Guest post by Richard Fowler
First of all, I like the idea of an electric car. I like “all-electric”. I’ve got an electric power washer, an electric weed eater, an electric riding lawnmower, an electric robot lawnmower, an electric toothbrush, and electric air pump just to name a few. I’ve driven an electric car, and it was fun to drive. Now they’ve got the range up to 250 miles, for an extra $9,000 you can get the range up to 300 miles. If you use your car to commute to work you can charge it between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., which is ideal for Howard Electric’s off peak rates. At our current off peak rates you could travel 250 miles for under $2.50.
Believe me, I and most other cooperative managers in the country would love to see an abundance of electric cars. If every member of our cooperative were to go out and buy an electric car tomorrow, slow charge their cars on our off peak hours, we could probably lower our electric rates 15%. Why is that? Because we wouldn’t have to upgrade our power lines. Those power lines have been designed and engineered for peak times (in Howard’s case 6 to 8 a.m. & 4 to 8 p.m.) and by charging your car in off peak hours you would be using those power lines during non-peak times. We would not have to upgrade your transformer because it too was engineered for your peak usage. The same is true for your substation, your transmission lines, and the coal and gas power plants – all designed for your “peak” usage. So using power during off peak times should be the cheapest power there is, and with our demand time of day rates, it is.
So yes, I want electric cars to be successful. But sometimes what we want, requires a reality check. So whether it’s electric cars, which I want, or a carbonless world, which those espousing the green new deal wants, both groups need a reality check. I will write about a reality check for the green new deal later, but today….let’s talk about a reality check for electric cars. I don’t believe, for the most part, that electric cars will be more than commuter cars. Here’s why.
We’ve tried hard to educate you on a KW charge vs. a kWh charge and you now have both on your bills. A car charger that’s a slow trickle charge overnight doesn’t present a problem, but when you’re traveling you’re not going to want to wait 8 hours to get your car charged. You’re going to want a fast charger. Well the fastest charger so far is a 500 KW charger and it will charge a car in 10 minutes. Tesla is working on a 550 KW charger. When you trickle charge an electric car the batteries should last about 10 years, but if you fast charge an electric car the battery life goes down significantly, and at $6,500 a pop, these batteries aren’t cheap.
Imagine a charging station, instead of a gas station, that has eight of these 500 KW chargers. That’s a four megawatt load, which is more than all our large power accounts added together. You’re going to need a substation for this charging station which will cost $1,000,000 not counting the upgrading of the transmission lines to feed the substation. That too will cost hundreds of thousands and this extra load is the equivalent of a new power plant which costs millions – and no – solar and wind for the most part do not provide reliable peak power, they provide unreliable intermittent power.
And it’s even worse for electric 18-wheelers. An ongoing study in California, Oregon, and Washington has projected a 10 MW charging station for electric 18-wheelers. How many gas stations exist across our country now for 18-wheelers? Well convert sixty of those to electric 10 MW loads and you’ve got the equivalent of our biggest coal fired power plant, and this will require more million dollar substations, more transmission line upgrades which will be very, very expensive. Now, on the positive side these 18-wheelers will go 500 miles on a battery pack, but these battery packs do weigh 5 tons which, along with their normal loads could test the highway legal “heavy haul” limits in several states. I really do hope they are successful, but the electric infrastructure to make this happen is a very big hill to climb and will likely require more carbon based coal or natural gas power plants (unless we’re willing to go nuclear).
Some have theoretically argued that by reversing the electricity flow from tens of thousands of cars to the grid at peak times, you could levelize the grid and avoid adding more peak power plants. In other words, the grid would use the charge from the car batteries, leaving the owner needing to recharge before driving. The problem with that theory is people probably aren’t going to spend $40,000 – $80,000 on an electric car so they can levelize the grid. If they spend that kind of money, it will be to drive the car.
