I have no clue if this is correct, shit is over my pay scale but it friggin makes sense. Read on with an open mind!
Got this from my buddy Mark Reed... an interesting take on Electric Cars.
“As an engineer I love the electric vehicle technology However, I have been troubled for a longtime 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.
A friend sent me the following that says it very well. You should all take a look at this short article.
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 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. This is the first article I've ever seen and it tells the story pretty much as I expected it to.
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.
At a neighborhood BBQ 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 75 amp service. The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our 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.
An electric vehicle for in town driving and another for longer trips in houses that have two cards already makes perfect sense. I've been looking at Leafs but still need a gas-powered 3/4 ton HD truck (which aren't available in electric yet) unfortunately for towing my tractor and such.
Again though, I would charge it from my solar anyway or charge at night mostly.. both of which are easier on the grid. [Reply]
Originally Posted by BleedingRed:
A wind turbine constructions uses more "Energy" to construct than it will produce in its lifetime. (You factor in construction and gas needed etc)
Originally Posted by Hog Rider:
Remember when we were told to turn lights off, thermostats down, and wash in cold water, hang your laundry outside to 'save energy'?
Now, rewire your house and plug in your feckin' car - and like it!
Every 2 or three hundred miles wait in line for your turn at a charging station for a couple hours - and like it!
Fly around in a battery operated prop plane and hope the battery holds - and like it!
Oh, and use LEDs, wash in cold water, turn your thermostat down, or the government monitors will turn you in for wasting energy.
Uh, ya'll realize oil is a finite resource, whether that's 20 years down the road or 200, and conserving energy is a good idea partly because the grid may need conservation due to plugging in cars?
Seems like some of you need to be told what to do, jeez. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Bearcat:
Uh, ya'll realize oil is a finite resource, whether that's 20 years down the road or 200
All resources are finite until we master recycling and manufacture. Siemens and Porsche are working on an e-fuel to potentially replace petroleum-based gasoline for ICEs. Pretty cool stuff! Science FTW :-) [Reply]
Originally Posted by BleedingRed:
Just for the record,
I think it needs to be noted because alot of people seem to be have a misunderstanding about "Green Energy"
A wind turbine constructions uses more "Energy" to construct than it will produce in its lifetime. (You factor in construction and gas needed etc)
Also, lithium mining is extremely damaging to the environment, and puts out crazy amounts of CO2.
Add in the fact that the majority of energy production is NGL or Oil and you're really not improving much.
Cold Fusion or Nuclear would go a long way to helping with this. You will NEVER scale Wind/Solar in a way that is carbon neutral to keep up with demand. We need to spend more on R&D into Salt Reactors etc.
Originally Posted by DaFace:
It's amazing how many misunderstandings there are about electric cars. I have 1.5 of them (one is a PHEV), and they're great. Not sure I have the time and interest to correct everything in this thread, but a few to start with:
They're more expensive than gas cars!
Partially true. They're generally a little more expensive than the nearest equivalents in terms of MSRP, but the tax credits bring them down to the range that is comparable for the most part. (Yes, you can argue about whether tax credits should exist if you want, but be sure to debate whether there should be subsidies that keep our gas prices low, too.) And operating costs are far lower for EVs - there's just no argument here. Our Leaf is about to hit 50k miles, and so far my maintenance costs are about $250 plus a set of tires. I pay $0.12/kwh for electricity peak times, which means that I pay about $5 for 150 miles of range (and it's about half of that in reality, as I mostly charge overnight when my pricing is lower). Articles that EVs are more expensive to operate often use the cost of public chargers as their metric. If you aren't able to charge at home most of the time, and EV probably isn't a great option for you. That's not a secret.
There's no rural infrastructure!
Partially true, but it really just depends on your lifestyle. I have personally charged a car at a public charger around five times in the past three years, and it was mostly just because I was at a location that made it convenient to add a little extra range. If you road trip constantly, then sure, the lack of infrastructure is a problem (and that's not unique to people in rural areas). But for most people, you just charge at home, drive to work, and repeat. Now, is it inconvenient to make road trips? Sure. But it's pretty easy to have at least one EV in your household that you use around town if you have a gas car for road trips.
They're bad for the environment!
Mostly false. There's literally no product that we can create that will have zero environmental impact, but it's just not true that EVs are overall worse than gas cars. They're a little worse when it comes to the manufacturing process, but it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. And sure, the power grid isn't perfectly clean, but 1) it's getting cleaner every day and 2) it's pretty obvious that millions of cars hurt air quality a shit ton more than a few coal-fired plants. Also, we're starting to figure out how to recycle li-ion batteries, so the biggest knock on the manufacturing process is getting better as well.
The power grid can't handle it!
