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Caribou

Time traveler
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I got this in an email from a friend. It's a short read and I found it informative. No electric cars for me.



Electric Cars - Are they great or what?

THE PINEHURST PRESS NEWS & VIEWS

Interesting Take on Electric Cars

As an engineer I love the electric vehicle technology However, I
have been troubled for a longtime 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. You should all take a look
at this short article.

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!
In case you were thinking of buying hybrid or an electric car:
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 service. 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 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 $25,000 while the Volt costs
$46,000 plus. So the Canadian Government wants loyal Canadians not to
do the math, but simply pay twice 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.
 
In Washington electric vehicles have to pay road taxes based on miles driven. I don't know the per mile rate but knowing our state government I would bet it was more than a similar gas vehicle.
 
I got this in an email from a friend. It's a short read and I found it informative. No electric cars for me.
. 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...
The gasoline powered car costs about $25,000 while the Volt costs
$46,000 plus. So the Canadian Government wants loyal Canadians not to
do the math, but simply pay twice as much for a car, that costs
more than seven times as much to run,
99% of that is true.
But I have to throw a flag for the other side when it comes to the Chevy Volt.
The Volt hasn't been manufactured since February 2019 and it does not sell for $46,000.
It was a failure though once the stink got out about how bad it sucked.
Yes, the road taxes will be paid.
Like Texas is finding out, a fixed-rate becoming a 'variable-rate' can come back to bite you.
 
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Many years ago I worked in the physics labs at U of Pitt. I was surrounded by people preoccupied by Energy , Gibbs free energy etc..

I was considering an energy source for a battle bot. We decided the energy per unit mass with petroleum far exceeded any other

Continued..
 
Many years ago I worked in the physics labs at U of Pitt. I was surrounded by people preoccupied by Energy , Gibbs free energy etc..

I was considering an energy source for a battle bot. We decided the energy per unit mass with petroleum far exceeded any other

Continued..
Form of energy.

For my part I will ride out the electric route and wait for the dust to settle.

Ben
 
I've had a fascination with electric cars since the 1980's. But the finances never seem to work. Even hybrids generally raise an eyebrow for me, though I have had hybrid rentals that I really liked driving.

Batteries are expensive and not reliable enough to be expected to last the lifetime of the car. And the cost to replace is often the price of a brand new engine, which is hard to swallow on any car. Regular old gas burners often get 300k to 500k on an engine if taken care of. Not gonna get that out of any battery that I know of.

I've often thought that I would like to be able to charge an electric vehicle with power produced on my own homestead, whether that be solar or hydro, it's hard to get excited about charging from the grid. Then again, we don't travel that much and can easily sit for days or even weeks between trips to town so there is no real reason why a charge would have to happen in a specific overnight period in normal times, for us.

I still oogle over them. But buying one, not likely. Probably the closest I'd consider might be an electric golf cart. Then again, gas ones are pretty reliable... without the need for new batteries every so often.

I've been waiting for the "dust to settle" for 40 years. Getting old enough that it doesn't mean a whole lot to me anymore. In another 25 years, if I'm still here and on the upper side of the sod, I probably won't drive anything anymore, save perhaps a riding mower or small tractor or golf cart or UTV... if they'll let me. It's kinda like that "global warming" thing that was gonna kill us all. Probably die of old age long before that.
 
I've had a fascination with electric cars since the 1980's. But the finances never seem to work. Even hybrids generally raise an eyebrow for me, though I have had hybrid rentals that I really liked driving.

Batteries are expensive and not reliable enough to be expected to last the lifetime of the car. And the cost to replace is often the price of a brand new engine, which is hard to swallow on any car. Regular old gas burners often get 300k to 500k on an engine if taken care of. Not gonna get that out of any battery that I know of.

I've often thought that I would like to be able to charge an electric vehicle with power produced on my own homestead, whether that be solar or hydro, it's hard to get excited about charging from the grid. Then again, we don't travel that much and can easily sit for days or even weeks between trips to town so there is no real reason why a charge would have to happen in a specific overnight period in normal times, for us.

I still oogle over them. But buying one, not likely. Probably the closest I'd consider might be an electric golf cart. Then again, gas ones are pretty reliable... without the need for new batteries every so often.

I've been waiting for the "dust to settle" for 40 years. Getting old enough that it doesn't mean a whole lot to me anymore. In another 25 years, if I'm still here and on the upper side of the sod, I probably won't drive anything anymore, save perhaps a riding mower or small tractor or golf cart or UTV... if they'll let me. It's kinda like that "global warming" thing that was gonna kill us all. Probably die of old age long before that.

How often do Tesla batteries need to be replaced?

Given that the Tesla batteries are manufactured to last between 300,000 and 500,000 miles, replacement should not be a worry that Tesla owners have. The estimated cost to replace a Tesla Model 3 battery is somewhere in the range of $3,000 $7,000.