System peaks are on the hottest and coldest days of the year. If on those days you’re using your car to drive and using your heater or air conditioner, how much excess battery energy do you expect to have to charge the grid? It is these hottest and coldest days that determine how many power plants we need. I don’t believe reverse flow is a reasonable solution to avoid those higher peaks that will be caused by cross country cars and trucks who will be fast charging their vehicles during peak times.
Unless somebody (either our members or taxpayers) has money to allocate to these fast chargers, substations, transmission upgrades and power plants they’re not likely to become a reality.
So, for discussion sake for cars, let’s tone down the chargers from a 500 KW charger to a more reasonable 50 KW charger (which is 8 times the peak of the average house). These are the fastest chargers Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) is installing in Kansas City.
These 50 KW chargers will charge a car in 93 minutes. So you pull into this charging station and there’s three people ahead of you, each taking 93 minutes. That’s a 4 ½ hour wait plus 1 ½ hours to charge your car. Many of KCP&L’s chargers are level 2 chargers. Those take four hours to add 200 miles of drive time. Not a bad wait if you’re on the golf course.
So how far can I go on a charge? Like I said earlier, these newer electric cars can now go up to 250 miles on a charge…….unless you turn on the heater. Heaven forbid you turn on your heater. The miles go down 25% if you need heat. Northern states may struggle with this issue. Slow charging workplace charging stations could make longer commutes more reliable and would work with existing infrastructure, but if you are going to rely on a slow charger to get home, it would need to be dedicated to you.
Electric cars are estimated to cost six to ten thousand more than a gas car. These cars need 70% less parts than gas engines and need 30% fewer workers to put them together, so lost jobs and a more expensive car. On the positive side, the cost to charge an electric car at home is much cheaper than gas….if….you don’t use a fast charger. Most of the cobalt in lithium batteries comes from the Congo. The Congo continues to raise the price of cobalt and the Congo is considered an unstable country.
In 2012, the CAFÉ standards required cars to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. President Trump has reduced that requirement to 37 miles per gallon. Apparently General Motors and other car manufacturers believe that either by 2020 or by 2024 politics will return that standard to 54.5 miles per gallon, so they are moving forward with that target. The only way to achieve that goal is to blend in a significant amount of electric cars. General Motors expects that 20% of their car sales by 2023 will be electric.
The Green New Deal would make all vehicles electric by 2030 and the proposed “OFF Act” would make all vehicles electric by 2035. If that happens, traveling across the country could be a circus. An electric car makes sense for a commuter car, but for traveling across country, if you don’t want the long charging wait, you’re going to want a gas vehicle, if you can find one.
The price of electricity may be favorable at the moment and as long as the BEV marked is not saturated — but then….
Governments are itching to tax the electrics (road pricing, or whatever term is used in your locale) as soon as people buy into them – surprise!
What it will do to the electric grid on a large scale is catastrophic.
It is no illusion to say that once they succeed in popularizing these (electric) machines you will be allotted only approved, government sanctioned times to slow charge your vehicle in order to maintain any stability in the grid.
The long and useless arm of government will intrude into every single aspect of our lives without a doubt.
I do not like this future…
It is fair for electrics to pay road tax just like everyone else, they use the same road.
Randomized low rate charging and using electric car batteries as leveling supply…. I can see it now…
“I was late because I lost the charging lotto last night. Plugged in with 35% charge and this morning it was at 25% but I need at least 30% to make the 20 mile commute.”
Some people want to herd everyone into cities and eliminate private vehicles. Easier to control people if they can’t get out of town except on mass transit that shoots right through all that empty space between cities.
The notion that electric is cheaper than gas ignores the cost of the battery. A $20k battery holds the equivalent of 2 gallons of gasoline and has a 1k cycle life. That means there is a hidden $10 per gallon of gasoline equivalent over rhe battery lifetime.
This is in addition to the $3-15 per gallon of gasoline equivalent you pay for electricity. As compared to $2-3 per gallon for gasoline.
Even allowing that electric is twice as efficient as gas, that is still an extra ($6-17)/2 per gallon for electricity. Also the “twice as efficient” notion is wrong because it ignores that the gas engine uses the waste heat to warm the vehicle.
