Spain: Cold Weather and Easter Traffic Reveal Frailty of Electric Vehicle Dream
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
From The European Conservative:
In Spain, long lines at electric car charging stations over the holiday travel weekend showed what can be expected from a future filled with electric cars.
Easter weekend is a peak travel time in Spain, with beach hotels fully booked and summer homes enjoyed by city-dwellers taking refuge in rural villages. El Debate reports that this year saw huge lines at the country’s main electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. Waiting in line for as long as two hours just to plug in EVs was just the prelude to even more time spent charging them.
While the newspaper coverage is anecdotal, it reveals key weaknesses in the EV infrastructure and problems that could quickly become more common.
Currently, Spain has a mere 200,000 totally electric cars on the road—most of them Teslas—in a country with some 25 million registered cars. Normally, EV drivers have no more problems than drivers of gasoline powered cars when refueling. They simply pull into a charging station and can immediately plug into a charger. But problems do arise under specific conditions.
Last weekend, the weather was the wild card dealt to travelers in electric vehicles, combined with the high volume of cars—including EVs—on the road. Temperatures dropped in all parts of the country, in some places into the single digits, and rain accompanied vacationers for a wet, cold Holy Week that continued into the first days of the following week.
According to El Debate, under such meteorological conditions, electric cars lose about 20% of their range compared to nice spring weather. Using car heaters can further drain the battery another 15% percent faster. Colder weather also causes EV batteries to take much longer to charge. Average charging times of 15 to 20 minutes soon turn into a wait of up to 50 minutes.
The long lines were seen primarily at Tesla charging stations along the A-1, the main highway from Madrid to Valencia on the Mediterranean coast, and the A-6, the main corridor between Madrid and the northern part of the country.
This situation, El Debate notes, is primarily due to high representation of Tesla in the electric car market. However, the newspaper notes that the Tesla drivers were not the only EV drivers affected and that there are thousands of charging stations that are built but not in use along Spain’s highways because of a lack of licenses to make them operational.
In part, the argument for a future all-electric car market rests on using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. Spain’s Easter weekend shows the capacity of EVs to waste one genuine finite resource—people’s time.
EVs make up less than 1% of Spain’s cars. Just wait till they are all electric!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I notice that Spain, being a sunny country, is going all-in on solar power. But this is hopelessly inconsistent with the usual protocol for electric vehicles which involves charging them at night!
Lack of licences. This means that the people who run the grid are at least somewhat aware of the looming problems – unlike some countries we can name.
Spanish solar subsidy farms run at night!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/17/nobody-expects-the-spanish-solar-inquisition/
You buy a car to enable you to travel, without much planning, with up to four others, at a reasonable cost, at any time of the day, in all but the worst weather and knowing that refueling is going to be quick and easy.
However a BEV has none of the above, but the adverts list a whole lot of plus points, full stereo system, full LED display, automatic preheat cold mornings, etc etc, none of which are really necessary for efficient travel.
Buying a BEV is akin to buying an i-phone with a stereo camera, 5G, GPS etc etc and finding it does not actually make phone calls.
I believe our civilisation has overkeepupwiththeJoneses our mobility instruments. A car is four wheels and convenience. It needs five hundred miles a tankful and I’ll allow you wireless locking. That’s it. And red looks nice
If EV users have cold weather problems in Spain, where does that leave countries further north?
Likely in the dark……
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Miami, September, 2038.
“Hurricane Ivor, a category 4, expected to strengthen, is now expected to hit Miami. Evacuation impossible; people’s electric cars can’t get them far enough away. Thousands will die. This may be the worst natural disaster in American history.”
Electric cars will make life in Florida impossible. Cars are personal escape vehicles.
Battery cars have only ever been suitable for use as short range city runabouts and then only if you have your own charger.
Aw cmon, having to wait a couple of hours is worth it if you are going save the planet. We had our own e-wait yesterday at Killiekrankie car park where they have nice new solar powered parking ticket machines dispensing £4 tickets. The message was “I’m sorry, I’m running in energy saving mode, your ticket will be printed shortly”. A couple of minutes later and we were on our way.
I’ve just tried out the Audi eTron range calculator. My normal routine driving (low load, city country road driving, mild temperature no air-con/heating) came out at 384 miles. BUT….changed it to a long motorway drive ( to my son’s home for example) in the cold, dark, wet, heavily laden and with the heating on and it dropped to just 184miles which is 18miles less than the journey. So realistically even a journey from Kent to the East Midlands (during which I rarely stop) is likely to mean a recharge on both legs which I can now do on barley more than half a tank of diesel. No thanks, I’ll stick with the diesel.
TTR (Time To Recharge) is a significant factor in road travel with an electric.
Saw an old friend yesterday, asked him if I had seen him driving a Tesla. He said, yes, it’s his wife. I asked him if they use his F-150 for road trips, and he said no, that they have actually taken two long trips with the Tesla. He said the software information from Tesla was perfect, telling them where to stop to charge.
But he wasn’t happy about it. The waiting for it to charge was hours of his life he’ll never get back.
Did the calculator include headlights wipers and radio on, plus children sucking out juice for their devices in the back seat
My ex-colleague and car guru said that A/C should be kept on to lubricate seals and prevent loss of (thermaggedon threatening) gas. Helps with winter demisting at very least. My £3k petrol retirement Panda doesn’t have any luxuries of that sort and so manages 50 mpg.
EVs are like electricity generators, you need conventional ones to deal with times when the modern ones are unavailable. And that is supposed to lower costs and Save the Planet?
True. Fossil fuel generation ENABLES renewables . . . they can’t work without it.
A reality most in the USA are still asleep to. Long distance road trips/vacations are the normal here where EV charging times will double the road time.
Here in Bridgend South Wales UK I am amazed at the amount of Tesla cars being driven around town. People must have more money than sense. The local small Tesco charging bay is normally empty. I stopped at a motor way service station next to the charging bays. I stayed in car as wife went into shops. I watched them plugging in and unplugging there cars. I thought if it was raining hard as it often does in south wales they would get drenched as there is no cover unlike at a petrol station. Are they advised about electrical safety to avoid charging in the rain . Water and electric never a good mix
Meta plans diesel generators to power ‘one of world’s most sustainable data centres’ in emergencies
https://www.businesspost.ie/news/meta-plans-diesel-generators-to-power-one-of-worlds-most-sustainable-data-centres/
Of course they are
There was a splendid opinion piece by Lionel Shriver in the Spectator a week or so ago pointing out that if your policy is to cajole and bribe people to replace machines that run on fossil fuels with electric machines then, pause here for a stunned gasp of astonishment, you need to get more electricity from somewhere. What prompted her to write was an article, in the New York Times, I think, that was brave enough to timidly acknowledge this.
You may be on your own for the electricity.
I think you may have missed the point. If you believe there is a need to replace fossil fuel driven machines with electric machines, as the government appears to, you need to get the electricity from somewhere. I don’t hold that belief at all.
And my point is, it isn’t going to happen. The fine government is happy to increase demand for electricity, knowing – or not even caring – it can’t be supplied.
Commie government is not coordinated.
Kestrel, I think you need to realise that ( as Gamecock points out) “they” really do NOT care nor want you to have adequate energy supplies. None of this is by accident or incompetence…they know it will not work.
Got the roads a bit wrong, the A6 goes to the North West to A Coruna and the A1 goes to the North, the Bilbao area. The A3 goes to Valencia. We travelled regularly through the north it was always cold and damp while Valencia area (the Med) was always warmer !!
I don’t understand how people are surprised by this, these cars have batteries, they are not electric . These outcomes are obvious.