Proof You Can’t Fix Stupid!
September 11, 2023
By Paul Homewood
h/t Mike Rennoldson
This one really takes the biscuit!
UPDATE
It has been correctly pointed out that a 350 KW generator would not take 3 hours to charge an EV, so the 5 mpg claim can be ignored.
On investigation, it appears to be a charging station in the outback of Australia
However, it clearly highlights the very real problem as to how rapid EV chargers can be powered in rural areas, which have limited power supplies.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
But also for the guy who bought the EV in the first place.
I’m not convinced about the figures. If it’s a 350kw charger then I doubt it will take much more than 10 minutes to charge the car (assuming it can cope with the high rate of charge).
Of course, that doesn’t take away from the fact that using a diesel generator to charge it negates any supposed environmental benefit of having an EV.
Even if that generator does actually only take 10 minutes to recharge an EV, 200 miles is less than a third of the range of my diesel which never takes more than 10 minutes to refill.
200 miles is also half the range of petrol cars from the 1960s
And 200 miles in the outback is next to nothing.
BS alert.
If :
– That is a 350KW electrical output generator and
– a large EV battery has a capacity of 100KWh (versus 50 KWh for small one).
That means it will take roughly 20 minutes to charge a large EV, assuming 17% losses. Electricity 101. 3 Hours would be a 1 MWh, right?
Someone is making it up , or they have NO understanding of the calculations and assumptions they are making. Two possibilities are:
1. They have no idea at all what they are talking about
2. Perhaps that generator supplies several chargers? But it won’t be running at full rating unless its full load of batteries is connected. Power capacity is not energy delivery unless it is working at full power, using most input primary energy. In this case it is not, obs.
Conclusion: Whoever is making these claims is an unqualified idiot, more so because they don;t understand the most basic electrical energy physics/engineering, but also that they are unable to understand they don’t understand. Dunning Kruger at work. Probably. I may be wrong, but you would have to tell me how, on the physics and data.
Hi Paul Love your work, and share it often (I’ve been fighting the insanity of wind for the last 16 years). This one rang bells, though so I googled, and this came up. I thought you should be aware. Kind regards Mary Mary Young
Thanks
I’ve added an update
No problem. As you’ve said, it does so highlight the problems of EVs in rural areas, and not necessarily remote areas, either. In the local (Central Scotland) village where I shop, there are two chargers and I’ve seen grown men practically tearing their hair out when they realise they haven’t got enough juice if the next village’s EV chargers are also out.
Sorry – I’m a trigger-happy idiot. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/diesel-car-charging-station/#:~:text=A%20photograph%20shows%20an%20electric%20car%20charging%20at,uses%2036%20gallons%20to%20provide%20a%20200-mile%20charge.
Did the car owner have to pay for the diesel as well?
A 2018 photo of an electric vehicle charging station powered by a diesel fuel generator was part of a test in Australia to see whether it would work for EV drivers in remote areas without a network of charging stations.
Whatever they use to recharge an EV, the range is still less than half the range of diesel and petrol cars and it only takes ten minutes maximum to refill with diesel/petrol.
And of course, there isn’t a pedal missing in my ICE.
” Whatever they use to recharge an EV, the range is still less than half the range of diesel ”
I’ve owned and driven diesel cars with a range of 1000+ miles. Range anxiety isn’t a problem, although remembering where the fuel filler cap is located can be a problem.
‘On investigation, it appears to be a charging station in the outback of Australia’
A genius drove an EV into the Outback? Brilliant! An excellent Darwin Award attempt.
So… we agree it’s not 5.6mpg. On another thread someone pointed out that a genny running at a constant speed may be more efficient than a diesel car going up and down hills etc. But then there’s the inefficiency of the battery.
Checking with the ducks I find a company claiming 106l/hr for a 400kW genny at full load. So 23.3gals/hr imperial or 28gals/hr US. Which is a lot more than claimed in the headline. Hmm. Anyway, it’s 23.3/400 = 0.06 gals/kWh.
What’s the performance of an EV? Again randomly I find a review that says a 58kWh VW ID3 will do 200 miles. Assuming that that means 200/58 miles/kWh that’s a figure of nearly 3.5.
So 3.5/0.06 = 58mpg. Did they misplace a decimal point (or did I)? I’ve not accounted for battery charging losses – Brian says 17% above – so 49mpg. Not too shabby, really. Does that look right?
Given the impossibility of getting the MWs to charging stations in the UK let alone the Australian outback, a large natural gas genny at every motorway service station and supermarket looks like the way to go!
It’s a pity you can’t put a diesel engine into a car directly
If there was a second EV plugged in, you would have been up to almost 12 MPG, about what a 1965 Galaxy station wagon gets going downhill with a tail wind.
This is an old one from 2019.
The sign on the charger above says “Nullarbor” — the vast treeless and grid-free centre of Australia — but this is actually a test site in Perth (the trees were the giveaway).
The 3,000 kilometer trip across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide is such an achievement for an EV that it’s practically a news story each time one makes it. Electric Car owners carry a chip about not being able to drive across the country like any real car owner could. So Jon Edwards, a retired engineer from Perth, set up this test site in his backyard. He wanted to know if it could be a realistic stop-gap for our far remote roads.
To me, this looks like a chain of efficiency losses going from diesel to mechanical to electrical to battery to mechanical, but Edwards tested it with ten friend’s cars last December and estimates it works out slightly better on fuel use than just driving a diesel. Readers can check out all his calculations and tables on his page — at a glance it’s a respectable effort. He is an engineer. The charger is a Tritium Veefil 50kW DC (a big fast one) and took 9 hours to charge all 10 cars and used 108L of fuel. Good for fuel. Bad for time. (The 6,600km return trip across the Nullabor took 13 days in case you were wondering, though they were not in a race)
https://joannenova.com.au/2019/08/the-diesel-generator-behind-the-electric-car-charging-point/
I haven’t a link to his youtube explanation but it would appeal to those with a sense of humour.
