Will electricity prices start to kill off EV's?

[Evanivitch]

wormus said:

My brother was telling me a couple a weeks ago that when he was travelling though France, there was a long queue to use the EV chargers, whilst all the petrol pumps were free to use. I couldn’t be doing with that, electric vehicles are the Betamax to synthetic petrol’s VHS.

Eh? Synthetic petrol (and hydrogen) are both products of electricity. It's impossible to believe they would be cheaper per unit energy than electricity

[Evanivitch]

Pica-Pica said:

Evanivitch said:

With overnight cheap rates still available, the home-chargers will be fine.

But the public charging infrastructure (with companies not being protected by the price cap) will see prices continue to approach £1/kWh, making charging reliant on public chargers completely uneconomical.

No. I have a long-term fixed price electric contract. Using that my fuel costs will be dearer on EV than on ICE. If I sign up to a ‘cheap overnight EV rate’,that will still make my fuel costs cheaper on ICE, that’s before we even talk about public chargers. That is also without the capital costs.

Let's see your numbers then.

[Tigger2050]

georgeyboy12345 said:

lol really?

An incredibly naive statement. Just because a news article is published on a website, it doesn't make it the truth. They could very well be lying, bending the truth or at best misunderstanding the situation. You have to remember, these articles are writen by journalists, not professional experts in their respective field. There has been no peer-review prior to the publishing of this article. I'm not sure where you have been the past 10 or so years, but websites (including Which) often publish attention-grabbing headlines in order to get greater clickthrough, either to increase advertising revenue, or in the case of Which, in the hope that you'll subscribe to a membership for money.

They are using the actual domestic electricity price of 0.52p a kWh from October, the average miles per kw for an EV, the actual price per mile for diesel/petrol and the average miles used per vehicle per year. Seems to cover everything and the calculations can be replicated by anyone.

As you are clearly not 'naive', why don't you do the calculation therefore and tell everybody here what the real answer is?

[anonymous-user]

Evanivitch said:

wormus said:

My brother was telling me a couple a weeks ago that when he was travelling though France, there was a long queue to use the EV chargers, whilst all the petrol pumps were free to use. I couldn’t be doing with that, electric vehicles are the Betamax to synthetic petrol’s VHS.

Eh? Synthetic petrol (and hydrogen) are both products of electricity. It's impossible to believe they would be cheaper per unit energy than electricity

Yes, but you can store it in liquid form, and distribute using an established network, with no need for expensive batteries made with scarce resources. Betamax, MiniDisc etc. There are loads of examples where innovation has failed, to be made into something better and usable later on.

Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 26th August 21:08

[M4cruiser]

akadk said:

Regulation and taxation will ensure EV’s are the only option for new vehicles from here on it

The cost to charge them will absolutely be the same if not more than petrol

The era of cheap EV motoring was / is 2010-2025

From memory, the first Nissan Leaf was quoted as costing £2 to "fill up" for 100 miles, in 2011.
Now it must be £7.
Next year, £14.

(Apologies if my memory isn't quite correct, but it must be something like these figures)

[eldar]

georgeyboy12345 said:

lol really?

An incredibly naive statement. Just because a news article is published on a website, it doesn't make it the truth. They could very well be lying, bending the truth or at best misunderstanding the situation. You have to remember, these articles are writen by journalists, not professional experts in their respective field. There has been no peer-review prior to the publishing of this article. I'm not sure where you have been the past 10 or so years, but websites (including Which) often publish attention-grabbing headlines in order to get greater clickthrough, either to increase advertising revenue, or in the case of Which, in the hope that you'll subscribe to a membership for money.

So, an organisation with a reputation gained over 50 years vs. An anonymous internet poster who states the obvious but hasn't quite grasped paragraphs.

OK.

[RUSSELLM]

Tigger2050 said:

confused_buyer said:

Hmm. The price cap is heading towards £1/kWh (current prediction £1.06) so public more like £2/kWh.

Obviously that is peak times.

If (or almost inevitably WHEN) the cap reaches 1.06/kWh that EV, with a 64 kWh battery, doing 230 miles per full charge (or 180 miles if mainly motorway) is going to cost £68 for those miles or £136 if charged on the road.

My ICE car (240 hp) would cost £35 for 230 miles or £28 for 180 miles.

I don't have range anxiety either, doing 650 miles on a tank or 750 miles when touring abroad. No lengthy times refuelling either.

