A Question about Electric Cars By James Reed

     As readers will know, I am a hater of much of the sham environmentalism of today, which is just social justice warrior socialism; immigration and population increase have never been addressed by these Greenies, so, they really only care about socialism, not the survival of nature. A real environmentalists, like immigration critic Garret Hardin and Pentti Linkola:
  https://www.amazon.com.au/Can-Life-Prevail-Pentti-Linkola/dp/1907166637

     All tend to be anti-humanist, and what is wrong with that? Anyway, I am getting old and digressing a bit. Here is the text of an email I received raising some good points about electric cars; sorry I don’t know who wrote it, but good work anyway:

“INTERESTING -  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! WHO WILL BEAR THE BURDEN?

In case you were thinking of buying hybrid or an electric car: Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile has never been discussed.  All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with not a mention of the cost to run it. This is the first article I've ever seen and tells the story pretty much as I expected it to. Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power things yet  it's being shoved down our throats. Glad somebody finally put engineering and math to paper. At a neighbourhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbour, 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 (approx. 25 homes),the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla charge.  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 latter "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 $20,000 while the Volt costs $46,000-plus. So the Canadian and American Governments wants loyal citizens not to do the math, but simply pay three times 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.”

     So, just as expected, electric cars have not-so-hidden costs relating to infrastructure, and all we have shoved down our throats is about cost per kilometre, while the bigger issues just get swept under the recharging station.