An interesting take on Electric Cars from a conversation:
“As an engineer I love electric vehicle technology However,
I have been troubled by the fact that the electrical energy to keep the
batteries charged has to come from the grid, and that means more power
generation and a huge increase in the distribution infrastructure. Whether
generated from coal, gas, oil, wind or sun, installed generation capacity is
limited.
IF ELECTRIC CARS DO NOT USE GASOLINE, THEY WILL NOT BE PAYING
A
GASOLINE TAX ON EVERY GALLON SOLD FOR AUTOMOBILES, WHICH WAS
ENACTED TO MAINTAIN OUR ROADS AND BRIDGES. THEY WILL USE THE ROADS, BUT WILL
NOT PAY FOR THEIR MAINTENANCE.
In case you were thinking of buying hybrid or an electric car...
Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things
has never been discussed. All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline,
with nary a mention of the cost of electricity to run it.
Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power things, yet
they're being shoved down our throats. Glad somebody finally put engineering
and math to paper.
.
If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, you will face certain
realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp
service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On a small street
(approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to
carry more than three houses with a single Tesla each. For even half the homes
to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.
This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles. Our residential
infrastructure cannot bear the load. So, as our genius elected officials
promote this nonsense, not only are we being urged to buy these things and
replace our reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive new windmills and
solar cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery system! This
later "investment" will not be revealed until we're so far down this
dead end road that it will be presented with an 'OOPS...!' and a
shrug.
If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are eco-friendly, just
read the following. Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. It's
enlightening.
Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors and he
writes, "For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25
miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine." Eric
calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the
battery. So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery
is approximately 270 miles.
It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to
charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical
road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.
According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It
takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery. The cost for the electricity
to charge the Volt is never mentioned, so I looked up what I pay for
electricity.
I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh.
16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery. $18.56 per charge
divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.
Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32
mpg. $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 Mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car costs about $25,000 while the Volt costs $46,000 plus.
So the Canadian Government wants loyal Canadians not to do the math, but simply
pay twice as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run,
and takes three times longer to drive across the country.
WAKE UP NORTH AMERICA!!!!!!!
Comments
It is not an easy subject to put numbers on as there are too many factors involved, including gas and electricity prices, taxes, location, infrastructure, etc. Near the end of the article, it is stated that, “So the Canadian Government wants loyal Canadians not to do the math…” I would then assume that this is about cars in Canada. If so, then that is the first problem. We do not use miles, we use km. That leads me to believe that this is a mixed bag of Canadian and American numbers and units. Miles per gallon – US or Imp. Gallons? We do not purchase in gallons, we purchase in liters.
“I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh.” Nobody in Canada pays $1.16 (US or Canadian $?) per kWh. The average is 0.179$Can/kWh, with a maximum of 0.382$Can/kWh in the Northwest Territories. The author’s argument is totally distorted.
“$3.19 per gallon.” US or Canadian $ and US or Imp. gallons? We use CAD and liters and the price is currently more than 2$Can/L or around 8$Can/Imp. Gal. How much does this change the outcome?
“According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.” That would depend on the type of charging station used. There are different types of charging stations that take different amounts of time for a Chevy Volt. The Bolt EV can charge up to 100 miles of range in about 30 minutes. For a Tesla, depending on the type, Superchargers can recharge a vehicle’s battery up to 80% in just about 40 minutes before dropping down to protect the battery.
“For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service.” Maybe, but I think that most of us with a normal size home (whatever that is) in Canada have 200 amp service. What do you have?
I’m not saying that the whole idea of electric vehicles is bad, it isn’t, but proper facts should be used along with assumptions and variations on those facts.
Finally, “So the Canadian Government wants loyal Canadians not to do the math, but simply pay twice as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.” Only if you distort the facts. Is an electric car really twice the price of a gasoline-powered car or is that just for a hybrid, and how is the comparison made? How often are we driving across Canada and why would it take three times longer when you would actually use a supercharging station thus reducing the recharge time greatly? And, with a hybrid, the subject of this article, one would be using both gas and electricity – stop for gas and a recharge – go for coffee.
Eventually, the world will run out of oil, or at least cost-effective oil. We don’t know when, but we do know that this is a depleting resource. What, exactly, to do about it, when, and the costs of everything including to the environment, is a very complicated discussion.
What to do in case of extended power outage? Hope that you have a hybrid.
Etc.
In 2006, Al Gore's book 'An inconvenient truth' is largely responsible for making fossil fuels the villains and all things electric the panacea to save the environment. Magic thinking that a wholesale move to electricity was the environmentally clean and free solution took hold.
Unfortunately all the new alternative energy sources (wind, solar) as the new transportation technologies (e.g. battery electric vehicles) have gotten a free pass as being god given environmental saviours. Few question their true operational and life cycle environmental cost of these technologies (and those who do often get branded as dinosaurs defending the fossil fuel industry).
The truth is that there is no free lunch. Unless we are prepared to go back to the pre-industrial era, we still need energy and lots of it to power our lifestyle. And that energy has an environmental cost, because it has to come from somewhere. The principle of conservation of energy (first law of thermodynamics) states that energy is neither created nor destroyed. The principle is still valid and has not been disproven yet after more than 180 years (Mayer 1824)..
So when an electric car is powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels (still the case for 70-80% of the electricity produced in the North America), it is environmentally speaking just about as 'dirty' as a gasoline powered internal combustion engine (ICE). Add to that the energy cost of lugging around the battery (an EV is on average 500 kg heavier than the similar traditional ICE). Does regenerative braking make up for it? Maybe in city driving but I doubt it on highway driving .
Add to that also the environmental cost of what went in the production of the battery (e.g. lithium, cobalt, rare earth metals etc). And finally the recycling cost (much higher than for the ICE engine). Never mind the the cost (environmental, financial and real estate) of the new refueling infrastructure and the electricity distribution network upgrade that will be needed. And finally, the principle of conservation of energy makes it evident that there simply is would not be enough electricity to power the whole transportation network even with a giant increase in solar and wind generation. The lifecycle cost of these technologies gets also conveniently ignored (e.g. where do solar panels and windmill blades get recycled?).
Other example environmentalist driven absurdity: he push to convert natural gas residential home heating to electricity (Boris Johnson's idea in Britain, mayor Plante's idea for Montreal). A modern natural gas furnace operates at a 90+% energy efficiency (converting the gas chemical energy to heat energy) and produces very little pollution by-products (mostly water and CO2). Providing the same heat from electricity generated from fossil fuels will require almost double the energy input with double the environmental cost.
Where is the new Al Gore to write 'An inconvenient truth' boor about the not-so-nice underbelly of these new 'clean energy' initiatives' foisted on us by maybe well intended but ignorant (or sometimes intentionally opportunistic) environmentalists?
André