Quote:
Originally Posted by Akrapovic
Nissan leaf has up to 30kWh battery. At 16 p per kWh, it'd cost £4.80 to charge it fully. Can do 107 miles on a charge say Nissan (lets bring it down to 100, because these numbers are never right). That makes it 4.8 p per mile.
Nissan Pulsar is around the same sized car. The most economic version is the 1.5 dCi. Nissan claim 74mpg, but real world reports are coming in at 58 mpg (which is still pretty good). Average price of diesel in the UK is 116.4 p per litre. The same 100 mile journey at 58 mpg, with fuel costing 116.4 p would cost you £9.12. That comes in at 9.1p per mile.
On your electricity cost, that makes the electric car half the price of the diesel for that journey. If you use a petrol Pulsar then the cost per mile rises to 13.2p per mile, and the gap is growing quickly.
It shouldn't be a surprise that it's cheaper to charge an electric car than fill one with petrol. The entire process of refining petrol, shipping it to petrol stations (which takes more petrol/diesel), and then running the petrol stations takes electricity and energy. So the companies providing this need to raise the price of their product to cope with these overheads. With a straight electric charge you cut out the refining, transportation and infrastructure costs which were inflating your petrol price, and get the electricity straight from the grid. You could argue the grid is an infrastructure cost, but you'd be paying that anyway since you live in a building with electricity, and you're still cutting out part of it as you're no longer funding others ability to pay for the grid. When you look at the bigger picture and the system as a whole, it makes sense that it's cheaper to charge an electric car.
|
If you take out the tax that only applies to fossil fuels (at the moment) how do the numbers look?
http://www.nextgreencar.com/car-tax/fuel-duty/
Nominally, using today's technology, the battery life for a Lithium battery is expected to be around 1000 charge cycles. It may be more. There is a chance that in some situations it may be less. Performance is very likely to degrade with time and number of charges but that may not be an issue here - nominally range would decline slowly
Using your Leaf figures (the Renault Zoe may do slightly better) 100 miles max per charge and 1000 charge cycles gives a useful life of 100k miles.
At that point one, presumably, scraps the car if the battery fails since replacements or exchanges for alternatives, if they exist, may not be cost effective ... but then things might change that would defer scrapping for another few years. Somehow I doubt it in the absence of retrofit autonomous capability.
Maybe fit a roll cage and go racing?
That said at the typical mileage that today's Leaf buyers might undertake the car could be over 20 years old by then ....
Batteries offer less benefits in colder climates and in colder weather although one can offset that by following the Norwegian model one assumes.
They are also somewhat challenged in hot climates, thus perhaps less desirable at any price south of the Pyrenees - which is a bit ironic given Spain's efforts with both wind and solar.
How that might effect deployment in, say, most of Africa might also be an interesting question.
If Nigeria takes on Shell's oil business as Shell pulls out and then transitions into a renewables company there may be strong resistance to going electric - even if at the same time solar panels have become so cheap and effective that they become a significant social changer in most of Africa where there is little or no existing infrastructure to oust.
Solar and batteries - but how to keep the batteries cool?
I recently read suggestions that no additional capacity is required to produce electricity for EVs since transitioning from ICE means the electricity consumption of refining plant reduces and with altered consumption in distribution, pretty much balances out the demand.
That may have some truth for countries with a lot of refining capability or excessive distribution costs.
However, seeking some numbers it became obvious that the bulk of refining energy is likely to come from internal sources (they are, after all, refining oil and making fuels, etc. ).
Large scale distribution of liquid fuels and gas is already piped in many places so in most of Europe the costs are reasonably controlled and probably on a par with building and maintaining an electricity grid.
Fast charging of a lot of EVs would almost certainly involve significant changes to the local distribution grids.
The National Grid predicts around 30% increase in demand for the electricity grid to achieve (from memory) circa 50% penetration of the transport demands. I can't recall if that included commercial and buses.
I would anticipate that most Governments and many car manufacturers are, at the moment, keen to see a rapid transition to electric powered vehicles. I therefore expect we will see legislation that reduced the advantages or convenience that fossil fuels appear to offer.
First they will come for diesel, as we have seen.
That will reduce the range advantage.
They can then make it more costly to run refuelling stations so that they become even fewer and further apart than they are now.
If they keep throughput capacity down they will start to match "recharging" times. Equality for all, business for the coffee shop.
I wonder if people might start to value the battery swapping concept at a premium price?