Even now, global battery production capacity far exceeds demand for them, present and projected, with the biggest excesses forecast for Japan and the United States. With economists fearing a battery “Bubble” within the next 5 years. When it does, factory workers in Michigan will be back out on the street unless companies successfully lobby for another federal bailout. When a consulting firm interviewed industry experts and 2,000 potential buyers, it found that from now until 2020, only “young, very high income individuals”; those from households making more than $200,000 a year, would even be interested in plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars. This “small number” of people will provide “nowhere near the volume needed for mass adoption.” They will be concentrated in Southern California, where weather, state regulations, and infrastructure are all favorable to electric vehicles and took a lot of regulation and federal and state start up money. Of course the adoption is already being popularized by high-profile celebrities. Annual sales will hit no more than 465,000 by 2020 according to experts, a drop in the bucket of the 250 million nationwide automotive fleet.

Several studies have found, however, that introduction of plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles will probably not reduce overall U.S. fuel consumption in the short run, and may even increase it slightly given the energy it takes to procure materials and manufacture batteries and dispose of them safely. It takes much more energy to make a classical letter battery than the power it stores, but we make the battery anyway because without it we’d have no Nintendo DS, no flashlights, portable radios, iPods, Diabetes testers, or smoke alarms. A report by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs found that “strong income tax credits for the purchase of new diesel, hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles are essentially ineffective at reducing CO2 emissions from transportation.