Slashdot Mirror
Germany Plans $1.4 Billion In Incentives For Electric Cars (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg article: German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government reached a deal with automakers to jointly spend 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) on incentives to boost sluggish electric-car sales. Buyers will be able to receive as much as 4,000 euros in rebates to help offset the higher price of an electric vehicle, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said at a press conference in Berlin. Purchasers of hybrid cars will get as much as 3,000 euros off the price. The industry will shoulder 50 percent of the cost. The program is set to start in May, pending approval from the German parliament's budget committee, he said. "The goal is to move forward as quickly as possible on electric vehicles," Schaeuble told reporters, adding that the aim is to begin offering the incentives next month. "With this, we are giving an impetus."
California has about 200,000 plug-in EVs, roughly 1/2 the US total and they're not building power plants or suffering rolling blackouts because of demand.
Most vehicle charging is done at night with baseload power. So rather than more power plants, we just better utilize the power plants that we already have. My wife has a Tesla, and it is programmed to start charging at 2am. We have demand billing, so we save money by using baseload power. A full charge (240 miles) costs us about $6.
Internal combustion will never pass 50% efficiency. A power plant would be above 90%.
ICEs are typically less than 20% efficient, and some more is lost in the transmission system (which electric cars don't need). The best gas turbine power plants are less than 60% efficient, and will never get near 90%.
So, rather than just being 2x more efficient baseline, electric vehicles are 3x as efficient?
That's about right. ICE+transmission delivers about 15% of fuel energy to the wheels. A gas turbine power plant + battery + charger delivers about 45%. So you get about three times the miles for a given amount of fuel. But gas/coal is much cheaper than gasoline, so the cost is much less than a third. Also, gas and coal are produced domestically, generating jobs for Americans. Petroleum is often from Iran/Venezuela/Russia or other people that hate us.