And what is the value of your time spent sitting waiting for a charge. With a flat battery and sub freezing winter temperatures.
Plenty of places are bitter cold in winter, even in the south west, as soon as you move away from the coast.
The concept of charging the car in off hours is a sound one and I have long proposed something similar for home electricity. If one’s home ran on battery power or mostly battery power during the peak time of day and if you “recharge your house” during off peak times, we could greatly improve our distribution problems and solve a problem with irregular supplies of renewables such as wind. In this case all that is required is for the power company to transmit the current cost of power down the grid. This would be used to modulate the amount of current drawn from the grid for charging your house. When it is 110 degrees and no wind, the cost of power would go up and the smart charging controller would not draw from the grid. When it is 70 degrees and windy, the price of power might drop to near zero and one might then draw all their household power from the grid and also charge the batteries. In other words, demand would follow supply.
One of the problems we have now is with static demand and a variable supply. If demand varied with supply, it would help considerably. Instead of slow charging overnight, if suddenly the wind comes up and your local utility has a surplus of power, it drops the price it is announcing on the grid, your charging controller ramps up the draw on the mains and charges your house battery bank faster. You were asleep, you did not have to intervene in any way, it was all done automatically by market forces and a small computer that is looking at the current price of power. One could also program their house to be a constant steady load 24×7 so turning their household from a variable demand load to a constant “base” load.
You could then charge your car at any time at any rate of charge because it is charging from your household storage which is no longer directly associated with your draw on the grid at that moment.
Also, in some areas it is not required to transmit the cost of power as it is available on the Internet. The California ISO, for example, publishes the current 15 minute price of power at hundreds of specific locations on the grid and one can get it electronically. So simply match your draw to the current cost of power at the interconnect that feeds your home and you’re all set.
This sort of scheme is available down in Australia. It doesn’t work out to be economically viable because the additional cycling of the battery for the arbitrage degrades it more quickly for internal consumption to the point where the battery replacement costs outweigh the earnings. And the batteries are only economically viable for user storage with large subsidies.
If batteries were capable of being used in this manner, utilities would install them to reduce peaking costs. There has been some attempts to do this but the costs are too large for really meaningful amounts of power and storage. Frequency support services is where batteries can make money but the market for this is limited.
Depends entirely on how much your batteries cost, how long you expect the batteries to last, how much your home insurance goes up due to the increased risk of fire and how much electricity is lost charging and discharging your batteries.
Utopia! In one post you solved all the real-world problems with EVs, crosspatch.
Where in Pete’s name do you keep all these batteries in an apartment or slab home? Even with a basement my house is small enough that there is no room left over for an installation of batteries!
BTW, how do I program my house to do the laundry when I get home? Or to cook a meal and save it for when everyone is home?
“which is ideal for Howard Electric’s off peak rates”
If we ever get above 1 or 2% of cars being electric, those off peak rates are going to disappear.
I can’t speak to other utilities, but for our electric cooperatives the number of electric cars we can handle without setting a new peak even on the coldest or hottest day is 20%. This assumes all cars are charged between 10 pm and 4 am and the big assumption is they all must use a slow trickle chargers. With fast chargers your 2% may not be far off.
Heat and cold also reduce the efficiency of the battery, so that’s going to reduce your range, in addition to the extra draw from the heater/AC.
The main reason why it costs less to charge your car vs gas, is because of road use taxes.
Don’t expect that to last much longer.
In a Green New Deal world, energy conservation measures will rule every facet of our lives. In such a world, most intercity commerce and most personal long range intercity travel will be handled using electrified rail transport. When you get to your destination, you will either take mass transit to get to your in-city meeting or appointment, or you will rent a local electric vehicle to give yourself more flexibility.
My grandparents never owned a car and used the local bus service to travel everywhere they needed to go in the city where they lived. They traveled by train or inter-city bus serice if they visited friends and relatives in other localities. Very rarely did they travel by airliner except when they visited another country on the other side of the ocean. If this is what most Americans want for their transportation future, so be it.
