to cover risks and capital expenditures, the studies I've seen predict that we're probably going to end up with an infrastructure that's not more expensive, it may even be cheaper. Like energy from an old nuclear power plant is really cheap today because the capital expenditures have been covered many years ago (discounting insurance and other thorny nuclear issues).
But these things have already been researched for some time. More than being researched, they have been put into practice. And this has already shown us that they are relatively expensive and hard to scale, while hydrocarbons are cheap and scale well and are not subject to much in the way of political risk or NIMBYism. And this will continue to be so for decades at least.
Any promoter of renewable energy really has to be aware of this or they will not be able to target their interventions effectively.
Tons of effort has gone into PV cells for decades (they were being manufactured in quantity in the 70s). They are our dearest hope for renewable energy at scale. And they are still more expensive than any other source of electricity we actually use by such an embarrassing margin that even really impressive cost improvements will still leave them pretty much non-competitive (making steam is a little better). Recent price drops due to subsidies are not going to be sustainable unless the industry is weaned off the subsidies.
Most of the reduction in that Economist graph is after Obama takes office, before that the changes are not all that dramatic to really support a comparison to Moore's law (which has itself shown pretty flawed as a way of predicting the computing future).
So I just don't see any substantive, fundamental reason (i.e.: clear prospect) to suppose that solar generation will get so much cheaper that it will reach striking distance of natural gas, of which we have quite a supply. But I'm not saying it's impossible to have another opinion.
And yet oil probably won't get too much more expensive for decades, while solar is ridiculously expensive without any clear prospect of becoming cheaper (currently parts are only as cheap as they are because the Chinese government is subsidizing their production, which can't last forever). Burning gasoline is not going to stop being economical and reliable any time soon.
Also, given the expensive reality of solar and the way we generate electricity, electric cars would still be getting their electricity from plants which burn coal. Perhaps in 20 years we will be using more natural gas than coal, which at least means we're not depending on the Saudis - but still we'll be using hydrocarbons, fracking, etc.
The only way electric vehicles will become mainstream is if the government mandates this. Seeing the way the Obama administration's "clean energy" agenda has tanked (even among the liberal base preoccupied with drones and Manning), there isn't going to be anybody to support this kind of action when it makes all transportation more expensive and thus makes everything more expensive. In a country which is physically very large, with an economy driven by domestic spending.