Tag Archives: #ElectricVehicles

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The Feds create the demand, and then give private investors money to increase the supply!

I had previously noted, on Christmas Eve of 2021, that I spotted six Tesla TSLA: (%) charging stations at the Wawa at the junction of Pennsylvania Route 61 and Interstate 78. Five of the chargers were unoccupied, while a sixth was blocked by a mid-1990s, gasoline-engine beater car, using the charging area as a parking space. 🙂

Alas! That was the last time I’ve been to a Wawa, and as someone who truly appreciates Wawa coffee, that is a tragedy. I have some hope, in that Wawa is expanding into the Bluegrass State, and there’s a permit application for construction of a Wawa at the junction of Interstate 75 and Athens-Boonesboro Road, about 30 miles from me, but someplace I could stop on my way to our daughter’s house.

At any rate, I was thinking about those six unused Tesla chargers when I read this, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Electric vehicle drivers can soon get a Shorti and a charge-up at some Wawas

The federal infrastructure law allocates $7.5 billion for new public charging stations for electric vehicles. Pennsylvania expects $171 million.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Monday, August 21, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation recently awarded $34 million in federal grants for businesses to build fast-charging stations for electric vehicles in 35 counties across the state, part of a Federal Highway Administration program to spur the development of EV infrastructure.

Note that this is not a federal loan program, but specifically “federal grants,” for businesses to build commercial plug-in electric car charging stations, on which they hope to turn a profit.

Outlets are planned at the massive Breezewood gas-and-go junction of Interstate 70 and the turnpike, a number of motels, existing charging hubs built by Tesla and other suppliers — and around here, Wawas in Bristol, Horsham, Lansdale, Philadelphia, and Woodlyn.

The 2021 bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $7.5 billion over five years to help make EV charging more accessible nationally. Pennsylvania expects to get about $172 million.

“The electric-vehicle fleet is growing in Pennsylvania — there will be more tomorrow than today and more the day after that,” Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll said at an announcement event outside Scranton on Aug. 15.

Why, I have to ask, are our tax dollars being distributed to install commercial electric car charging stations? If people choose to buy plug-in electric vehicles, there will be a growing demand which will cause entrepreneurs to build such stations, using their own money, in order to turn a profit.

Pennsylvania had 47,400 fully electric vehicles registered at the end of 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center. New Jersey had 87,030.

With a population of 9,261,699, New Jersey is less populous than Pennsylvania’s Census Bureau guesstimated 12,972,008, yet the Garden State has nearly twice as many electric vehicles. I guess that proves that Pennsylvanians are smarter than Jerseyites. Having spent some time in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I shudder to think what it would be like, worrying about a steadily declining battery charge. You can get a five-gallon can of gasoline, but not a five-gallon can of electricity!

Lack of charging infrastructure has been a barrier to sales of EVs, along with high sticker prices relative to vehicles that run on fossil fuels. In turn, that complicates the ambitious federal goal that 50% of the nation’s new cars and trucks be electric by 2030, in order to reduce carbon emissions that cause global warming. . . . .

A major goal of the EV charging program is to use federal dollars to stimulate private investment in the technology, as well as in batteries and vehicles, said Andrew Rogers, deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

“The ecosystem of charging that’s already underway is really impressive,” Rogers said in an interview. “The private sector has just stepped up in ways that have demonstrated the catalyzing effect of the law.”

If the private sector has “just stepped up” in the way Mr Rogers stated, why does the federal government need to tax poorer people to prop up wealthier investors?

Further down:

Since the Biden administration took office in 2021, the number of publicly available charging stations has increased 40%, with the private sector investing $130 billion in that effort, and developing longer-lasting EV batteries and production lines for the vehicles, Rogers said.

Last month, seven automakers from Detroit, Asia, and Europe joined in an effort to build 30,000 fast-charging ports in the United States and Canada that will work with any brand of electric vehicle

But if the private sector have invested $130 billion in these efforts, why does the federal government have to do this? Oh, wait, the newspaper gave us the answer:

The companies said one of their main goals was to qualify for federal subsidies for charging infrastructure.

Translation: supping at the federal trough to make money for private investors.

I can see why Wawa wants in on this program. While just about the only thing I ever bought at Wawa is their coffee, the convenience store also sells hoagies, snacks, and just about anything else a traveler might want to eat-and-go. The newspaper article claimed that, “Fast chargers can replenish a drained battery in 10 to 30 minutes,” but most sources state that it can take an hour or longer, unless the stop is to recharge just enough to make it home safely. For a business like Wawa, people having to sit around for half an hour or longer means more coffee, more sodas, and more hoagies sold.

If a business wants to add public charging stations, that’s absolutely fine with me; it’s none of my business. But when the federal government is throwing the dollars it taxes away from me for something the private sector has already been doing, then yeah, it becomes my business! And I say not just no, but Hell no!

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The Patricians just don’t understand how the plebeians live! The elites push policies that will affect the working class in ways the policymakers just can't comprehend

As the patricians try to force the plebeians into plug-in electric vehicles, another thought came to me as I got our electric bills: it isn’t just gasoline prices which have increased, but electricity costs as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing propaganda site:

    Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

    Energy charges are set to increase on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. There are ways to save. But beware the risks.

    by Andrew Maykuth | November 28, 2021

    Energy costs for electric customers are going up by as much as 50% across Pennsylvania next week, the latest manifestation of across-the-board energy price increases impacting gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas.

    Eight Pennsylvania electric utilities are set to increase their energy prices on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. Peco Energy, which serves Philadelphia and its suburbs, will boost its energy charge by 6.4% on Dec. 1, from 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour to about 7 cents per kWh. Energy charges account for about half of a residential bill.