What makes you think that “most Americans” have the right to determine how everybody lives their lives?
This was supposed to be a free country.
Have you *ever* experienced life in some place other than a large city? And even in a large city where are all these “rented electric cars” going to be housed? At the local airport? You can’t even rent bicycles in a large city in sufficient numbers to do what you propose because there isn’t room for them to be parked!
Have you *ever* tried to ride a train or bus cross-country today? Take Missouri, they have one train route between St. Louis and Kansas City. Pete forbid you should want to ride a train to Springfield, MO. Those train routs were phased out years ago. Same for buses! Try and catch a bus from Kansas City to Manhattan, KS.
I just love coastal elites that know little about life outside their urban bubbles.
My grandparents were born in the 1880’s. For a good part of their lives, America’s transportation infrastructure included readily available train and bus service in most of the places where it was needed.
If climate activists take control of America’s energy policies, and if they give more than just lip service to reducing our carbon emissions on a fast track schedule, then we will be seeing a revival of what was once the norm in transportation services eighty and ninety years ago.
I’ve demonstrated a number of times here on WUWT that a climate activist president now has all the authority he or she would need to push forward with a unilateral fast track Executive Branch program to reduce America’s carbon emissions 80% by 2050.
But would a climate activist president actually use that power? Sooner or later, a Democrat will be in the Oval Office and so when that day comes, the question will be given an answer one way or the other.
In the same manner as CA’s high-speed rail. Additionally, never underestimate NIMBY.
Almost *all* of the train tracks that used to serve America have been pulled up, reclaimed, and turned back to the appropriate landowners. Trains no longer provide passenger service or farm-to-market backbones in most of America, trucks and passenger vehicles do. There is simply no way that infrastructure is ever going to be reproduced, I don’t care how much of an environmentalist you are.
Your push to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 is a pipe dream, it simply doesn’t matter what your political persuasion is. First, we don’t have the electrical grid to support such a goal and we don’t have the financial resources to build out such a grid in a mere thirty years. For example, every single street and sidewalk in the entire Central West End of St. Louis would have to be dug up and high voltage, high current cable laid in. Where is the cement going to come from to redo all the streets and sidewalks? Second, EV is only feasible in dense, urban areas and then only as a secondary transportation vehicle for most people. For suburban and rural areas, EV’s are not really suitable for much, they are inefficient in cold temps and, because of their battery weight, have a harder time navigating on icy or snowy side roads. And I want to see you tell the people in Miami that they have to walk away from the coast during a hurricane evacuation because EV’s with dead batteries have blocked up all the roads!
In our business, we have some massive diesel/generator rigs that can be positioned around the country during any major grid supply issue at that site. The problem is stopping certain communities from nicking the cables.
Even live with several megawatts, they just tie a rope around the cable, hook to a truck, and drive. Flash bang, cable put in truck and off. Not found a charred miscreant yet, but its only a matter of time.
So then, in the EV wet dream, every street and parking lot is filled with vehicles plugged in to charge. It’s a pikey’s dream come true. 5 minutes with a hatchet and that’s several hunddred kilos of scrap copper to flog.
Anyone thought how to stop this? Legally I mean. And I accept that Texas is different.
In our business, we have some massive diesel/generator rigs that can be positioned around the country during any major grid supply issue at that site. The problem is stopping certain communities from nicking the cables.
Even live with several megawatts, they just tie a rope around the cable, hook to a truck, and drive. Flash bang, cable put in truck and off. Not found a charred miscreant yet, but its only a matter of time.
So then, in the EV wet dream, every street and parking lot is filled with vehicles plugged in to charge. It’s a pikey’s wish come true. 5 minutes with a hatchet and that’s several hundred kilos of scrap copper to flog.
Anyone thought how to stop this? Legally I mean. And I accept that Texas is different.
” let’s tone down the chargers from a 500 KW charger to a more reasonable 50 KW charger (which is 8 times the peak of the average house) ”
Really ? We have a 200 amp service .
Peak load is more than 17 kw…. and with a 27 kw on demand water heater I’m lucky it is not higher !
