"Electric vehicles ... have high up-front costs, lack of range, higher carbon manufacturing footprint, and length of time and cost to charge.
... In order to be able to charge his electric vehicle at home, the car dealer, Geoffrey Pohanka, installed a Level II charger at a cost of about $850.
A Level II charger was needed because charging an electric vehicle with a 250-mile range with a normal 120-volt plug requires about 54 hours.
Charging with a Level II, 240-watt charger ... requires up to ten hours, which can be done overnight.
... If the vehicle needs to be charged at a public charging station before returning home, there are a number of issues.
... not all public charging stations are the same.
Tesla has a nationwide rapid-charging infrastructure, but Tesla uses a proprietary charging plug that does not work with other makes of vehicles.
Volkswagen, as part of its diesel settlement, constructed a large charging network under the name of Electrify America.
With the Electrify America charging network, however, there is only a ten-minute grace period once the 80 percent charge is achieved.
After that, a 40 cents per minute charge is tacked on to the cost of charging, which limits shopping or other activities while charging, which takes a long time ...
Pohanka, with about 25 miles of battery range (left) (10 percent of capacity), first tried a fast charger, located in an office park.
It had three charging towers, each with two cords, but one of the cords fits only the Nissan Leaf.
Pohanka had a choice of four 350 kilowatt chargers and one 50 kilowatt charger.
Choosing the 50 kilowatt charger, the dealer plugged in the cord into his electric vehicle, inserted his credit card, and experienced his first public fast charge.
The time it takes a battery to charge
depends on four things:
the capacity of the charger,
the capacity of the battery,
the battery discharge condition, and
the rate of charge that the battery will accept.
The dealer’s electric vehicle would accept up to a 75 kilowatt rate of charge.
Because fast charging above 80 percent of capacity can damage the battery, Pohanka, who had ten percent capacity remaining, needed an additional 70 percent charge that would reach a vehicle range of 190 miles.
It required one hour and ten minutes to charge at a cost of $21.07, or 43 cents per kilowatt.
The cost would be less—about 34 cents per kilowatt if the dealer joined Electrify America for four dollars per month.
Filling his gasoline vehicle for the same range would cost less – about $13.
Charging an EV at a fast charger costs more per mile of range than filling up a gasoline-powered vehicle and takes 15 times longer.
The time required was about the same with a 150 kilowatt or 350 kilowatt charger.
Since it required over one hour to charge the battery and since the dealer drives 80 miles a work-day, he would have to spend over 200 hours annually charging his vehicle without a home charger – the equivalent of 25 eight-hour working days, assuming no wait time for a charger and a charging station nearby office or home.
Electric vehicle owners living in a town home, row house or an apartment, without access to a Level II home charger, would have to rely entirely on the public fast-charging network, thus reducing the 250-mile range of the vehicle to 190 miles to ensure the battery would not be damaged.
... The other drawback to EVs is their higher cost.
For example, the cost of a 2021 Hyundai Kona Ultimate is $46,985.
The same model powered by gasoline costs $31,370, over $15,000 less.
One reason for the price differential is the cost of the battery.
To manufacture a 1,000-pound battery requires the processing of 50,000 pounds of ore with 500,000 pounds of (dirt) to get the ore.
... Manufacturing electric vehicles has a larger carbon footprint than gasoline vehicles.
... the electricity for charging an electric vehicle in the United States today is generated mostly from fossil fuels—coal and natural gas, which have a 62 percent share.
... For California to ban the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035 as Governor Newsome wants, presumably working toward an all-electric market, charging stations will need to proliferate.
California will need 1.5 million electric vehicle chargers by 2030, or three times what President Biden promised for the entire nation.
(CA) has 67,000 chargers available today, with another 121,000 in the pipeline. "