New Study on Electric Vehicles cost per mile
I saw an interesting article on Yahoo News. I usually don’t see anything headlined on Yahoo News except adventures of the Kardashians, Elizabeth Hurley’s abs, or headlines about something bad Trump did. But this one caught my attention:
Which Really Costs More: Charging an EV or Filling Up Your Tank With Gas?
There have been several studies on the relative costs of charging EVs vs. fueling your hydrocarbon powered personal conveyance with gasoline. In those studies EVs always came out being cheaper to drive than gasoline vehicles.
However, Anderson Economic Group — a respected economic consulting firm with decades of auto industry experience — released the results of its own study. They looked at more than just the cost of gasoline per mile vs. kilowatt hours per mile. They took into consideration the higher cost of commercial charging as compared to charging at home. Also, the factored in the costs of the home charging equipment, and “deadheading,” driving around looking for far flung commercial charging stations. Plus, something I didn’t know about, taxes applied to EVs by states and cities because they don’t pay gasoline taxes.
The bottom line of this study is that EVs energy cost can reach $12.95 per 100 miles as compared to $8.50 per 100 miles for a gasoline vehicle that can do 33 MPG.
Here is a link to the full article:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/really-costs-more-charging-ev-182319606.html
Very cool. Very reasonable conclusion.
Probably the biggest thing the EV advocates never talk about is if we’re transferring trillions of watts (HP) from petroleum fueled cars to EVs, where do we get that energy? If you’re the only one in your neighborhood who plugs in a car at night, that’s one thing. There’s enough surge capacity in the grid that it doesn’t collapse. If everyone plugs in a car that’s another thing.
I’ve seen some estimates that we’d need to triple the generation power capacity of the entire national grid. Some areas of the world would need more than tripling.
Ready for perpetual brownouts and not being able to go anywhere?
I have wondered about the same thing. Seems like the electrical grid hardly has the capacity for the current demand much less fueling automobiles.
I would like to see a conversion factor for how many kilowatt hours there are in a gallon of gasoline, based on some MPG factor. That would make it easy to come up with an estimate of how much increase in electrical capacity we would need for an all electric auto fleet.
Then consider the fact that there have been very few new electric generation facilities built in the last 20 years and the problem becomes more critical.
Absolutely right. The current power grid is barely holding on right now (ask the Texans from last winter) and whenever they put in windmills or solar cells, they don’t seem to be building the required backup – either massive battery banks or some sort of power generators – for when the winds don’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
I ran into a quote in Design News (I think) that went, “While battery makers desperately try to figure out how to reach a specific energy of 450 Wh/kg (Watt-hours per kilogram), gasoline already offers 12,000 Wh/kg.” There’s the answer to kilowatt hours in gasoline.
1 horsepower is 746 Watts.
The battery’s 450 Watt*hours becomes 0.603 HP*Hours, and gasoline gets 16.1 HP*hours (both per kg).
In comparing two vehicles, the weight can be calculated as the weight of the batteries or the weight of the gasoline. 1 gal of gas weighs 2.84 kg.
This week’s big news story was the traffic mess outside DC on I-95 where people were stuck for up to almost 24 hours. People survived by running their engine intermittently to keep the vehicles warm.
If everyone had been driving a battery-powered Electric Vehicle, would this have been a mass casualty event?
This article is saying that if 2/3 of the cars in the country were electric by 2050, the grid generation capacity would need to double.
Reuters article
I would hate to try to drive an all electric vehicle in the winter weather “up north.” Seems like a survival exercise to me!