Maybe you are talking about Tiny Houses ?
“Now they’ve got the range up to 250 miles, for an extra $9,000 you can get the range up to 300 miles.”
Not in Texas, where you are either running the air-conditioner or the heater 90% of the time. You can take the published range numbers and divide them by two and get a good estimate of what to really expect from NEW batteries. This number drops over time, especially if you are consuming most of the electrical charge in your drives or using a fast charger.
A “reasonable” Texas DFW commute is about 30 miles one way. You often sit in traffic for 10 to 15 minutes, both directions. The air-conditioner or heater is running whether or not the car is moving. So a stated range of 250 miles on an EV is approximately using “80 miles” of energy to keep you warm or cool, and then tack on the actual 60 miles you drove. You have used 60+80=140 miles of energy on your “average” daily commute. Need to go to a satellite office, or the grocery store, or appointments? You are soon running near “empty”.
This means the DFW average commuter needs to plug in their EV every chance they have – in case they get stuck in a one or more hour traffic jam (several times a month). Want to go out of town?…add in multiple 10 minute stops for recharging. And because of all the fast charging you get to:
Replace the entire battery pack ever 5 or 6 years. There goes any savings you might have had by using an EV.
In previous discussions on EV batteries it was noted that the manufacturer recommends no charging past 90% and not discharging below 20% to maintain the batteries efficiency; effectively derating an EV battery from a 300 mile range to a 210 mile range. If you have the heater on, the effective loss in battery efficiency is an additional 25% or a loss of 75 miles of range. A drop from a 210 mile range to 135 miles. Put a couple of fat guys in the EV, tow a small trailer, drive at night with the lights on and listen to the radio and you are going to find you cannot make it out of the city limits before you have to recharge.
For various technical reasons, such as the Laws of Nature, EVs are not a long-term solution. I’m also convinced they are a poor interim solution as well.
We have large natural gas reserves and methane hydrate reserves off our coasts. We should use more of these clean-burning fuel reserves. Perhaps we will wise up and start using modern nuclear reactors for power generation.
Please
Just try to learn what the electrical units represent if you’re going to get into a serious discussion.
Kilowatts is a measure of Power.
Kilowatt hours is a measure of Energy.
In (very) simplistic terms kWh = (kW x time).
To install chargers that can complete a charge at night off-peak time in residential neighborhoods will require replacing all the power distribution system unless every residence has PV w/battery storage (expensive). It will require as a minimum 400A service. The green new deal will require replacing the whole transmission & distribution system. Another issue besides shorter battery life with fast charging is reduced range due to the LI battery capacity decreases with charge rate. A fast charge doesn’t fully charge the battery. So, a 250 mile range EV wo/cabin heating or cooling won’t make 250 miles after a fast charge. Another thing not mentioned is the battery temperature has to be limited otherwise they catch of fire & they loose capacity below 77F. So, EV’s have battery cooling & heating systems. Unless the EV is designed to provide the necessary heating & cooling while parked EV’s would be useless for providing peaking power to the power distribution system.
Technology has reached the point where EVs are a practical choice for some people. It is a not unreasonable expectation that with the vastly reduced maintenance expenses and charging at home in the evenings, you will save money over a 15-20 year lifetime of the vehicle. The major maintenance uncertainty is the battery itself. So one argument for an EV is lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Whether that turns out to be true depends on the price: how much is it worth spending today to save $20,000 or so over the next 15 years? Certainly much less than $20,000 – in fact assuming a 5% interest rate it is worth about $10,000. So if you can buy an EV for no more than a $10,000 premium over the equivalent IC vehicle, live in a temperate climate, have a dedicated home charging port and have transportation needs that fit the EVs lower range, the TCO argument is valid. Available subsidies obviously affect this calculation. According to Edmunds, you would expect to pay:
$35,000 for a 2020 Nissan Leaf base trim vs. $19,925 for a base model Toyota Corolla
$40,674 for the the Leaf SL PLUS vs. $25,320 for Corolla XLE.
