> The majority of the cost of road construction and maintenance comes from general taxes. Fuel taxes haven't paid the majority since the 80's.
My point isn't that fuel taxes pay the full costs of the road, but that electric cars in many countries receive favourable taxation (which significantly reduces the cost of ownership) which is only possible because they are a minority of vehicles.
This actually depends largely on the country you're in. In the UK (where I live) the effective tax rate on gas is around 68%, and there's lots of tax breaks for electric cars. The effective tax rate on electricity is 5%, and the cost per MJ of electricity and gas is about the same. Effectively the government tax revenue per mile of electric cars is drastically lower than that of gasoline cars - not a sustainable situation for widespread adoption.
It looks like the tax on gas in the US is significantly lower than in European countries, so the same situation probably doesn't exist to the same degree.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
Yes, average power consumption is quite low. In fact over a year the average car (if it was electric) would probably only consume a few hundred watts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is peak demand. A usable electric car charger draws 7kW for a sustained period of time. That's a very different use case (distributed across every house in the country) than currently.
Taking this study for example: "32% of low voltage (LV) feeders (312,000 circuits) will require intervention when 40% - 70% of customers have EVs, based on 3.5 kW (16 amp) charging."
http://myelectricavenue.info/
Bear in mind that's for 3.5kW charging, whereas anyone installing a charger today is putting in 7kW+ charging.
The only way to mitigate distribution network changes is by smart charging on the car side - basically reducing charging rate or times to spread the load. Fortunately that's fairly doable, but it's not necessarily a panacea - if there's a couple of days where many people do higher than average mileage (eg a national holiday) you could find that there's simply not enough capacity locally to sustain charging all the cars on the street.
The problem is that we need to be adopting electric cars _now_ to make a dent in emissions, but there's all these infrastructure problems (I haven't even mentioned on-street charging or long distance journeys...) that will become evident when we do. We need to be fixing them today. Claiming they don't exist is naive. Remember that there's just over 1 million electric cars on US roads today, out of 273 million vehicles. The infrastructure needs to grow by 2 orders of magnitude to support that.
It's not a big deal. Average american drives what 12,000 miles per year? Or 32 miles per day. My car (m3) has a 75kwh battery and has a range of 310 miles or so. So I need (on average) 10.3% of a battery charge or 7.75 kwh. Most people are home for 12 hours a night, so 650 watts. So sure peak might be 3.5-7kw, but the average car load will be much less.. 5-10x less. Keep in mind that the average car lasts 8 years (claims consumer reports), but seems like bad economy is causing that to head higher. So even if 10% of the cars per year switch to electric that's not really all that much power. Especially with wind, solar (both home and utility scale), battery storage (both home and utility), hydro, etc ramping up. The hardest thing for most grids to handle is peak loads on hot days where a fairly large fraction of home AC are running, now that's a load that makes charging an electric car look easy. E-cars by nature tend to balance the load and make the grid easier to design and maintain. Sure tax incentives for storage, wind, and solar should continue. California's SGIP program seems particularly effective. Solar+Storage solutions get a big break, and the grid can make do with less peaker plants because they can tap into residential installed power walls all over the state to handle the peaks that used to require spinning up the least efficient/most expenisve peaker plants.
My point isn't that fuel taxes pay the full costs of the road, but that electric cars in many countries receive favourable taxation (which significantly reduces the cost of ownership) which is only possible because they are a minority of vehicles.
This actually depends largely on the country you're in. In the UK (where I live) the effective tax rate on gas is around 68%, and there's lots of tax breaks for electric cars. The effective tax rate on electricity is 5%, and the cost per MJ of electricity and gas is about the same. Effectively the government tax revenue per mile of electric cars is drastically lower than that of gasoline cars - not a sustainable situation for widespread adoption.
It looks like the tax on gas in the US is significantly lower than in European countries, so the same situation probably doesn't exist to the same degree.
> electric cars generally charge at night and use about the same amount of power as an electric oven. Distribution network changes are not required.
Yes, average power consumption is quite low. In fact over a year the average car (if it was electric) would probably only consume a few hundred watts.
But that's not the problem. The problem is peak demand. A usable electric car charger draws 7kW for a sustained period of time. That's a very different use case (distributed across every house in the country) than currently.
Taking this study for example: "32% of low voltage (LV) feeders (312,000 circuits) will require intervention when 40% - 70% of customers have EVs, based on 3.5 kW (16 amp) charging." http://myelectricavenue.info/
Bear in mind that's for 3.5kW charging, whereas anyone installing a charger today is putting in 7kW+ charging.
The only way to mitigate distribution network changes is by smart charging on the car side - basically reducing charging rate or times to spread the load. Fortunately that's fairly doable, but it's not necessarily a panacea - if there's a couple of days where many people do higher than average mileage (eg a national holiday) you could find that there's simply not enough capacity locally to sustain charging all the cars on the street.
The problem is that we need to be adopting electric cars _now_ to make a dent in emissions, but there's all these infrastructure problems (I haven't even mentioned on-street charging or long distance journeys...) that will become evident when we do. We need to be fixing them today. Claiming they don't exist is naive. Remember that there's just over 1 million electric cars on US roads today, out of 273 million vehicles. The infrastructure needs to grow by 2 orders of magnitude to support that.