By P Gosselin
Green technology debacle
“Hidden gas guzzlers”…The wonders of electric cars are turning out to be pie-in-the-sky fantasies.
Massive energy losses from generation, to transmission, to charging and during battery storage are turning electric mobility into a cost nightmare.
“E-cars lose massive amounts of power during charging,” reports the online 24hamburg-de here, citing results of tests conducted on a variety of electric cars of different price classes and sizes by Germany’s ADAC automobile association.
This makes electric cars even more expensive, and less affordable, than previously thought.
The ADAC’s results show, “electricity consumption when charging electric cars is significantly higher than indicated on the consumption displays.”
Manufacturers forgot to tell e-car buyers that lots of energy – about 10% – in fact gets lost during charging and battery storage.
Wasting huge amounts of energy
“The result is devastating,” reports 24hamburg.de.
“With a gasoline-powered car, that would be like spilling a few liters when refueling,” says the ADAC.
Apparently. significant energy gets lost by all the electrical systems, from the charging station, to the on-board charger and the drive battery in the car itself.
Currently e-car owners are forced to contend with a myriad of obstacles in their quest to achieve the level of convenience and comfort that combustion engine vehicle drivers enjoy. “Not surprisingly, a survey by the German automobile association ADAC had previously shown that e-car drivers were still extremely dissatisfied with the infrastructure of charging stations,” reports 24hamburg.de.
Major charging losses
The ADAC tested electric vehicles were all connected to the same 22-kW wall box at 23 degrees ambient temperature, all under the same conditions. According to the test results: “a 100 kWh battery in a Tesla Model X100D actually requires 108.3 kWh. The Kia e-Niro Spirit requires 72.3 kWh for a 64 kWh battery. Even the Jaguar I-PACE EV400 needs at least 10 kWh more for a 90 kWh battery,” reports 24hamburg.de.
With skyrocketing electricity prices in Germany, these hidden costs are turning out to be substantial. But the news will soon get a lot worse, 24hamburg.de reveals: “Electricity prices will rise by 320 percent. […] Driving electric cars is and will be more expensive for drivers than previously thought.”
Currently charging rates in German cities are at about 50 euro-cents a kilowatt hour. With a 300% rise, mobility is about to become a luxury only affordable by the rich.
Germany’s once much ballyhooed “Energiewende” is unraveling, and turning into a grand technological fiasco.
Energy transfer between systems is not 100%?
Engineering. First Year. First Term.
Not a difficult concept.
Strategic driving for EV drivers;
As I drove onto the highway near Goulburn NSW Australia in my Diesel 4WD wagon I clicked cruise control onto the legal speed limit of 110 KMH, on me vehicle speedometer 117 KMH corrected error. A Tesla S EV was positioned close to my vehicle and the driver obviously wanting to drive in my vehicle’s slipstream to conserve energy.
The Tesla followed for maybe 20 minutes as the highway presented several hills and heavy transport vehicles to overtake. On one steeper incline the Tesla suddenly pulled out and drove alongside my vehicle stopping me from overtaking a transport vehicle and remained there until over the hill and then drove off, passed the truck and pulled in front of it. I passed both vehicles.
After that the Tesla tailgated again but not for long before slowing down and quickly dropping back into the distance behind. I suspect that the driver was suffering range anxiety as the Tesla warning system alerted him to the battery charge reaching low, as far as I was aware the next recharging point was maybe 50 kilometres ahead.
I have on other occasions come across EVs being driven well below the speed limit, example 80 KMH despite the 110 KMH limit generally and 100 KMH for heavy transport vehicles.
I’ve just driven across Europe and back again. Given the high cost of fuel and the fact that I have unlimited time (being retired), I’ve been driving at 90 kmh most of the time, in my diesel Volvo convertible. The range predicted was going off the charts, finally reading 770 miles for a 90% full tank (maybe 45 litres left).
Driving at the most efficient speed on cruise control is a massive boost in efficiency for ICEs too.
There seems to be significant EV potential buyer resistance, no wonder woke globalist agenda government politicians are becoming more desperate to force us to buy one.
Interesting will be the numbers coming from Norway, especially during the winter season. That country wants to ban fossil fuel cars, a land that has oil reserves by the way …
Finally found a link to the article about bidirectional charging:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/vehicle-to-grid
This article is crap from the word go.
How does having bidirectional charging help ease the problems? The same current will be transiting the transformers.
I’m sure the developers are *very* happy with this restriction! I’ve worked with businesses on siting issues where the amount of parking available was a primary concern. Charging stations will be the same issue here. And that is *still* 1000 new charging stations that would be needed!
In residential areas the peak demand would be pretty much the same times for everyone! So who is going to charge and who is going to discharge?
Unfortunately articles like this have become de rigueur for The Spectrum; they are cheer leaders for the IPCC/Paris and hype the 1.5C “climate change” limit at every opportunity.
And that is while electricity used to make cars go is not taxed the way gasoline burned to make cars go is. In Ontario, Canada, if the tax paid by a gas car driver (~31 Canadian cents per litre) followed him to his new EV driven the same distance per month, his electricity cost would more than double at current night rates, (when most EV charging will be done.). Right now this electricity is not taxed, to subsidize EV uptake. But governments can’t ignore this revenue leak forever.
Electricity would still be cheaper than gasoline but much less so, prolonging the breakeven point on the much higher purchase price for the EV.
Forget CO2 – just drive an EV. Floor it at three m.p.h and feel the push in the back, smoothly, silently and with no gear changes to 80.
But this article is misleading. The losses described sound like the losses incurred in extracting and refining petrol (“gas” in the USA), shipping it to petrol stations around the country and running the forecourt lighting, kiosk heating etc.
I once calculated that I can drive the same distance on the power consumed extracting and refining a litre of petrol as a conventional car could drive on the litre of fuel.
The Constant Velocity Transmission in my Subaru Outback has no obvious gear changes either.
I’m enjoying this discussion about EVs vs ICE cars. Western governments have bet heavily that a wholesale switch to EVs will help meet Paris targets, just because. Let’s leave aside, for sake of argument, whether meeting Paris, Net-Zero, etc. is worth doing. I personally don’t think it is but that’s just me. I could be wrong.
EVs are the low-hanging fruit in the Net-Zero crusade. They are the one “retail” lifestyle change at the individual level that at least sort of resembles business-as-usual, compared to not having private transportation at all, never flying anywhere, not eating meat, and giving up cheap natural gas for cooking and heating houses in cold Canada. None of these other changes will ever happen. EVs might be do-able.
Yet look how much dispute there is about whether a switch to EVs will actually reduce life-cycle CO2 emissions for the average and aggregate driver! And they are expensive—always will be, given need for many kg of scarce metals—and inconvenient to boot, requiring subsidies to get people to buy them. Big heavy batteries could be dead-end technology. The whole exercise might be a wash on CO2, especially in countries with fossil-fuel-intensive grids. Which is most. A very costly wash.
So it’s entirely possible that the mandated switch to EVs by 2035 will not bring down aggregate CO2 emissions despite much wasted private and public cash, which crowded out more productive things to spend or invest that money on.
Then what? No oil-based or GHG-emitting fertilizer?
The MPGE figure of plug-in electric cars is a “wall to wheel” figure, and factors in losses in the charger and the battery. As for typical losses before the electricity gets to the charger: I figure multiply the MPGE figure by .39 for comparison to a gasoline car. Average combined generation, transmission and distribution losses for electricity from natural gas power plants is about 61%. And when people increase or decrease their usage of electricity, the power plants that get accordingly cranked up or down are mainly natural gas ones.