A previous poster mentioned an energy supplier currently charging 7.5p per KW. Even if that gets trebled, they'll be able to put 28kw of charge (70 miles ish) in for less than 23p

I know they could chose to pay top wack for their charging but likewise, I could drive down the motorway and buy my diesel from Shell or BP at the services, instead of the much cheaper local Sainsbury's.

Range wise, I agree. If you're regularly doing 700 mile trips, an EV would be more inconvenient.

[Evanivitch]

wormus said:

Evanivitch said:

wormus said:

My brother was telling me a couple a weeks ago that when he was travelling though France, there was a long queue to use the EV chargers, whilst all the petrol pumps were free to use. I couldn’t be doing with that, electric vehicles are the Betamax to synthetic petrol’s VHS.

Eh? Synthetic petrol (and hydrogen) are both products of electricity. It's impossible to believe they would be cheaper per unit energy than electricity

Yes, but you can store it in liquid form, and distribute using an established network, with no need for expensive batteries made with scarce resources. Betamax, MiniDisc etc. There are loads of examples where innovation has failed, to be made into something better and usable later on.

Edited by wormus on Friday 26th August 21:08

So you're going to use loads of electricity to generate a fuel, ship it, transport it, that you'll then burn at a best-case efficiency of 40%, and you think that will be more cost efficient than just using the electricity directly...

[Carlososos]

Tigger2050 said:

The increase in electricity prices will already make many EV's more expensive to 'fill up' than ICE cars and this is for charging at home, goodness knows what it will cost at fast public chargers, when firms catch up with the latest price increases.


https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/energy-price-...


Of course electricity prices will be going up again by about 50% early next year. When that happens there will be a big gap between 'filling up' EV's and ICE cars.

With fairly bog standard unexciting EV's coming in at about £40,000, who will be wanting to buy knowing they will have to pay far more to fuel them?

Electricity supplies as they are forecast are not sustainable. There may be a thinking blip about buying ev’s along with the massive energy prices but I don’t think it’ll be a long term problem. If the energy costs stay anything like they are predicted long term there will be massive personal home and business investment in renewables because they are so much cheaper run, install and will be able to massively undercut fossil energy prices immediately. Long term it’ll sort itself out or it’ll all collapse like a card tower.

[Evanivitch]

M4cruiser said:

From memory, the first Nissan Leaf was quoted as costing £2 to "fill up" for 100 miles, in 2011.
Now it must be £7.
Next year, £14.

(Apologies if my memory isn't quite correct, but it must be something like these figures)

Nissan Leaf 24 kWh would been about 11p/kWh in 2011 so yeah, approx £2.64 (plus 10% for charging losses).

£6.72 today, £11.52 on October.

But with a decent Smart tariff it would actually cost you less today at 7.5p/kWh.

[Biggy Stardust]

NMNeil said:

The average oil pump-jack uses 9 megawatts of power each month to pump the oil out of a well.

This statement doesn't actually make sense. Watts are a unit of power, not of energy.

[anonymous-user]

Evanivitch said:

wormus said:

Evanivitch said:

wormus said:

My brother was telling me a couple a weeks ago that when he was travelling though France, there was a long queue to use the EV chargers, whilst all the petrol pumps were free to use. I couldn’t be doing with that, electric vehicles are the Betamax to synthetic petrol’s VHS.

Eh? Synthetic petrol (and hydrogen) are both products of electricity. It's impossible to believe they would be cheaper per unit energy than electricity

Yes, but you can store it in liquid form, and distribute using an established network, with no need for expensive batteries made with scarce resources. Betamax, MiniDisc etc. There are loads of examples where innovation has failed, to be made into something better and usable later on.

Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 26th August 21:08

So you're going to use loads of electricity to generate a fuel, ship it, transport it, that you'll then burn at a best-case efficiency of 40%, and you think that will be more cost efficient than just using the electricity directly...

Well the ICE has worked for over 160 years. Only problem is the fuel is not carbon neutral, fix that and there’s no longer a need for EVs.

[Biggy Stardust]

Evanivitch said:

So you're going to use loads of electricity to generate a fuel, ship it, transport it, that you'll then burn at a best-case efficiency of 40%, and you think that will be more cost efficient than just using the electricity directly...

What percentage transmission losses have you allowed for in your calculations? Or have you neglected to consider them in your guesswork?

[Evanivitch]

wormus said:

Well the ICE has worked for over 160 years. Only problem is the fuel is not carbon neutral, fix that and there’s no longer a need for EVs.

Oh dear. Whilst we do use energy to extract, refine and distribute fossil fuels, the whole point is that they release more energy than required to complete those steps.

