By Raleigh Perry
BUFORD, Ga. | People who buy battery-powered automobiles do so because it is good for the environment. Clean power, no exhaust emissions! Gosh that is wonderful! Yet where does their power really come from?
Perry
Since we live in Georgia, let us talk about the Georgia origins of the electricity that powers these cars. Basically speaking, Georgia gets its electricity from several different sources including nuclear, hydroelectric and steam plants.
The problem is that over 60 percent of the electricity comes from steam plants that are powered either by coal or by natural gas. Both of those are fossil fuels and neither source is renewable. Both sources create a massive amount of emissions. (Coal would be the worst.) Both make emissions that cause global warming. So those driving an Electric Vehicle (EV) in Georgia are no boon to cleaning up the planet at all, at least for now. You can get the emissions report on one of the largest of Georgia’s fossil fuel plants, Plant Scherer, on the internet.
To beat all of that, where do you think the coal comes from? It comes from Montana, not from a closer source like West Virginia. How does it get here from Montana? It comes by train, powered by what a diesel electric engine, but the electricity comes from a generator run by diesel fuel.
In a recent article by Ryan Erik King published in Jalopnik News recently, driving 100 miles in an EV is now more expensive than with a car with an internal combustion engine. Anderson Economic Group internal combustion drivers pay about $11.29 per 100 miles while EV drivers pay $14.40 per 100 miles. So is it not cheaper! My son recently had to fly to South Florida and called Uber. The Uber was a Tesla. It was near running out of fuel and the driver was driving wildly around Atlanta to find a charging station.
Reuters reports that insurance companies are sending some Telsa Model Y electric vehicles that have been in crashes to salvage yards as “totaled” because they are too expensive to repair. Of more than 120 Model Ys that were totaled after collisions, the vast majority had less than 10,000 miles on the odometer. So you can expect a much higher rate for insuring the Teslas (and probably other EV’s) than you would on a conventional internal combustion car.
I think that trying to find a way to make cars so that they do not pollute is the right thing to do, but we are not there yet.
There is not yet a guarantee on how far you can drive without recharging because there are too many variables. One, of course, is the speed at which you drive. Others are headlights and air conditioner usage.
I know that in my car with about 22 mpg can drive me from my home to a little north of Nashville without refueling and that is driving 75 mpg on the average. My car is an SUV and can carry a lot of things, but the load does not seem to make much difference.
Right now, I could not be sure that I could do the same thing in an EV.
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