That’s a premium of roughly $15,000 for the electric vehicle, which isn’t worth the likely savings, especially as the more expensive repairs on the Corolla will come after the first 10 years. Buy the Corolla, bank the extra $15,000 and draw on it for repairs. After 10 years the fund will probably have grown enough to buy a new Corolla rather than make expensive repairs to the old one.
Another argument for EVs is lower pollution. While they still produce particulates from tire and brake pad wear, they emit no combustion products. Some of that is of course emitted by the powerplants needed to charge the batteries, but pollution controls are more efficient at the larger scale and they are located well outside the densely populated areas where vehicles operate. So taken as a whole, EVs probably produce less pollution than IC vehicles and transfer most of that out of urban areas.
Unless technology improves significantly, EVs will always have some disadvantages:
1. lower range and longer recharge times. This hits long-distance driving. Yes, you can learn to live with it but it is still an inconvenience.
2. lower performance in very cold and very hot conditions. Battery performance drops at lower temperatures and the additional draw to heat the passenger compartment further reduces range.
3. lack of convenient charging options for apartment dwellers.
In the US, probably less than 50% of personal vehicles could be sensibly replaced with EVs. Current EV technology is completely inadequate for long-haul heavy transport vehicles.
But automobile purchases have long been largely emotional decisions and the car makers spend a lot in advertising to create that desire. They vary the pitch for changing tastes and values, but the emotional feeling is seldom connected to reality.
The reality is you are not going to off-road to the top of a mesa in your new 4WD pickup truck; the blond supermodel is not going to jump into your sexy red convertible sports car, and your new EV is not going to save the planet from climate change. If believing any of those things makes you happy, then be happy. It’s like lottery tickets: you’re not going to win, but for some people the fantasy of winning is worth the price of the ticket.
Tesla marketing is actually very clever: you get a luxury car with fabulous performance while displaying your deep commitment to fighting climate change, and nobody is going to criticize you for conspicuous consumption. It’s hard to do that buying a super yacht, although you’d have a much better chance on the blond supermodels.
So of reasons given for owning an EV: Total Cost of Ownership – most likely not at the present prices; lower pollution – probably yes; save the planet – in your dreams.
Electrics evading the road use taxes won’t last much longer. Once that goes away, almost all of your cost savings go away. Modern engines require very little maintenance, except for an oil change a couple of times a year. Modern engines will easily last as long as the battery, probably longer, and they cost less to replace.
@MarkW:
Quite a bit more than that. Take a look in your owner’s manual at the recommended maintenance schedule. As your car gets older, many of those “inspect” tasks end up being “replace”.
With an EV you get rid of hundreds of moving parts in the engine and transmission, the fuel system, the exhaust system and the cooling system. All of those will give you trouble in an older car. In exchange you get an electric motor with one moving part and two sets of bearings and seals.
Why do you think all commercial ships and heavy rail locomotives are electric drive? It’s more reliable and less costly. As I said, the battery is the big unknown; we don’t have enough real-world data to go on.
Regarding road taxes: most states are moving ahead with various ways to address this. Georgia charges a $213.88 “alternative fuel” fee each year for a personal all-electric vehicle. Given that EVs will likely be driven less than the average 15,000 miles a year, this is more than an equivalent IC passenger vehicle will pay in state fuel taxes. Work out the math and assume 15,000 miles/year and GA is charging EVs the same fuel tax as if they purchased 664 gallons of fuel. EVs do get free use of “Peach Pass” lanes, so there is still an effective state subsidy.
For comparison, I drive a Toyota Avalon hybrid and in 2019 in a total of 12,840 miles I used 346 gallons of gasoline. The total GA fuel tax is $0.322 / gal., so I paid GA $111.41 — just over half what an EV owner would pay for the alternative fuel surcharge. In effect, the EV owner is subsidizing me and pickup truck owners are subsidizing both of us. So far this year I’ve only driven 2,963 miles and paid taxes on 83 gallons of fuel, so I’m way ahead of EV owners.