The fundamentals of thermodynamics and the realities of industrial processes, mean it will take more energy to generate a synthetic fuel than you will release from it. You're always at a net loss of energy. Massively in this case.

Biggy Stardust said:

What percentage transmission losses have you allowed for in your calculations? Or have you neglected to consider them in your guesswork?

Nope. 9% grid, 10% at the charger. Not my first rodeo.

[Otispunkmeyer]

It will depend.

Friend of mine worked out that he'd need to be paying 92p/kWh before it was more expensive than petrol currently.

But it will be different for different tarrifs/cars.

Certainly in a lot of cases (and usually fast charging) they're not in the "buttons to run" realm anymore.

[Rich Boy Spanner]

Depends on the user. Private buyers have never made sense tome anyway, but as a company car user about to get an electric i will be saving about £2500 a year in tax. It would take electricity to increase a lot to offset that. Right now my fixed rate until next Autumn in 17P KWH.

[TheRainMaker]

First off to the question asked in the title, no but I think more people might think twice.

My workings out on my car (Polestar 2) based on the 52p per kW announced today, I am on a variable tariff like a fair few other EV owners, we are not all on cheap overnight tariffs for a whole host of reasons.

In December last year, my EV used an average of 41.6 kWh/100mi (2.40mi/kWh)

This gives my car a range of 180 miles in winter (WLTP 301 miles)

To charge my car from empty to full will cost £41.60 (23p per mile)

Any petrol car (£1.70 per litre, RAC) with an MPG higher than 35 will be cheaper to fuel than my EV.
Any diesel car (£1.82 per litre, RAC) with an MPG higher than 36 will be cheaper to fuel than my EV.

If we then look at the possibility of public charging becoming £1.00 per kW, this would bring a full charge to around £80.00 (44p per mile)

Any petrol car with an MPG figure of more than 17 mpg will be cheaper to fuel than my EV.

[dvshannow]

Evanivitch said:

Nissan Leaf 24 kWh would been about 11p/kWh in 2011 so yeah, approx £2.64 (plus 10% for charging losses).

£6.72 today, £11.52 on October.

But with a decent Smart tariff it would actually cost you less today at 7.5p/kWh.

No expert here , but I would think anyone using smart tariffs is simply gaming companies slow reaction to the energy crisis and existence of these tariffs is a not a logical argument in favour of EV vs ICE economics

It’s simply not economic to sell electricity to us this much below wholesale prices - which went up another 25% just today.

Governments need to sort out supply and rethink the anti nuclear movement until renewables are more capable of replacing fossil fuels

[georgeyboy12345]

eldar said:

georgeyboy12345 said:

lol really?

An incredibly naive statement. Just because a news article is published on a website, it doesn't make it the truth. They could very well be lying, bending the truth or at best misunderstanding the situation. You have to remember, these articles are writen by journalists, not professional experts in their respective field. There has been no peer-review prior to the publishing of this article. I'm not sure where you have been the past 10 or so years, but websites (including Which) often publish attention-grabbing headlines in order to get greater clickthrough, either to increase advertising revenue, or in the case of Which, in the hope that you'll subscribe to a membership for money.

So, an organisation with a reputation gained over 50 years vs. An anonymous internet poster who states the obvious but hasn't quite grasped paragraphs.

OK.

Sorry that you found my post difficult to read. Next time I’ll use more paragraphs and perhaps a few pictures too.

[anonymous-user]

Evanivitch said:

wormus said:

Well the ICE has worked for over 160 years. Only problem is the fuel is not carbon neutral, fix that and there’s no longer a need for EVs.

Oh dear. Whilst we do use energy to extract, refine and distribute fossil fuels, the whole point is that they release more energy than required to complete those steps.

The fundamentals of thermodynamics and the realities of industrial processes, mean it will take more energy to generate a synthetic fuel than you will release from it. You're always at a net loss of energy. Massively in this case.

So we agree, the goal is to become carbon neutral, not build EVs. Have you done any research into what’s required to establish an entirely new network for distribution? What energy is needed to extract scarce resources to make batteries, motors, controllers etc? Whether you like it or not, we’ve spent 160 years making ICE more efficient. Why go back to zero when you can solve the problem with carbon neutral fuel? Beardies and hipsters may find EVs sexy, but not when they find their cars don’t work as well as the old petrol/diesel ones did.

ETA: we’ve had milk floats since 1947, they’ve not exactly caught on.

Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 26th August 22:02