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-car drivers are in for a cost shock
“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.
And those losses will increase with higher and higher charging rates. If you can plan your journeys to avoid using too much battery charge, then the lowest (typically 7kW) chargers are the best way. But once your “Smart” wall-box charger starts obeying government restrictions you might have make do with a standard domestic wall outlet…
Here is something to consider. A typical 8 pump petrol station can fill 8 cars every 5 minutes =96 cars per hour. Say it takes 30min to charge a EV, then the station can now only charge 16 cars per hour. For an equivalent gas station a EV station would have to have space for 48 cars. Can’t wait to see how that’s going to work in the real world. Just another EV absurdity I guess.
They’ll pack the EVs in side-by-side and nose-to-tail to charge them all from one charger with many charging cables… then act surprised when one of the EVs flames out and all of them follow suit.
Then they’ll not learn the lessons of experience, and do it again and again and again until no one wants to buy EVs and those charging stations go out of business.
Or they’ll follow the recommendation to not have anything within at least 50 feet circumference from a charging EV, and we’ll have cities with entire city blocks dedicated only to charging EVs. The cost and property taxes of that real estate will increase the cost of charging until no one wants to buy EVs and those charging stations go out of business.
Imagine your scenario at a recharging station on I-95 leading north from Miami a day before a category 4 storm is to come ashore in the city.
I get a chuckle every time I read this sort of thing:
“than previously thought.”
I bet that most people reading NTZ on a regular basis have been aware of the loses from the half-dozen steps of getting electrons from a generating facility to the wheels of an auto.
It is nice to have numbers – that we have frequently thought of.
Yup. It’s always easy to to get more or less of something “than previously thought,” when there was zero thought previously given.
I always wonder, “Where were the engineers in that loop?”.
Why are these so called authorities only started realising this now. It’s always taken at least 10% more of the battery capacity to charge. And even then you don’t get full a full rated charge, the batteries degrade slightly with every charge / discharge.
Then there’s the loss through the charger, rectifier and or converter. That heat you feel coming out of the charger – that’s lost energy. It goes on.
First law of thermodynamics – :Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, it can only be transferred from one form to another. Caveat : There’s always losses during this process
What a surprise, no such thing as a free lunch.
Germans will re-charge the battery in their electric vehicle while barely heating their living spaces.
You got that right!
Just live in your EV, you’ll stay warm.
Hilarious.
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I was arguing with an EV owner online… he kept claiming his EV was cleaner and more efficient than ICE vehicles.
So I did the analysis for his state, taking into account what fuels powered his state’s electrical generation stations.
Turns out, his vehicle was nearly 100% powered by coal.
Then his state shut down some coal generating stations, so he was back to brag again… but the plant closures only reduced his vehicle to 78.6% powered by coal. And by calculating the energy losses from fuel to battery, his vehicle was less efficient than my ICE vehicle. Then his battery went bad and it cost him $20,000 to replace it and he had to pay a disposal fee for the old battery. LOL
If the fuel tank on my ICE vehicle could only hold the energy equivalent to ~3.5 gallons of gasoline, I’d be angry. If I had to pay ~$20,000 every 8-10 years to replace the fuel tank on my ICE vehicle, I’d be incensed.
In the UK more battery cars – including hybrids – are failing their annual vehicle checks due to tyre wear. I was embarrassed once to have all 4 tyres fail what is something that is easy to check but felt better that the exhaust had also failed and was giving no sign of it. I suspect people are not expecting tyre wear to be a problem but the extra weight of the battery is chewing up the tyres. They were trying to blame drivers for making use of the high torque delivery. With regard to fuel versus battery – I don’t fill my tank very often now so that I am not carrying weight I don’t need. I put in an amount every week. Battery cars and hybrids carry the full weight all the time.
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I’m sure read somewhere that a busy motorway gas station dispenses energy equivalent to a small power station.
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