Every home is supplies with 240 volt service.You get two 120 volt busses in your breaker panel phased oppositely. with your alternating current on one side at+ while the opposite side is at - and switching back and forth 60 times a second. A circuit breaker connected between either side and ground is 110/120 and between the two sides is 220/240 volts. What determines the power to the house is amperage. When my house was upgraded from 60 amp to 100 amp many years ago a heavier wire had to be run down the side of my house. To go to 150 or 200, heavier wires and breaker panel would be needed.
Thr original wiring had no circuit breakers, just four 15 amp fuses.
As others have said, this has much misinformation. It was apparently written when the Volt was new and the car is now discontinued. It was not a full EV, as it required that gas engine after only a few miles.
Tesla home chargers are to be put on a 220v. line with up to a 60 amp circuit, with lower breaker values to 15 amps allowed, with lower charging rates. With a 60 amp breaker it will charge with up to 48 amps. Charging usually takes at most a few hours at 48amps, so it is not drawing much current most of the time. The local lines may well be able to handle this now.
Tesla chargers in the Northeast, at least, are typically in shopping plazas, gas stations and grocery stores. They charge 27 to 34 cents a kwh. Musk says he will never use the Superchargers as a profit center.
With respect to bcohen2010 who said about the decisions of politicians to eliminate ICE vehicles “the timeframe for this to take effect after they will have left office (and for many of them, after they will be deceased).” I don’t think this was a ploy so they would not have to face the consequences, I think it is an attempt at a realistic time frame; many of have children who will inherit the results. And what would you say about them if they said it should be done in 5 years?-I’m afraid I can imagine.
We seem to be rushing into electric vehicles without the infrastructure to support them. We don’t have enough clean electricity to power our homes on hot days. Where are we going to get all the clean energy to power all our cars, to say nothing about the transmission lines, transformers and substations. Also all the storage batteries and what about all the power losses that occur with batteries even when the cars are seldom driven.
As long as there are gas stations around, I will stick with ICE or at most a hybrid. 500 miles on a 5 minute fillup is hard to beat.
The infrastructure will grow as more people buy electric vehicles. In fact the infrastructure is growing FASTER then the sales of electric vehicles. There are electric charging stations that are rarely used.
Most people will be charging their vehicles at home during the night when electric use is low. That’s one major advantage electric vehicles have over ICE.
Any current gas station can be converted from pumping gas to charging cars without running any extra power to the gas-station. Gas stations use a lot of electricity already for the pumps and lights and other things that require power.
Electric car batteries don’t discharge at the same rate as your 12 volt battery. But again most people will be charging them at home so probably won’t be an issue.
True…and a good valid argument to keep driving ICE vehicle. But 500 miles on a 5 minute recharge will probably be here in 5-10 years.
The electric power companies in some locations had problems when air conditioning became popular in the 1960s. Some communities had rolling blackouts or brownouts. The power companies beefed up equipment and to recoup some of the investment, pushed the use of electric heat in the winter season.
In my home HVAC system, in the cooler seasons, an air to air heat pump heats the house until the outside temperature drops below 40 degree, at which point a gas furnace takes over.
I see more use of geothermal energy here in East Central Indiana. I had my house built 32 years ago. If I were to have a house built today, I would have a geothermal energy system and have solar roof panels.
Our electric rates are the same no matter what time of day. We also have a lot of cloud cover and I depend on maple trees on the south side of my house to reduce the load on my A/C while letting in a lot of winter sunlight to warm my Family room/dining room.
Also I don’t have much time left for payback. I can see a EV for amulti car family
Or 63% empty depending on your outlook. I never subscribed to trying to fool yourself by calling the glass half full. Makes no difference what you call it, there was only a half glass.
@keith I am glad to know that these inverter heat pumps exist. I was on a committee at the church I attend. We had one large space heated and cooled with air to.air heat pumps. The rest of the building has a gas fired hot water boiler. The heat pumps were fine until the weather got cool so the electric resistance coils had to supplement the heat. The electric bills shot.up.immensely. We removed the electric resistance coils, upgraded the gas fired hot water boiler, ran pipes to the HVAC units and installed hot water coils. Our savings in electrical energy by switching the electric coils to hot water coils cut.our electric bills by $6000 annually.
I know if I get an EV that my electric bill will increase. Some years back, I had an opportunity to buy an EV called a Citicar. It needed the batteries replaced, bit the batteries were lead acid so they weren’t outrageously expensive. I was going to install a separate power meter and measure kilowatt-hours consumed by the Citicar. I wanted to find out whether there was a real savings at the time using an EV around town and commuting 2 miles each way to work over using my 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The one thing that bothered me about the Citicar was that the cabin was heated with a propane powered heater. I do remember the time period when a heater was an option and many motorists had a Stewart-Warner gasoline heater installed. The gasoline heater really decreased the mpg. Since I don’t like to freeze in the winter, I wasn’t certain that there would be a savings running the Citicar instead of my Oldsmobile Cutlass when the cost of the propane was figured in.
my son is a Electrician. he started working for a solar company about a year and a half ago. he just became a manager. he came over yesterday and and we were talking and he told me that they use Tesla batteries for those that want back-up batteries. he said most people dont put in the back-up batteries. I was kind of surprised by that.
I suggest one not pass along material like this without knowing its source, the the author’s background, and making at least a cursory effort to verify its salient claims. This article contains glaring half-truths, absolute errors, and unsubstantial claims that even the most meager effort at fact checking would have uncovered. There are many political, economic, and technical decisions that must be made on the way to achieving a sustainable energy system, but we must get along with the process, and expeditiously. Pieces like the contribute nothing to the solution.
Also, a lot of states force the electric utility to buy solar generated electricity. Around here, you get about a third of what you pay per kWh, but at least that’s something. It’s also paid once annually.