EDIT: I have deleted my original post that started this discussion thread.
I failed to do due diligence in verifying the article’s claims thereby posting highly biased, erroneous information.
My apologies. I shall be more careful going forward.
Marnet
A lot of half truths and misconceptions in that article:
NOBODY pays $1.16/kwh. I pay 9 cents/kwh.
Most homes have 100 to 200 amp service, not 75.
You don’t have to stop to charge up a Volt on a trip, just add gas…
Really a useless, misleading article.
Don’t get me wrong, there are issues with EVs. But this article is just wrong.
I may be wrong but I think this rticle may have originated in Canada and is referencing electric costs in Canadian dollars. Several friends I have in various parts of Canada have mentioned electric rates that seem far higher than in the U.S.
But as you note, power rates are typically much lower, houses are not wired for 75 watts, and hybrids normally go much farther on a charge and can simply be refueled for the ICE to keep going.
The greater issues arise with fully EV and most of those issues are being addressed.
A great issue with any discussions over any innovations, changes, and challenges to what is familiar in life is sorting through information, misinformation, distortions, and varying opinions, all which abound.
We are at 13.6 cents per KWH. Given rolling brownouts in places, I would look at dependable electricity for where I live.
See the thread on Ford going electric.
With China controlling the majority of lithium from Afghanistan, what could go wrong with batteries from China? Or is that the plan in the first place?
Given how foolish our current crop of politicians have become, and how eager they are to advance their (flawed) ideologies regardless of the ultimate cost, this does not surprise me. It is also very interesting how most of the politicians who are proposing ideas which are certain to be very difficult and expensive to achieve–such as the elimination of fossil fuel powered vehicles–have set the timeframe for this to take effect after they will have left office (and for many of them, after they will be deceased).
In other words, whether or not one believes that eliminating fossil fuel powered vehicles is a good idea, one thing we can all agree on is that it will be very difficult and expensive to make this happen. One other thing we can agree on is that the politicians who have issued these edicts have decided to have them take effect long after they will be out of office–so as always, the younger generation will be stuck with the cost and aggravation.
Just my opinion… the U.S. should have done what was needed to be as energy self sufficient as posdible many, many decades ago. And critical industries self sufficient.
I’m not an isolationist. But preserving self sufficiency in critical components is good national defense and good economic sense.
I now yield the soapbox to the next speaker in line. 
Average cost of electricity in Canada is 17.9 cents per kWhr, the average cost in the US is 13.3 cents per kWhr. This pass-around has the electric price at 15X because most people have NO CLUE what they are actually paying. Simple calculation… your power bill divided by the kWhrs used in a month. It will vary a bit since there are fixed costs and taxes that don’t change month-to-month.
In northern homes without AC and with nat gas or propane heat, 100 AMP service isn’t entirely uncommon. A decent size charger needs 30 to 50 amps and nighttime power usage would allow that in these homes. Likely the utilities’ grip supply will have an issue meeting the demand in these areas.
Maybe not in the high-load AC filled southern homes with 200 amp service and electric everything. Like me. My max draw is early evening when the AC is running, the stove is on and then the water heater. Nighttime load drops to a low demand on the AC. Unless, of course, those 2 car families are charging BOTH overnight drawing 100 amps plus the homes. Solar is NOT solving that problem, now is it?
The reference I found has average Canadian cost at $0.18/kwh, in Canadian $.
The most expensive electricity currently worldwide is Germany @ $0.39/kwh
Maybe the author of this article lives on a different planet.
I find this discussion interesting about the amperage capacity of the electric service in homes today. The house my parents bought in 1948 ran on one 20 ampere fuse located in a box on the front porch. The kitchen range was gas, the house was heated with coal, although there was a blower on the furnace. We were in well water with a pressure pump and there was a sumo pump in the basement. All was fine except on wash days when my dad would substitute a 30 ampere fuse to account for the extra current draw of the washing machine. The previous owners of the house had an electric kitchen range. One leg of the 240 volts came from the leg that supplied the power to the house and the other leg of the 240 volt service had, as the only load, the kitchen electric range. My dad had the service increased to 60 amperes. My mother replaced the gas range with an electric range. We added a clothes dryer, a freezer and a tube type television set to the load. Yet, I never remember having s fuse blow I the 17 years my parents lived in that house.
In 1962, I rented a room in a house when I was in graduate school that only had 120 volt electric service and again everything ran on one 20 ampere fuse. The landlord and his wife lived in the house as well. Whole I lived there, the landlord switched from coal to gas heat and the new furnace did have a blower motor. If the refrigerator and the furnace fan came on at the same time, the fuse would blow. The landlord wanted to up the fuse size to 30 amperes. I bought a slow blow 20 ampere fuse and that solved the problem.
With today’s more efficient appliances and cathode ray tube televisions replaced with flat sçreen sets that use much less power, and vacuum tube high fidelity equipment replaced with solid state electronics, 150 to 200 ampere service should be sufficient to power battery chargers for EVs.
