Charging electric cars is actually not as big a problem as you might think. Most of the charging would happen at night, when electrical demand is naturally lowest. Electric cars would have to become a pretty high percentage of the fleet before the existing excess off-peak capacity was insufficient.

In coming years, starting right now, we are going to have to move as much of our public intercity and long-distance transportation, including freight hauling, to electric as possible. Much more freight will have to move by rail for max efficiency and affordability, or we will find ourselves without the shipments of food and goods we currently rely on. Additionally, the passenger rails will have to start replacing air travel for shorter (under 700 miles) distances, for the airline industry is substantially over. We’re throwing $14 B a year in subsidies to airlines that will cave no matter what- they can’t hack these fuel prices.

Now, the grid is already stressed- we are talking no excess capacity whatsoever. The utility people call this “maximum efficiency”. The denizens of CA have some experience with that. Moreover, one denizen of the east coast pointed out that fuel oil is now so expensive that in the northeast, which is dependent upon fuel oil for heat, many folks are switching to heating their houses by electric space heaters and by leaving their electric ovens on all day- a horrid, inefficient way to heat a house but still cheaper than fuel oil.

I can only say that if we expect to be able to put anything like our current fleet of cars on the road by means of electrical power, we had better ramp up the nuclear power program plus every alternative we can think of. We have 3 nukes under construction, old fashioned light water reactors, and 33 in the planning stage. A really promising new nuclear technology, now being contemplated for Galena, Alaska, to test the prototype, has been developed-much safer,much more efficient, and vastly more “scalable”.

I personally don’t see us being able to run more than a fraction of the private autos now in service by electric, at least not for quite some time. Expect electric rates to escalate even more rapidly and for more brownouts to occur should we start rapidly adopting electric cars, as opposed to public transit and walkable communities.

I watched House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (and Rep. Maxine Waters and others) on CSPAN questioning MBIA, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Hope Now, and I think a loan service company or two, if they had the authority to modify loan terms. It took forever before the guy from BofA said, yes, we have the authority to modify terms. First they would go for lowering the interest rate. When asked if they had the authority to reduce the principle, again, it took forever before they finally said that, yes, they had the authority to reduce the principle, but they would go for lowering interest rate first. If they are that resistant to just answering the question, I imagine it’s going to be very difficult for them to accept reducing principle as a viable solution.

Unless banks/investors are willing to reduce the principle to market value, I don’t see any incentive for a borrower to keep paying for a loan that is twice the market value of the home, and therefore hard to see how BofA can help 250,000 Americans stay in their homes.

We’ll see how it plays out as the option arms hit their negative amortization caps (happening now) and interest rates reset (peaking fall 2011). Congress can’t force the banks/investors to modify terms, they can only ask them to.

Either way, whether modifying loan terms to reduce principle to market value, or foreclosing on the property and reselling at market value, prices will continue to decline here in CA.

We might see the end of the large production home builders and the re-emergence of local small builders, who will work for less. My guess is that the “factory” method of building homes, where thousands of homes were set down at once as though they were squeezed out of a giant cookie press, will not survive, and that houses will be built only in response to existing demand. There will be the natural push-pull between supply and demand, but you will not see entire new towns created by one developer in the space of a year, for this sort of thing was made possible only by public policy that wanted to create a demand for new homes and build new towns. Rather, we will see houses built individually, and for modest margins.