Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Share the pain of a deep green activist politician who desperately wants to attend a climate change rally, but misses out because of her useless electric vehicle.
SLO climate change activist Heidi Harmon’s electric car calamity
January 24, 2022
By KAREN VELIE
Former San Luis Obispo mayor and climate change activist Heidi Harmon attempted to “do the right thing,” and travel to a rally in San Francisco in an electric car. After multiple attempts to find a working charging station in San Jose, Harmon realized charging the car would take up to seven hours and there was no way she could make the rally.
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Read more: https://calcoastnews.com/2022/01/slo-climate-change-activist-heidi-harmons-electric-car-calamity/
The video (h/t Cal Coast News):
I love this story, because it offers a microcosm of why green try to waste so much of your money.
“We need some transition support squads”.
If Harmon wasn’t such a deep green, it might have dawned on her that her experience is unequivocal evidence that EVs are useless.
But the green belief system does not seem to permit such thoughts.
Greens start from the assumption that their vision is inevitable. Then they try to work backwards, to figure out how much of your money they need to throw into the bottomless pit, to fund all the “transition support squads” and other useless green props they hope will help advance society towards their vision of a green nirvana.
Even if their green vision is an economic and engineering impossibility, they don’t hesitate to spend your money, because their belief system does not allow them to accept such negativity. So they just keep spending and spending, until someone cancels their ability to plunder your future financial security.
Another failed book marking attempt on my part concerend an elderly couple living the outskirts of London and who bought a Renault Zoe, talking to the BBC.
The car was primarily to visit their children who lived on the diagonal opposite side of London.
The woman was doing the talking in interview and she was ever so ever so pleased about dodging all the Congestion and Pollution (the ULEZ) charges in London.
I did wonder why she had to spend £31,000 in order to do that, why not simply take the bus at £3 for the round trip.
No matter
She then recounted the long distance journeys she’d been on in the car and her story is exactly as this story – a whole litany of broken and non-functioning chargers stretching from London to Bristol and beyond.
It was obvious though she didn’t actually say the words, that anything more than a ride across town stressed her out so much she simply wouldn’t go there again
Doesn’t she know that you just park your armored Suburban a couple of blocks away and ride your bike?
Ah, Mayor Pete. Trans Sec got caught out.
Hmmmm . . . Heidi Harmon is not the brightest bulb on the street, is she?
Just how long had she owned her EV before this event caused her first become aware of the multi-hours charging time required to drive it distances over 250-300 miles?
Hey, an EV’s driver’s manual? . . . what the heck is need for that???
RTFM is out of date 😀
This morning I looked at the PJM Interconnect website. Two things caught my eye. One was the load and generation mix–109,000MW with less than 5000MW of wind power. The second was a fact sheet on how they plan to provide power for the large number of EVs in their territory. These would be charged with excess renewable energy, as they phase out fossil fuel.
With the current mix it seems there is no excess renewable energy at any time, and little chance of getting to that point any time soon.
Oh, and they also think that your EV could be used to stabilize the grid. How will that work out in the morning when you have to go to work?
Simon the BatteryCarBoi won’t like this one…
But I thought California was chock full of fast charging stations. What possibly could have gone wrong?
She probably didn’t have a Tesla.
I have no objection to EVs at all. In principle an electric car can snap your neck with its acceleration and should be a total blast cornering.
But there is no way on earth I want to own a battery. I want the battery to be like a propane cylinder. I want to drop the dead battery, pay for the charge in a fresh one, plonk it in (or better, have some kind of ‘bot offer it it up), and off I go in minutes.
As long as I am expected to own (and depreciate) the battery, and loiter about waiting for it to charge every time it dies en route, they can go hang.
You are paying for the depreciation whether you own the battery or not.
If you don’t own it, the depreciation will be built into the rent you are paying for the battery.
I am prepared to share the declining value of all batteries with all other users. That is fair.
The excessively rapid decline in the value of my car was not what I intended as my main point though. I regret clouding the issue.
You aren’t saving any money, just changing how you label it.
EVs have great low end acceleration but unless you have the super high end model they peter out at higher speeds. Why do you think taking an overweight vehicle around corners would be a blast? Do you like the feeling of losing control?
” Oh dear, how sad, never mind”
It ain’t half hot mum.
Ahhhh – The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one!
I looked up to see if a train was available. San Luis Obispo is only ~230 miles from San Francisco but there are no direct trains at all so it takes 7 hours. I find this surprising. Buses are 4.5 hours but they don’t seem to run on a regular schedule. So I guess you gotta drive. For all the money spent on high speed rail in the state, it seems like it was originally envisioned as a third option (to fly or drive) for the wealthy in LA and San Francisco and they’ve left the ordinary people of the state with green ambitions to fend for themselves.