I really don’t see the increased demand for recharging the batteries of EVs causing a problem within homes with 150-200 ampere electric service. Providing the power to houses to recharge the batteries on EVs may be the real problem.
And plus, it forgets that we faced the same hypothetical problem when the ICE car was coming around. It’s not like we had a Texaco on every corner in 1895. But you didn’t see people saying (or at least if they did, no one recorded it and they died before they could bore us with it) “well we can’t possibly ever replace the horse with the car because if every horse user switched to cars there wouldn’t be enough gas stations!”
There weren’t enough oil refineries or gas stations for the current ICE fleet in 1895. Then we built oil refineries and gas stations because they were needed. The same thing’s gonna happen with electric cars. If we need more electric infrastructure, we’ll build it.
I’ve got 200 amp service. The only reason I have a couple slots left in the panel is because I ran a sub panel in the garage. I’ve got a 50 amp 220 circuit for the welder and a 30 amp 120 for the other welder, along with about 3 20 amp 120s for other uses in the garage. While I’ve never had a problem, charging one or two cars would be like running the welder full tilt all night. And I know some guys with a 220 table saw. It is just plain is a lot of juice in a single family residential home. Like I said before though, let the market make the choice not a bunch of lobbyists,
Well this is not your great grandfather’s 1895 though and the market handled it pretty well. I suspect though that the real push is for the utopian view of everyone living in high rise apartments and using mass transit. The vision is not increased freedom and mobility like in 1895.
Agree 100% leave the politics out of it.
It’s not the individual homes that are going to be the problem.
It’s going to be the substations that supply power to the whole community, can they handle the load if every house in that community charged a car at the same time?
The article is full of holes. But no matter what size your breaker panel is, it does NOT determine the size of the service you are getting from the power company. That is determined by the transformer that serves your house.
Most residential services have a 15 kVA transformer which is 240v 62.5 Amp. Some subdivisions and urban homes share a larger transformer, up to about 300 amps, 240V. I’ve seen up to 8 homes share a transformer that size, they usually are the green pad mounted type instead of the gray pole mounts.
But infrastructure will come as EV’s become more numerous, just as gas stations and roads bloomed on the landscape as cars and trucks increased in number.
The real elephant in the room is not the infrastructure issue. The real elephant is that gasoline and other volatiles are a hazardous waste by-product of oil refining. Oil refining provides so many products that are important to us like plastics, textiles, lubricants etc. As long as we want those other products, oil will be refined and gasoline will be produced.
I believe in the end, there will be a balance of EV’s and ICEV’s. Almost all multi-vehicle homes will have a mix of both. Single vehicle households will probably have a hybrid or plug in hybrid. This will make the most economic sense in the long run.
When my parents built a fairly simple home in 1960 my mom insisted on 240 rather than the standard 120 most homes in Tulsa were being built with because she wanted extra outlets in every room so she could plug in lamps, vacuum cleaner, etc. easily. And although we had gas stove, clothes dryer, hot water heater, and furnace, she had the house wired to be able to switch over to electric for any of those gas appliances if ever wanted. The architect, builder, and my dad thought she was crazy as well as her insisting on having a laundry room inside rather than the laundry machines in the garage. There were even multiple outlets in the garage so current owners (no pun intended) could easily plug in an ICEV or EV vehicle or two.
@Marnet I am surprised that 120 volt service was the standard in Tulsa as late as 1960. I owned a hoi built in 1947 that was built with 220 volt service as was every house in the addition. This was an addition of inexpensive houses built for service personnel returning from WW II. My house originally had 60 ampere 220 volt service. The service panel had a disconnect pullout with cartridge fuses, an electric range pullout with cartridge fuses and four screw in fuses for lights and 110 volt outlets and ceiling lights. There were three wires running from the pole to the meter. The voltage across the two “hot” wires was 240 volts and the voltage from each hot wire to the third “neutral” wires was 120 volts. I am surprised that in 1960 houses built in Tulsa still had two wire 120 volt service. The house in which I had a room while in graduate school that only had 120 volt two wire service was built in the 1920s.
I have a 200 amp service and 25amp gfci in the bathroom for my wifes blow drier, Gotta keep the ladies happy. 15 amp was not enough
Yes, but we weren’t replacing a national fleet’s fuel supply with a fuel supply that is already in use for other things back then.
I think we need to establish the fuel supply (grid) before we convert to EV’s. We don’t need to establish it 100%. But I think we ought to establish a 25% or so nationwide “EV grid” before we start putting a lot of EV’s on the road. Have Tesla pay for it lol. They’re getting quite a bit of carbon points kickbacks from other auto manufacturers anyway, I have read. Probably the only thing keeping Tesla in the black. I believe that and CAFE are the reason Ford and others are investing in EV’s. That article VC posted said Ford’s take rate for EV’s is like 1 or 2 percent of sales currently. But they estimate it’ll be 50% by 2030, I believe it said. Where does that math come from? Either because it’s an upcoming mandate or Ford is full of beans. If we are going to be 50% EV’s (new sales) in less than 9 years, we better get some more infrastructure in place. And no, I do not want to pay for it.