Fw: Electric Cars. Understand ?

This is the first time I have seen an economic comparison
but tends to give verification to my own opinions. Same goes
true for the push to CNG (compressed natural gas). Bob
PS: Had to re-format to 'plain text' for space.

----- Original Message -----
From: Jim Solomon
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2018 2:37 PM

Subject: Fwd: Electric Cars. Understand ?

As an engineer, I love the electric vehicle technology. However, I have been troubled
for a long time by the fact that the electrical energy to keep the batteries charged has to
come from the grid and that means more power generation and a huge increase in the distribution
infrastructure. Whether generated from coal, gas, oil, wind or sun, installed generation
capacity is limited. A friend sent me the following that says it very well. Perhaps this is
the data the President has that led him to say GM is making a mistake tooling for all electric
cars and that GM should perhaps give back the subsidies. Something very odd going on here.
Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile of those things has
never been discussed. All you ever heard was the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention
of the cost of electricity 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 they're being shoved down our throats. Glad somebody finally put
engineering and math to paper.
At a neighborhood BBQ, I was talking to a neighbor, 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 services. The average house is equipped with
100 amp service. On our small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure
would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla, each. 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 batteries 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 American
Government wants loyal Americans 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.