Alan,
Those “electric drive” locomotives all have huge diesel generators on board feeding those electric drive motors. They are the same as a hybrid auto with an onboard ICE engine, just like your Toyota. I suspect it is the same for any large ship.
Any hybrid is going to have similar repair/replace costs as a ICE-only auto.
Interesting article on the range of EV charging issues
The logic that you can lower rates because you dont have to do something escapes me. If you havent done it , why arent the rates at that level already?
Feed in fom EVs is a nice theoretical spin, but in reality would be pretty useless unless EV penetation was total and use behaviour uniform, then you get back the same old issues of diffuse, lower powered and inconsistent power sources. Just another nirvana proposal that will never happen at scale.
I look foward to watching the UKs EV mandates fom afar, and seeing at what stage they finally realise its a nonsense.
EVs will remain niche vehicles until range and charging limitations are solved. Today they are great for urban transportation and offer advantages over ICE cars but their primary claim to fame is virtue signaling.
One problem is that urban environments are also where the problem of finding a place to charge are the greatest.
What about a livery model? Instead of keeping a single battery, you could drive into a bay–like for an oil-change–have a robot remove your spent battery and load a full one, and you drive away in minutes. The livery stable then recharges the battery slowly and loads it in a car when its charged. You’d be billed on how much you drained the battery.
The problems with the “livery” model are well documented and have been discussed ad infinitum.
To start with, there’s cost. Those batteries are heavy. Designing a robot to handle one of those easily is difficult and expensive. Moving heavy objects quickly is even more dangerous and difficult.
An even bigger problem is standardization, especially between vehicles of different size classification. Out in the real world, you’ve got both full sized and stretch passenger vans, mini-vans, SUVs, mini-SUVs, sedans, full-size, compact, micro.
Each of those is going to require a different size of battery. Your robot will have to be able to handle all those types of batteries, worse, your station is going to have to maintain a supply of all of those in stock.
Finally, the insurmountable problem is convincing people who just bought a brand new $15K battery to swap it out for a battery of unknown age and reliability.
Why is it that people who never bother thinking through a problem are so willing to convince themselves that they have come up with a perfect solution that nobody has ever thought of before?
Google “Better Place” to see how this worked out a decade ago.
This article seems a little silly since a couple of articles before the headline is:
Mean and Unclean: Electric Cars Powered by Child Labor in Africa
Richard Fowler, the author, calculates electricity costs just as Socialists, Communists and Progressives calculate the economic impacts of their policy positions. Change one thing, and nothing else in he equation ever changes, do your math, wham, bam, thank you Uncle Sam, you’ve just been … well, it would be a posting policy for me to say exactly what it would be like, but think of a very funny scene in”The Big Lebowsky” with Walter Sobcheck, played brilliantly by John Goodman, and a new Corvette automobile.
Mr. Fowler, if millions of electric cars are waiting for off-peak hours to begin charging, and that magic moment arrives and then all those cars’ chargers suddenly switch on, do you really not see the potential for the new “PEAK” usage period to shift to 8pm to 6 am? And if it does, your brilliant, money saving scheme has fallen flat on its face, with it’s ass in the air and you’re ….. well, watch the movie.
I responded respectfully to this point at 7:57 this morning.
Have not believed in global warming for 20 years, but I live in downtown 4 blocks from work and no car only bicycle. In a city with an abundance of bicycle routes. Love my life this way, never buying windshield wiper fluid again so help me god!
Solving mass human demands does not involve only meeting the ideal situation. Government bureaucrats will never solve our complex energy management problems. Leave humans alone and they will solve their own problems when and as needed.
The best transport is no transport.
The best electricity is no electricity.
This is the real green agenda.
They know that non-fossil alternatives are inadequate and it’s a feature not a bug. There is no intention for non carbon energy to work, at all.
That’s why nuclear will be shut out as well since it is the one alternative to fossil energy that would actually work as France has shown for more than half a century.
Get used to the eco lock down that will never end. (Buy warm clothes, and learn to wash them by hand.)