Electric Bubble?

Before I get to the topic I want to discuss today, a bit about my week. I have been in California most of this week, combining several business meetings with a few days in Sonoma for the NAFEM Annual Meeting & Management Workshop. I spent the first few days beautiful San Francisco. I have always enjoyed this city. There is so much energy. Of course, I love all of the technology that was developed in this part of the country. It is an amazing place (at least to visit). My business partner and I were driving between meetings and pulled up along side a beautiful Teslia. Well, actually it blew by us, but that's expected. We were able to catch and I snapped the picture below with my iPhone. I wish I would have been able to stop and get a good picture, but that was not going to occur without risking my life and likely creating a major traffic accident.

Seeing this cool car was timely. Just today I read an article in Forbes that warned of a developing glut of electric car battery capacity. Partially created by the $2 billion in stimulus money that promoted manufacturing of car batteries, the author wrote that by "2015 2015 the new factories will have the global capacity to produce 36 million kilowatt-hours of battery capacity, enough to supply 15 million hybrid vehicles, or 1.5 million fully electric cars." (My reference to the stimulus is NOT a political statement .. just referencing one source of a lot of cash. When the government puts money into an industry, we often get bubbles).

I highly doubt there will be enough demand to fill these factories, at least  by 2015. The article quoted one executive, from Enr1 (NASDAQ: HEV), that said manufactures are no where close to being able to meet demand. I am not going to share more from the article .. go read it. I believe there will be much less demand than capacity. Time will tell. I actually have high hopes for electric cars, I just believe tehcnology needs to advance before it becomes this ubiquitous. We will see.

If you want to keep up with developments on the electric car front, you may want to read the Green Car Congress. Golden Gate Photo: The_Tahoe_Guy

Rick