Oregon to Buy 22 Electrical Outlets for $90K Each

Jeff Barnard at The Washington Times:

Charging stations that can fill the batteries of electric cars in 30 minutes or less are moving from the city to the country.

Oh boy! Only 30 minutes to fill up—every 50 miles! Oh one more thing:

They will be able to handle only one car at a time.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• Distance between stations: 50 miles.
• Charge time: 20% to 80% charge in 30 minutes (increase charge level by 60%).
• Simultaneous charges per station: one.
• Total cost: $2 million.
• Profitability: The article neglects to mention if the charging stations will be profitable.¹

So, let’s say you’d like to make a 300 mile trip. In a typical gasoline-powered family sedan (say a Honda Accord), if you averaged 50 MPH (pretty typical on an interstate including stops for fuel, the bathroom, etc), you’d make the trip in six hours. If you averaged 34 MPG², you would use 8.8 gallons of gasoline, about $33 at current fuel prices.

Let’s make the same trip in a Nissan LEAF. Assuming you leave your house fully charged, a 300 mile trip would require at the very least five charges, but more likely six, because you don’t want to charge up at 250 miles in and arrive at your destination with a near-drained battery, so you’ll likely charge up at 300 miles, so that your car has a charge when you’re ready to leave. Six charges at 30 minutes each means you’re stopped for three full hours waiting for your vehicle to charge. Hopefully no one is already using the charging terminal, because that doubles the amount of time you have to wait. At a gas station, if all of the pumps are full, you need to wait about three to five minutes, tops.

My understanding is that electric cars consume something like $0.05 per mile in electricity. However those numbers are based off of charging the vehicle at night, during off-peak hours. Unless you’re traveling at night, you’re going to pay more for your electricity.³ Let’s use $0.06 per mile. You’ll probably pay more than that, but let’s be conservative. That amounts to $18 in electricity.

So in summary, a typical 300 mile trip takes 6 hours and costs $33 in a typical gas-powered sedan. That same trip takes a minimum of 9 hours in an all-electric car and costs $18. That’s a delta of three hours and $15, at best. Which means when I’m using an electric car I’m paying myself five bucks an hour to sit around and wait for my car to charge. That’s well below minimum wage in my state (and probably most states).

I wonder why electric cars aren’t taking off?