Horace Heffner wrote:
We may get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the
states have to find a way to pay for the road maintenance currently
paid for by gas taxes. Meanwhile, the lack of road taxes on
electricity is a great and automatic incentive.
I had not thought of that. However, the Federal road maintenance
highway tax is only $.18 per gallon, or 0.8 cents per mile for the
average car. You could replace it with a mileage tax based on the
odometer reading, or a simple flat fee per vehicle.
The above map only shows current electric prices, not the incremental
cost of new electricity. It reflects much old capital invested in
dams, etc.
New electricity from wind power or large-scale solar in the Southwest
is presently expensive but if it is developed on a large scale it
will soon become dramatically cheaper.
As vehicles are converted from petroleum to electric power the
incremental demand will cause new the electric rates to come more
closely in line nation wide.
Actually, electric vehicles use such a small amount of electricity, I
doubt that any additional generator capacity will be needed. Some
additional fuel will be burned and fissioned, of course. Here is 2001
data from the Annual Energy Review 2002:
Average annual mileage (miles per vehicle): 11,766
Miles per day: 32
Electric vehicle consumption per mile: 0.3 to 0.5 kWh (Wikipedia)
Electric energy per day: 16 kWh
In other words, recharging a car would be like plugging in a 1.5 kW
electric room heater for just over 10 hours. If every US household
did this from 9:00 p.m. until the next morning, it would put no
strain on our generating capacity. It would be a problem with
everyone did it at 3 p.m. a summer afternoon, but not at night. In
many houses you could probably turn off a half-dozen lights and a
television to save most of this power. If the car dealerships and
grocery stores a few miles from my house would turn off half the
lights they leave burning all night, they would save enough
electricity to power every car in the County!
- Jed
