Guest Post by Eric Peters
What do you suppose the result would be if you needed to get gas in a hurry – in order to get somewhere quickly – but you couldn’t fill up because there was another car already at the pump and it just sat there for half an hour while its driver enjoyed a nice cup of coffee inside the station?
How about another parked car at every pump?
Scale that up times several tens of millions of drivers and you have a picture of our forced-electrification future.
Hopefully, they add more coffee machines at Sheetz. That actually calls to mind a secondary problem that will arise from the decrease in throughput – i.e., the number of cars and people who can come and go within a given period of time.
If a gas station has a dozen pumps, a dozen cars can be fully refueled in about five minutes, making way for another dozen cars to be refueled. Such a station can hypothetically as well as actually fully refuel more than 70 vehicles in 30 minutes. The cars – and the people in those cars – come and they go. As each one goes, room is opened up for another car and new – but not more – people.
The lines for gas and for coffee are rarely long – and neither usually is the wait. Even if every one of the 12 pumps in our example is in use when you arrive it is certain one of them will be open within minutes of your arrival. Waiting longer than that for gas is something Americans have not had to suffer since the ’70s, when gas was made artificially scarce by the government.
It had nothing to do with the infrastructure.
With “electrification,” it has everything to do with the chemistry.
Not only isn’t the infrastructure there – and won’t be, for years, notwithstanding the Biden Thing’s sluicing of billions of dollars of other people’s money to build it – because it takes years to build the sort of Soviet-style national infrastructure EVs require. It won’t change the wait and for that reason, the throughput problem will remain.
And worsen.
It is possible to build more EV “fast” charging joints.
They could be built on every corner, assuming limitless amounts of other people’s money and assuming people don’t mind there not being room anymore for other things, such as stores. Never mind that. It will still take 30 minutes or longer to partially recharge an EV. Perhaps this can be reduced to 15 minutes – somehow. Without greatly shortening the useful life of the battery (read the EV owner’s manual). Without greatly increasing the risk the battery will catch fire.
But not without another (sigh) “breakthrough” in “battery technology.”
A gas tank is an empty container. There is almost no resistance to the liquid fuel being pumped into it. That is why gas pumps are fast – in the etymologically accurate sense of that word.
An EV battery is full – even when it is empty. It contains thousand of individual cells and you can’t just pump them full of electricity. The process of recharging is far more complex and involves a number of steps, including assessing the condition of the battery and its readiness to be charged, whether it is warm enough to receive charge – and so on. These steps are handled by the electronics and automatically but they take time. And then it takes time to induct the electricity. The process can be speeded up but it is extremely improbable that it will ever be fast in the way that it is fast at a gas pump – there and done in less than five minutes.
And that will lead to lines – and longer waits. Not occasionally but regularly. It will be part of the New Abnormal.
And those lines – and constant waiting – will lead to tension, which will lead to anger, just the same as happens on roads clogged with traffic. It’s infuriating to be held up by traffic when you have somewhere you need to be, such as work. Or want to be somewhere else, such as home after a long day at work.
But traffic eventually clears.
The wait to charge will remain – and increase.
Charge Rage is already becoming a thing in the UK, where “electrification” has been pushed more aggressively and where for that reason there are more ordinary people driving EVs and waiting in line to charge them. There is an interesting article that gets into details about it here.
But the take-home point is that similar is coming here. 
It will be similar to what happened here back in the ’70s, when people had to wait in line – sometimes, for hours – to get gas and for essentially the same reason.
Government.
Back in the ’70s, it created temporary gas lines by causing gas to be temporarily in short supply (even though there was plenty of gas available). In our time, it is recreating lines – which will be permanent – by forcing gas (and diesel-powered) vehicles off the road in favor of battery-powered devices that take many times longer to recharge than it takes to refuel. Irrespective of the number of not-so-fast chargers the government conjures into existence. 
Even if there were one “fast” charger for every EV on the road in a fully “electrified” scenario (as opposed to one gas pump for every several thousand; there are about 145,000 gas stations in the country vs. about 290 million vehicles, almost all of them not electric vehicles) it would still take each EV five-times-plus as long to recover a partial charge as it takes to fully refuel a gas-powered vehicle.
It will be like going to the DMV every day.
Perhaps the better – the more apt – example is it will be more like standing in line for bread every day, as in the old Soviet Union.
Which is just what America is becoming.
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A much bigger question is where will the electricty needed to connect these chargers come from and how will it get to the charging station. Many places, CA included, are already at or near capacity of generating plants and distribution lines. Add 10’s of millions of EV’s, electric cook tops in every house, electric water heaters in every house/building & electric heat pumps in every house building and I think you can see there will be quite a problem.