    PPL Electric Utilities, the Allentown company that serves a large swath of Pennsylvania including parts of Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties, will impose a 26% increase on residential energy costs on Dec. 1, from about 7.5 cents per kWh to 9.5 cents per kWh. That’s an increase of $40 a month for an electric heating customer who uses 2,000 kWh a month.

    Pike County Light & Power, which serves about 4,800 customers in Northeast Pennsylvania, will increase energy charges by 50%, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

    “All electric distribution companies face the same market forces as PPL Electric Utilities,” PPL said in a statement. Each Pennsylvania utility follows a different PUC-regulated plan for procuring energy from power generators, which explains why some customers are absorbing the hit sooner rather than later, it said.

There’s more at the original.

2022 F-150 charging in a lot nicer garage than I have. It shows you just how much money you have to have to buy one of the fool things. Photo from a Ford sales site. Click to enlarge.

I just got my sparktricity bill, and with most, though not all, of our heating on it, it’s $325.73 for the house and $30.11 for the shop[1]The garage/shop is not heated.. Now, imagine if we were driving plug-in Chevy Dolts, or, for me, a plug-in Ford F-150 Lightning[2]My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.: all of the electric charging for the month would be coming in one monthly bill! It will be argued that that might still be a bit less than gasoline, but when a month’s worth of your driving costs comes all at once, that can be quite the shock. Yes, we have the money, and the discipline, to handle that, but when I see these ‘payday loan’ places — and they certainly seem to have metastasized in poor eastern Kentucky — you know that there are a whole lot of people who are not living just paycheck to paycheck, but from paycheck to not quite the next paycheck. Do these people have the money and discipline to save up for that next big electric bill?

We bought a house for my sister-in-law, and got her electric bill — from a different provider — which was $462.80. The house we bought for her is total electric, so that includes the range and water heater, which our bill does not.

Those bills were for February, a cold winter month, so they’ll decrease as spring springs, but I can imagine what it would be like if there were a couple hundred more bucks tacked on to charge electric vehicles. This is something the left, which tell us how wonderful it would be to go all-electric, never consider: Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have plenty of money, and a big electric bill would, to them, be certainly manageable, but the Patricians just don’t understand the lives, the economics, and the struggles of the working class.

More, it is well known that cold weather decreases both range and charging speed in plug-in electric vehicles. You’ll have to leave your Tesla plugged in longer, and you won’t get as many miles out of it, meaning that it will cost you more in your electric bill to charge your EV in winter, the same time as your heating costs are high.

In 2019, before the panicdemic, the Federal Reserve reported that “Nearly 40 percent of Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve — a stark reminder of many people’s financial insecurity even amid solid economic growth.” Yet the people who could handle such an expense are trying to proscribe a ‘solution’ to global warming climate change that would drastically change how the working class would have to handle things . . . if they could at all.

How many Kentuckians, how many working class people, are going to get their electricity shut off because they don’t have the money, or money-management skills, to pay for the plug-in electric vehiclesinto which President Biden and the activists want to force people?

References

References
↑1 The garage/shop is not heated.
↑2 My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.
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When a credentialed media article gives numbers, it’s always wisest to check the math

Screen capture from the Weather Channel, February 12, 2022, showing a woman getting the charging cord for her car, in the weeds, while wearing flip flops for shoes. Note the dilapidated building, complete with broken window, to which the charger is attached. Video provided to Weather Channel by Plug In America.

As our regular readers — both of them! — know, I have not been a fan of the Brandon Biden Administration’s plans to mandate that all new vehicles sold in the United States be zero-emission by 2035. The technology is not ready, and the problems many people will have in charging their plug-in electric cars will be enormous. Those who do not have a garage or secure parking area in which they can install at home charging units will have to depend on commercial chargers, which are very time consuming — it can take an hour or more to charge an electric vehicle, as opposed to five minutes to fill up your tank with gasoline — and more expensive than gasoline.

There are, however, some applications in which plug-in electric vehicles could be practical. William Teach noted that Biden Administration is planning to replace the entire federal government’s 600,000-strong fleet of vehicles with plug-in electrics by 2035. If we’re talking about electric vehicles which will be parked at federal facilities, there will doubtlessly be private contractors being paid to install overnight charging stations for them. Assuming that they are all driven less than range, and all parked back at the fed garage/parking lot, they can at least be practical.

Now comes the School District of Philadelphia:

    Electric school buses are coming to the Philly School District, which plans to replace its diesel fleet in 10 years

    Electric buses have a higher price tag than diesel buses — $365,000 per bus compared to $150,000. But they save money in the long run.

    by Kristen A Graham | Friday, February 18, 2022

    Electric school buses will soon begin rolling on city streets as the Philadelphia School District starts the process of greening its transportation fleet.

    The school system has purchased five electric buses and ordered six more. The 11 electric buses, which will begin carrying students this spring and summer, represent less than 1% of the district’s fleet of buses.

    “We understand the impact that gas emissions has on student health and we’re committed to leading the way to reducing emissions to positively impact health and wellness in our communities,” Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said Friday at a news conference at the district’s North Broad Street garage. . . . .

    Electric buses have a higher price tag than diesel buses — $365,000 per bus compared with $150,000. But they save money in the long run, said Teresa Flemming, executive director of transportation services. She estimated each will save the district about $5,000 annually. Once the entire fleet is electric, the district will save between $1 million and $1.5 million annually on fuel costs, officials estimate.

There’s more at the original.

The guesstimated fuel savings, of course, are based on guesstimates as to how much electricity will cost. But if the electric buses cost $365,000, rather than $150,000 for diesel buses, and the annual savings from operating the buses are $5,000 per bus, it would take 43 years per bus to break even. Does the School District of Philadelphia keep its buses for an average of 43 years?

Kristen Graham, the article author, didn’t do that very simple math. That’s not exactly good journalism.