7 hours? Her car might be 2/3 charged in that time! sarc
Astute observation. As for the mythical high speed rail, that project is still a train to nowhere; the current rage by Newsom is to somehow finish a roughly 100 mile segment between a non-descript point north of Bakersfield to another non-descript point near Merced, where a small University of California campus is located. These two points are smack in the middle of the inland valley part of the state, both being at least 200 miles from either LA or SF, to which the train is likely never to be connected, at least in the current century because this small segment will probably not enter operation until sometime in the 2030s.
according to route planner
distance is 232 miles
A vw id3 will require one charge at 8065 san miguel canyon stopping 26 minutes
total time 4h9m
Plenty of charge points on route 22 to 50kw
The solution is to spread the Green blight in lieu of a green and hospitable Earth.
Unless you are stuck next to recharging station, running down battery charge trying to keep warm in Athens or Istanbul today would not be terribly good idea.
Rescue crews in Istanbul and Athens dug through snow and ice Tuesday to clear paralyzed roads and rescue people stranded overnight in their cars after snowstorms and a massive cold front brought much of Turkey and Greece to a standstill.
Earlier today I reported record low temperature in the nearby Monte Negro of -33.2C (-28F).
Global warming at it’s best 😀
A half charged battery would last you 17 hours
So what do owners of EVs do in cold weather? The batteries don’t work efficiently in cold weather and there’s all that heat pumped into the cabin to keep warm that also drains the battery.
https://leasing.com/car-leasing-news/electric-vehicle-range-in-winter/
According to data from the above article an e-Golf with the heating off has a range of 188 miles when the outside temperature is 20°C.
At 0°C with heating on that goes down to 133 miles.
By the time we get to -10° it’s down to 88 miles.
Maybe we all need 2 cars. An EV for summer and an ICE for winter?
In South Florida, the problem is AC in summer, usually not heat in winter unless we are experiencing falling iguana weather.
Wind chill factors are very different at different speeds.
In other words, that is a calculated result, not actually testing a vehicle driving at the speed limit in 0°C weather.
National Weather Service’s maximum wind speed on the wind chill chart is 60mph.
At 60mph, 32°F (0°C) chills like it is 10°F air temperature. The entire battery is going to stay cold unless some of it’s energy keeps it warmer, thus shortening an EV’s range considerably.
Thousands of pounds of cold lithium battery takes awhile to warm up enough to charge.
Tesla now has a heat pump so as long as it’s not cold the heater doesn’t use much energy. But on those cold, humid days with a heavy snowfall …
‘Do the right thing?’ Who decides what that is?
this woman is an idiot.
How insulting. You owe idiots ever where an apology for comparing them to her.
You are completely overestimating her mental capacity with that statement.
Well I’m to lazy to plug my pickup in every night in fact I have a hard time stopping to put gas in it once a week.
She said it all with her comment “I don’t understand why this has to be so hard”, especially the ‘don’t understand’ part
Yeah, she could have ended that sentence as soon as she finished saying “understand”.
It’s all about the math.
transport-electric_car-extension_cord-electrical_car-automobile-auto_mobile-rcln208_low.jpg (800×688) (cartoonstock.com)
EV needs 13 freezing hours to get 650 km with 3 charging stops and no heater
German car reporter bought a new VW e-Up car in Wolfsburg and drove the 650 km to Munich. But the weather was freezing and to get further on each charge Lisa Brack kept the heating off most of the time. She still needed three charging stops and took 13 hours to get home.
I wouldn’t say evs are useless for transportation. they work well in a metro environment. its that long journey that sucks. she should have taken the high speed train.
That ‘high speed train’ is a total fantasy in Gov Newsom’s fevered brain. They’ve been building it for years now, and it still doesn’t go anywhere.
Many of the posts have now been deleted
Why would a climate activist delete her own posts? Doesn’t sound very “activist” to me.
As long as her EV or her property does not have any “Defund Police” signs or stickers, her wacko notion couldn’t be dumber there ….
This is a Brit talking. My friends who have EVs say oh but we save on fuel costs and I say but your vehicle costs £10,000 more than mine and with my diesel I can drive 85,000 miles for £10 grand. By which time you’ll need a new battery at £4000. I
I recently read a cost-benefit exercise comparing EV and ICEV and the author worked out that there is a slight cost penalty for EV all factors considered.
Something like with rooftop solar and home storage battery, all costs accounted for including eventual replacement and grid electricity is a cheaper option.
Those fuel savings are going to disappear whenever the government starts taxing EVs for their share of the road taxes.
And the subsidies incentives for people to buy an EV.
I understand that when removed sales drop accordingly.
Can anyone here say schadenfreude? It’s all about planning rather than hoping and wishing. I hope she figures this out, but I doubt she will.
The trouble is that you need to plan on the worst case scenarios. Basing projections on averages is going to make for lots of salty tears.
In her mind, such as it is, believing makes it so, no matter how illogical it is.
Yes, schadenfreude.
Cela lui apprendra…
I think there is a Tesla fast charge station at a parking garage in Campbell