Maybe we will go the route of other 3rd world countries that have scheduled blackouts for the country. I experienced it in Honduras 30 years ago and let me tell you, a hotel shower gets really dark when the electricity goes out and the stairwell gets crowded, as well dark.
Don’t worry ck of elabout the lack of power- TPTB don’t plan on there being many people left to spread it around to.
I never travel to those kinds of areas without at least a couple of small flashlights,and a substantial padlock for my tube sock.
I’m with you bro, I also carry my anti tiger rock.
Worked in Honduras in the early ’80s. In the hill town of Yoro, they had electricity from 6:00-10:00p every night, provided by a single diesel generator. One learned really quick about drinking warm beer, but you could usually get a cold one around 7:30p. About twice a month, the generator tender would get drunk on Friday and the generator stayed on all night, using up the next two days’ diesel allotment, so the entire weekend we would go without electricity, save those that had their own backup generators. At that time, there were only two others in town. Thank goodness, one of them was at the bar next to the boarding house we were living at.
The worse case is noticing a 4-5″ Banana Spider, building a web in the ceiling corner of your bedroom, around 9:59p. About the time you gather up something to swipe it with…the lights go out!
Why never any talk of hydrogen cells , or The Water Car ? News shows even reported it.
Water car is a real thing- I have a device that creates hydrogen gas from water and lye. Gas can be used too run cutting touches- Just make a bigger one and run your car- cost is almost nothing. TPTB don’t care about your running a torch but try it on a car and you won’t be long for this world.
Because they don’t work in real life. The energy required to create the hydrogen gas by electrolysis is more than the energy returned by making electricity in a fuel cell or burning it in an engine. Thermodynamics is a cruel bitch, and the first Law is You Can’t Win. Snake oil and bullshit.
BL has a car that runs on BRAWNDO!
It’s got what cars crave.
A perfect Socialist system has lines for everything. Get used to it!
You simply can’t explain facts to 90% of the American people. They are sheep people. They have no interest in competing facts. They want entertainment,fast food,and the illusion of saaaaafety from a caring government. Might as well be plants.
A gasoline pump delivers fuel at about 10gpm. In energy terms that is 20MW for the 3-5 minutes you are actually pumping gas. 20 MW is 20,000KW or 100x a 200KW Supercharger unit. Each pump delivers that power as long as the underground tank has fuel. Our Costco station has 12 pumps so it is the equivalent of a 240MW power station JUST for that facility.
I’ve been asked for an adapter. people don’t even know if the chargers working or if it fits their car. I had a guy tell me about a charging station that was connected to a diesel generator that roared to life when people hooked up.
This again?
I have an EV for the past six years. The EV gets charged 99% of the time at home. It’s like having a gas station at home.
The real problem with the EV is the cost and range. I bought a used Tesla for 60k in 2017. I could have bought a used Honda for 15k. My max range is only 230 miles (new would be 280) which makes it impractical for out-of-town trips.
The main advantage for me is low maintenance. I don’t have to worry about engine failure, cooling system issues, transmission fluid or oil changes, and no brake pad changes.
I agree, only those traveling will charge on the road, but power plants and infrastructure will be a problem for decades to come. It means huge new transmission lines, and more substations in neighborhoods which will be fought by neighbors and environmentalist. I worked in a power plant put up as a IPP (Independent Power Plant) with a tolling agreement with the local utility. It took almost 15 years to get enough transmission lines that we could run consistently as there were to many transmission line constraints. At that point the utility bought the plant.
So your car doesn’t have brakes? A 5000 lb car-with no brakes? I know that it has regenerative braking, but you still have wear items. Plus when that battery degenerates to the point where it won’t take a charge you have a useless shell of a car–unless you repower with a gas engine like the guy back east did when Tesla wouldn’t sell him a battery.
The car uses regenerative braking for a vast majority of braking. The brake pads haven’t been changed from the original new ones. I have been told that they frequently outlast the car.
The car is nine years old. The battery has lost about 20% of max charge in that time. In six years, I will probably get a new car. It should still be usable as a backup vehicle.
I forgot to mention, my Prius is a 2012. It’s never had new brake pads.
My Prius hybrid has 102,000 miles on it and still doesn’t need brake pads. So long as you don’t stomp on the brakes and use the regen friction to slow the car while charging the battery, you can make the brake last a long time.
Right now though, I wouldn’t buy a straight up electric car. My Prius will probably last the rest of my lifetime.
..there you have it!
So, anyone needing to go out-of-town regularly will need an ICE car for that.
That fact alone invalidates all public policy around EVs.
Brother, can you spare a kilowatt?
Wait, Watt?
Gas and diesel ARE the most effective, portable, and cost-effective power sources in the foreseeable future.
I would add propane, not because it has more calorific value (it doesn’t), but because propane powered engines require so much less maintenance so that, on balance, the total cost of ownership is less.
Also, the exhaust is environmentally negligible.