Electric refueling: Doing the math

Oilbama and what passes for a green movement talk breezily of “clean energy,” as if the only thing blocking a rapid and thorough transition to an alt-energy economy is oil-industry corruption and political indecision.

In the misleading verbiage of such false prophets, you never get any details. Why not? Because the facts are entirely contrary to the promises.

Leaving aside geology and EROEI, let’s examine the single point at which the fuel meets the car, shall we?

According to recent “good news,” “JFE Engineering claim[s] to have produced a quick charger which can replenish 50 percent of an EV’s battery level in just three minutes. The company also claims the system could recharge up to 70 percent in just five minutes.”

The news here is that this promises some relief from the fact that recharging an electric automobile is generally an overnight process, not a 5-minute pitstop.

The price of the speedy new charging unit? $120,000 per unit.

As of 2007, there were 117,908 gas stations in the United States.

$120,000 x 117,908 = $14,148,960,000.

So, putting one single electric car charger at each filling station in the USA would cost 14.1 billion dollars.

Of course, the average automobile fueling depot needs and has probably 6-10 gasoline hoses springing off its meters. This is for the obvious reason that motorists don’t want to wait half an hour to access a single hose.

So, re-fitting the nation’s gas stations for a fully electric fleet would actually cost more like $100 billion.

And, of course, we [read: the babysitters our overclass hires for us] love the free market and don’t begrudge gas station owners getting rich. Gas stations, in other words, are not owned by the public. So, this $100 billion expenditure would have to be done voluntarily by the nation’s fueling entrepreneurs, for whom such outlays represent deductions from their returns-on-investment.

And, of course, all this is merely the cost of the electron-dispensing units. It says nothing about the radical reconstruction of the underlying electrical generation and distribution system that such a conversion would require.

Bottom line: As the car capitalists know, electric cars are a minor diversion, a profitable trick on hoodwinked green shoppers and a crucial political psy-op against the general public.