False. Or at least false for all practical purposes. This is like saying that gas cars should never have been made because the infrastructure was built for horse-drawn carriages. Sure, if we went from zero EVs to every single car in the country being an EV overnight, this might be a valid criticism. But the power grid is being updated every day whether or not EVs exist. As there's more demand, we build more supply. Welcome to Econ 101. Also, many electric companies love EVs because they can charge overnight when there's plenty of excess capacity at power plants.
If you don't want an EV, don't buy an EV. I don't care. But beyond people who can't charge at home and range on road trips, a vast majority of the concerns people have about them are unfounded.
I'm all for electric cars as a choice but what's going to happen when the number of people charging overnight goes up 100 fold? Also I think there will be a lot to learn about the effects of going electric in mass. And then I don't like having to depend on stuff like lithium batteries where we have to get the lithium from other countries which happen to be communist or totalitarian.
I am waiting on my new golf cart that will have a lithium battery. [Reply]
Originally Posted by philfree:
I'm all for electric cars as a choice but what's going to happen when the number of people charging overnight goes up 100 fold? Also I think there will be a lot to learn about the effects of going electric in mass. And then I don't like having to depend on stuff like lithium batteries where we have to get the lithium from other countries which happen to be communist or totalitarian.
I am waiting on my new golf cart that will have a lithium battery.
How did we handle the increased power needs of homes being built with central AC systems?
If you're worried about buying things from communist countries, you're gonna have a bad time. [Reply]
Originally Posted by philfree:
I'm all for electric cars as a choice but what's going to happen when the number of people charging overnight goes up 100 fold? Also I think there will be a lot to learn about the effects of going electric in mass. And then I don't like having to depend on stuff like lithium batteries where we have to get the lithium from other countries which happen to be communist or totalitarian.
I am waiting on my new golf cart that will have a lithium battery.
I read a study a while back that concluded that if 80% of new vehicles were EVs, electricity generation would need to increase by 10 to 15% [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaFace:
How did we handle the increased power needs of homes being built with central AC systems?
We built coal plants. Not part time power sources like wind and solar.
If the entire country is going to running electric cars by the time the industry and this administration want them to we better start building an electrical infrastructure that is based on uninterruptible electricity. [Reply]
Originally Posted by mlyonsd:
We built coal plants. Not part time power sources like wind and solar.
If the entire country is going to running electric cars by the time the industry and this administration want them to we better start building an electrical infrastructure that is based on uninterruptible electricity.
I just don't understand what the point is of statements like this. The fact that we might need more a little more capacity in 20 years is an argument that our current grid can't handle it? We're not going to have 100x more electric cars tomorrow. The grid will be built out as the demand is there, which is the way it's always worked.
And for the record, the wind blows at night, the sun shines on calm days, rivers flow full time, ocean currents move full time, nuclear is getting another look, and no one is shutting down all of the coal-fired plants. Plus batteries exist. [Reply]
Originally Posted by mlyonsd:
We built coal plants. Not part time power sources like wind and solar.
If the entire country is going to running electric cars by the time the industry and this administration want them to we better start building an electrical infrastructure that is based on uninterruptible electricity.
That's going to be a problem since this push towards electric cars is happening at the same time there is a push for eliminating "dirty" energy. Still waiting for an explanation as to how we're going to pull that off. [Reply]
I think one thing to remember is that most new innovations start out inefficient. It's a natural progression. The first cars probably got 4 miles to the gallon and broke down every third day. The first computers were the size of my living room. The first cell phones were the weight of dumbbells. The point of early models are to prove the concept, and then things get more efficient. Comparing new technologies to older technologies that had an 80 year head start isn't an appropriate comparison. [Reply]
Originally Posted by crayzkirk:
To me, it's not about being progressive or green or whatever you want to label it; the problem is that technology advances at it's own rate and people accept the technology when it become practical and more cost effective than what they're currently doing. This really seems like something that hasn't been well explained to people who don't understand the cost of lithium mining, electricity production, charging times, load on the existing grid, infrastructure changes, fuel taxes and probably more things than I can think of.
Unfortunately, it seems that there's a lot of things that people don't know about and yet are being forced down our throats as the savior of the planet. Any attempt to go against the prevailing message is seen as 'bad'.
Well if you mean that technology advances at the free market/private rate that just isn't true.
When gasoline cars were replacing the horse and buggy, long distance travel was almost exclusively by train. The federal government paid most of the cost of the interstate highway and road/bridge system that actually made cars useful. Sure, gasoline taxes from users contributed some but general fed and state taxes paid a lot.
Government has subsidized all sorts of research over the years.
No reason that a major transition shouldn't be a similar mix of user fees and government support instead of expecting the 'free market' to carry the load.
And actually the free market wouldn't be such a bad approach but there is no politically viable way to include all the externalities for harm done such as a carbon tax. [Reply]
