AN INTERESTING TAKE ON ELECTRIC CARS
T J & WEBB - The Pinehurst Press News and Views
As an engineer I love the electric vehicle technology. However, I have been troubled for a long time by the fact that the electrical energy to keep the batteries charged has to come from the power 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. A friend sent me the following that says it very well:
IF ELECTRIC CARS DO NOT USE GASOLINE, THEY WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN PAYING A GASOLINE TAX ON EVERY GALLON THAT IS SOLD FOR AUTOMOBILES, WHICH WAS ENACTED SOME YEARS AGO TO HELP 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 a 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 miles per gallon (mpg) in terms of gasoline, with nary any mention of the cost of electricity to run it . This is the first article I've ever seen and tells the story pretty much as I expected.
Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power things, yet they're being shoved down our throats. I’m glad somebody finally put engineering and math to paper. At a neighborhood barbeque I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He laughed, then got serious.
If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires seventy-five-amp service. The average house is equipped with one-hundred-amp service. On our small street (approximately twenty-five 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 latter "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. 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 twenty-five miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.” Eric calculated the car got thirty mpg including the twenty-five miles it ran on the battery. So, the range, including the nine-gallon gas tank and the sixteen-kilo-watt-hour (kwh) battery, is approximately 270 miles.
It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at sixty mph. Then add ten 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 twenty mph. According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds sixteen kwh of electricity. It takes a full ten 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 (it varies with amount used and the seasons) approximately $1.16 per kwh. Sixteen kwh times $1.16 per kwh equals $18.56 to charge the battery. $18.56 per charge divided by twenty-five miles equals $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 is $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 to 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.
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