Eric Bolling (Fox Business Channel's Follow the Money) test drove the
Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors.
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
batery is approximately 270 miles. It will take you 4 1/2 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 hold 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 only that
gets 32 mpg.
$3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car cost about $15,000 while the Volt costs
$46,000.
So Obama wants us to pay 3 times as much for a car that costs more that
7 times as much to run and takes 3 times as long to drive across country.
REALLY?
Here’s an excerpt on the subject from the NRDC’s (Natural Resources Defense Council*)
“Battery Chargers and Energy Efficiency, Summary of Findings and Recommendations”
These recent trends in the marketplace towards electronic portability have important
energy consequences. Although designers and engineers are extremely careful to save
energy when portable products, such as laptops and PDAs, are running off of the battery,
they often devote far less attention to how much energy is consumed when the product is
connected to the grid and charging its battery. As a result, these products are often
equipped with low efficiency power supplies (transformers) and inefficient charging
circuitry. The result is that 10 to 16 times more energy is often drawn from an AC outlet
in the charging process than can be retrieved from the charged batteries, indicating
active1 mode system efficiencies as low as 6 to 20% for AA battery chargers and cellular
phones.
1 Active mode is defined to be the mode in which the battery is being charged.
By contrast, the charging systems we have analyzed in laptop computers are highly
energy efficient, with system charging efficiencies of up to 70%.
Think the Volt makes sense?
Processing your mostly coal-powered recharging electricity supplied from the grid is not a 100% efficient enterprise, so the stated costs of recharging the Volt’s battery as reported in the article below are way too low. The batteries used in the Volt are Lithium-Ion, a type typically used in laptop computers, so the charger efficiency could be expected to be about 70%. That means it would take about 23 Kw to recharge a 16Kw battery pack to 100%, or $26.68 using the electricity cost cited, or $1.07 per mile (I do a lot better than that in my 7725-lb diesel Excursion, about $0.19 per mile at today’s fuel price, and can pull a 15,000 lb load and carry 8 pax and their baggage when I want to). For comparison, check out the VW Golf TDi diesel: 30MPG city, 42MPG highway EPA ratings, costs only a bit more than HALF the Volt, has a hugely longer service life (without mandatory battery replacement in the process; Volt battery estimated 2011 cost $8,000, max life 100K miles) and can outperform the Volt in any drag race, road race or top speed contest. Importantly, the VW also does not have the “Greenie-smug” stigma attached.
$1.16 per KWR? Really? What colorado company do you use for Power.
ReplyDeleteDid you misread that.. maybe it was 0.116 (11.6 cents) per KWr.
Denver rates are below the national average. And many other rates are cheaper. My electric rates, using Time-of-day use plan (and charging at night) are $.05 per kWh, drawing < 13kw (from the wall) for my full charge. With taxes and fees my charge is .70 to .80 per night, from which I'm getting 38-40 miles this winter (and 42-55 in the summer). I'm at about $.025 per mile. And none of that is going oversees to people that want to destroy our country or kill our soldiers.
If you want to call yourself a colorado conservative do the rest of us Colorado Conservatives a favor and learn to be fiscally accurate.
Wow. I do not think the author realizes how incorrect he is.
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to be making strongly opinionated claims, can you please back them up with actual numbers. Do you really pay $1.16 per kwh? The rest of the country pays about 12 times less than that on average. If you divide your numbers by 10 to 12 then you will be looking at the true picture of the economics of driving an electric vehicle.
ReplyDelete