Jim
 
In looking at Lithium for a stock investment for a friend I ran across some articles about new fuels for internal combustion engines and they were saying not to be so quick to go the EV direction, the truth is that there is a lot of on going research into longer lasting batteries and as it is, those types of batteries tend to be very expensive at the moment, this, so far, is a long term project that has to go hand in hand with better electrical power systems and upgrading of power lines.
 
In looking at Lithium for a stock investment for a friend I ran across some articles about new fuels for internal combustion engines and they were saying not to be so quick to go the EV direction, the truth is that there is a lot of on going research into longer lasting batteries and as it is, those types of batteries tend to be very expensive at the moment, this, so far, is a long term project that has to go hand in hand with better electrical power systems and upgrading of power lines.
Correct. Remember when they had to put ethanol in all the gasoline because there wasn't enough oil? There went all the corn. And decades later we all still pay to subsidize the $3.00 per gallon price of the ethanol they pollute our gasoline with to this day.
brickwall100.gif

And it don't matter how long batteries last if you ain't got no way to "fill 'em up".
 
We bought a lithium ion battery from Millertech. It's got a full replacement 5 yr on it. We charge it on our solar panel and it stays inside, ready to hook up to the inverter for husband's oxygen and c pap machine. I love that it's very lightweight...same size as the marine batteries, but alot lighter. And has grab handles.
 
The drive behind Electric cars is not about cost or energy efficiency, it is about greenhouse gas reductions and global warming.

The current administration does not want to hear about facts or reality. To them this is a religious crusade to save the planet… anything that produces CO2 is bad….

But they fail to realize that the real problem is people, we make CO2, we use energy, we eat food, and our numbers are growing faster than the planet can support. The liberals solution is to make people use less energy, use low carbon energy, use low carbon intensive food (no meat), and to be good troopers who don’t ask why? During the last year the U.S.A. lost 500,000 people (0.15% of the population) and half the country was locked down for a year, this reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 11%.

Maybe the China Flu was just the Chinese way of trying to save the planet….

Sorry, became a rant......
 
During the last year the U.S.A. lost 500,000 people (0.15% of the population)

But... but... but... According to the statistics I'm able to quickly lay my hands on, the birth rate was 11.990 per 1,000 people, for 2020. Hmmm... a little quick math and that means that we had an increase by people havin' babies of a little under 4,000,000.

OK, so not everyone who died were part of that 500,000. A completely normal year, according to the CDC will have around 2.8 million people die.

As much as we see the panic over people dying, there are more people here now than there were a year ago. And that doesn't even consider immigration.

FWIW...
 
But... but... but... According to the statistics I'm able to quickly lay my hands on, the birth rate was 11.990 per 1,000 people, for 2020. Hmmm... a little quick math and that means that we had an increase by people havin' babies of a little under 4,000,000.

OK, so not everyone who died were part of that 500,000. A completely normal year, according to the CDC will have around 2.8 million people die.

As much as we see the panic over people dying, there are more people here now than there were a year ago. And that doesn't even consider immigration.

FWIW...
According to ABC news (questionable source at best) "Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019."

Also the US population has been increasing by just over 2 million per year, in 2020 it increased by 1 million, so the population growth did slow, but I think it was from mature adults and not infant mortality, so the decline in energy consumers was larger.

Doesn't really matter much, even after COVID-19 the population is still growing, so we need something more drastic if we want to control the climate change.....
 
I tried to do something about climate change but it seems they don't make thermostats big enough for the sun.
 
Doesn't really matter much, even after COVID-19 the population is still growing, so we need something more drastic if we want to control the climate change.....

Covid isn't over. The first phase of it is winding down. Phase two, vaccinations, are winding up. Millions vaccinated, millions more in line for the jab. In my opinion, that is gonna come back to bite a LOT of people. Oh, it may not look like covid deaths. It may look a whole lot more like what happens when someone dies of Lupus. Or it may even be the next strain of a common flu that comes rambling through that the now "covidized" immune system will over-react to and kill the patient.

Hope I'm wrong.
 
We got a call from the doctors office while I was at court today. They wanted to schedule our vaccinations. My wife asked if they had any openings after 2035. They got the hint.
 
Covid isn't over. The first phase of it is winding down. Phase two, vaccinations, are winding up. Millions vaccinated, millions more in line for the jab. In my opinion, that is gonna come back to bite a LOT of people. Oh, it may not look like covid deaths. It may look a whole lot more like what happens when someone dies of Lupus. Or it may even be the next strain of a common flu that comes rambling through that the now "covidized" immune system will over-react to and kill the patient.

Hope I'm wrong.
Is it just me or there a lot people around here that hope they are wrong?

Imagine the average lottery players saying that.

Ben
 
Covid is a non-event next time around.
 
We got a call from the doctors office while I was at court today. They wanted to schedule our vaccinations. My wife asked if they had any openings after 2035. They got the hint.
You are blessed with a wife like that!

Tell her Ben gives her a thumbs up.

Ben
 
I am indeed!
I hope she sticks around for another 1930 years.
 
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