#electricity

Electric vehicles have a peculiar way of making gasoline cars feel complicated.

You plug the car in. Electricity flows into a battery. Later, that electricity turns a motor, and the motor turns the wheels. There is no gasoline to pump, no miniature sequence of explosions under the hood, and much less energy disappearing as waste heat. After spending some time with a good EV, it becomes surprisingly easy to look at the internal-combustion automobile and wonder whether we are seeing the mature form of transportation or an extraordinarily successful transitional technology.

That raises a much bigger question.

Suppose the United States eventually converted essentially its entire passenger-vehicle fleet to electricity. Where would all that electricity come from?

One intriguing answer begins in the enormous stretches of open land across the American interior. The Great Plains and neighboring regions contain abundant solar and wind resources, along with vast areas where large generating projects can be built. Could we simply build enough solar capacity there to provide the energy currently supplied by gasoline?

And if we could, could that electricity eventually appear wherever Americans currently expect to find fuel: interstate exits, highway service plazas, neighborhood filling stations and thousands of other places across the country?

It sounds like a project of almost cartoonish scale.

The surprising part is that the arithmetic itself does not rule it out.