Also need to factor into these costings the capital cost. How many of these big expensive generators and transformers do they need spaced across the Nullaboor? Maybe 10? I could drive my 4×4 diesel with a trailer full of jerry cans and get across with no stops at expensive generators. In the old days that was all a service station was – a large overground tank and a gravity feed.
Also. Its wrong to talk about generators in Kws. They are rated by KvA hrs. That is the rate they can deliver at. So this is a 50Kva generator.
Astonishing ignorance.
w=vA
It has been a while, but last I checked W = V x A applies only to DC circuits. When dealing with AC circuits phase angle must be accounted for. Volts x Amperes = Apparent Power, to which one applies the PF (power factor) to obtain Watts, or True Power–the rate at which Work is done. I don’t know if these “errors” and “stupidity” are such, or a matter of semantics.
bobn:
reply to the engineer who was the subject of the 2019 article I quoted.
I haven’t been able to find the youtube on line.
Reply to billydick007.
Watts=Volts x Amps still works for AC but on an instant basis as you go through the alternating cycle. As is the case for DC if the voltage or current changes.
With AC the voltage (and current) changes in a sine wave from positive to negative and averages zero. So to get an idea of the level of voltage/current we use thew Root Mean Square. We square the voltage/current at each instance so eliminating the negativity then average out the squares and take its square root.
But the sum RMS volts x RMS amps = RMS watts doesn’t work. And works even worse if the voltage and current are out of phase (if you have an “inductive load”). And it gets evem more fun if you work using more than one phase from the power supply.
As ever wiki makes a good attempt at simplification!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power
What does Wiki have to do with these comments? Do you actually read and cite Wiki? The only time I use Wiki is for a discography of some band, or other such vital information.
billydick07 I find Wiki an excellent source for well presented information on almost anything. Here AC Power concepts and calculations.
What is required is a ‘minutes per mile’ figure to compare charge time with filling a tank. Then you can see how much time you have wasted virtue-signalling.
I just pointed out that the photo (and accompanying text) had appeared before.
For your information Nullarbor means NO TREES.
A bit of digging reveals that the Nullarbor plain is less than 800 miles across. Too far for a battery car without refueling stops, but an easy unrefueled trip for many diesel cars https://www.australia.com/en-gb/trips-and-itineraries/perth-and-surrounds/crossing-the-nullarbor.html
Whatever .it takes less than five minutes to fill a petrol car .So…
Precisely and at least three times the range of an EV. My own car (60 litres (13 gallons) 2 litre diesel) shows 1200 km = 750 miles
How is it possible that EVs in 2023 have maximum half the range of petrol cars from the 1960s? My 1966 Toyota with 1600 cc petrol engine had a 12 gallon (55 litres) tank and easily had a range of 400 miles.
ICE has improved. EVs haven’t even reached the range of ICE cars from over fifty years ago.
>>Whatever .it takes less than five minutes to fill a petrol car .So…
How do you get the diesel to the remote charging stations in the first place? EVs? That would be an extra challenge. And at what cost?
Recalculating the car charging time on the basis of 20 minutes, it looks as if the fuel use is about 50 miles per gallon which is what I get with my current diesel car, without the exorbitant cost of the EV and the charging station. What profit margin would the charging station operator expect, and what would the cost be of delivering the diesel to the charging station?
Related point. If we assume a coal powered generator (I know we’ve hardly any left.) then to charge for 200 miles requires about 125kWh (fast charging is only 40% efficient: losses via internal resistance (I^2R etc increasing as the square of the current). This requires 40kg of coal (80kg if you believe Green Peace – which I don’t).
Around 1927 tests were conducted on the Royal Scot express train which weighed about 500 tons. It consumed coal at 20kg per mile. Scaled down to, say, a Tesla weighing in at around 2 tons for 200 miles would require 16.5kg of coal. But in fact it requires 40 kg of coal. Hardly an improvement of energy efficiency!
I have a similar problem with the sort of hybrids that you never plug in to the power supply. So all the power comes from petrol/diesel. Surely converting it via electricity must INCREASE consumption?
A proper “hybrid” would run on any refill of petrol, diesel, CNG without conversion to electricity at all. Is there any research in that direction?
>>hybrids that you never plug in to the power supply
IIRC a chieftain tank would run on any flammable liquid including vodka and cooking oil. But that comes at a price. For optimim efficiency and low pollution you need a fuel specific engine.
I have owned three Toyota Prius’. They got forty-five to fifty MPG in Summer, and a measly forty to forty five in Winter cuz the engine needed to run for cabin heat in the Midwestern Winters. They were perfect cars; reliable, quick, fun to drive and reasonably priced. I kept all three to 100K+ miles with only one repair in one car–road salt ate the 12 volt starter motor. Also, range anxiety is for losers and fools.
It is absolutely NOT normal to be forced to recharge a vehicle after only two or three hours of actual use. Look at the range of EVs. That is bad enough, but EACH of those recharges takes a lot longer than 10 minutes.
>>Also, range anxiety is for losers and fools.
Realist IIUC typical electric vehicle range is ~200 miles which IS three hours at motorway speeds.
Range anxiety is for people who want to get where they are going. And, preferably, back
Still less than one third of the range of a proper car. And would be even less for travelling in towns and cities.
>>typical electric vehicle range is ~200 mile