Daily Take: Gas Prices Are Exploding Again

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1:00Gas prices are exploding again, but there's a cheap alternative hiding in plain sight. Trumps and Netanyahu's insane war against Iran has caused gasoline prices to skyrocket here in the United States. Even the New York Times has noticed with Michael Grunwald writing in an article titled, Now is the perfect time to buy an electric vehicle. Quote, even before prices at the pump started soaring above $4 a gallon, consumer reports found that the typical EV owner saves $6 to $12,000 a year on maintenance and fuel over the car's lifetime. End quote. Don't tell that to the grifters in the White House though. Just a few days ago, JD Vance or whatever's name is this week, this is his third name change. Told a group of Republicans speaking about gas prices in the US. Quote, he got a lot of people all over the world who focused on a lot of green energy scams and they're hurting a lot more than we are. Right. The oil industry, which gave Trump hundreds of millions in support to become president

2:01loves it as their costs have not gone up but their profits are through the roof. And Putin is grinning from ear to ear as Trump has dropped sanctions on Russian oil exports and he's making billions to fund his terror campaign against Ukraine. All of this has Americans wondering if now is the time to buy an electric vehicle in EV. And because Trump killed federal subsidies for EVs, the price of them has fallen and used ones in particular have come way down. Now they're easily competitive with internal combustion engines and light trucks. So what does it cost to fill up and drive an EV? And how far do they go on a full tank? For several years we drove a plug in Toyota Prius electric hybrid. It would go about 30 miles on a charge and then kick over to gasoline power since I rarely drive more than 30 miles a day here in Portland in the four years I owned the car. I only bought gasoline about 10 times. Now we have a Hyundai Ionic 5, pretty much the coolest car I've ever owned that is entirely electric.

3:01No oil change, no hundreds of engine and transmission parts to worry about failing or repairing and no gasoline smell in the garage and no need to visit the gas station. Its range is around 300 miles on a full charge which is about the industry average for EVs. The new car from Arizona car maker Lucid has an EPA rated range of 511 miles on a single charge meaning that we're now well into the territory where range and anxiety is a thing of the past. And as battery energy density continues to increase while prices fall 800 to 1000 mile ranges for electric vehicles will probably be commonplace within a few years and already are in China. There are about 70,000 public charging stations in America right now and they're being added at the rate of about a thousand a month even though Trump sabotaged Biden's plan to install 500,000 additional ones over the next few years. But aside from making it easier for people without a garage or home charger to own an EV

4:02and just recharge it every few weeks like we buy gas, what does that mean for people considering a new or used EV because of the explosion in gas prices? The key to easily understanding both is hair dryers, seriously. Most people know that a hair dryer draws about as much power as your average modern outlet will give it, typically around a thousand watts or at 110 volts just shy of 10 amps. Plug in and turn on two hair dryers from the same outlet and you'll usually blow a circuit breaker. Most homes max out at 15 to 20 amps circuits. If those numbers are gibberish to you, hang on, it'll all have meeting in a moment. Last year Donald Trump was trashing electric cars and he went into this rant about how if everybody in America bought an electric car charging them would take down the entire country's power grid. I don't want everybody to have an electric car, he said, we don't have enough electricity. We couldn't make enough electricity for that. This assertion is to be charitable, a bald face lie.

5:04But since we all know what a hair dryer is and have at least a sense for how much power one typically uses the equivalent of 10, 100 watt light bulbs, let's convert an electric car's power usage into hair dryers. A typical electric car using a 110 volt home charger pulls about the same amount of electricity when it's charging as does a hair dryer between 812 watt or 8 to 12 amps with an average of around 10 amps or around a thousand watts per hour, one kilowatt hour. So charging your car is about the same as running a hair dryer, our new unit of measurement. The average electric car travels 100 miles on around 30 kilowatts, 30,000 watts or 30 hair dryer hours of electricity. Tesla Model 3 only uses 25, the Chevy Bolt 29. While the average driver in America travels around a thousand miles a month or 33 miles a day, roughly 10 kilowatts or 10 hair dryer hours a day to cover those 33 miles.

6:06So the average driver charging their car overnight for 10 hours to replenish that 10 kilowatts of electricity to travel 33 miles will use the same amount of electricity as running a single hair dryer for 10 hours. First off, you can see how silly it is to argue that it would take down the grid if every family in America were to turn on a single hair dryer in their home for 10 hours every night, equivalent of everybody charging 33 miles worth of driving every day, particularly because most of that charging is done overnight when electric demand is lower than normal. The average cost of electricity in the US is about 10 cents per kilowatt hour or 10 cents per hair dryer hour. Most utilities offer an even lower price overnight to encourage people to shift their demand for power from the day to the evening to reduce the load on the grid. So simple math suggests it costs about $3 to drive 100 miles, 30 hair dryer hours worth of electricity times 10 cents per hour in the average electric car. For comparison, in the average 25 mile per gallon gas powered car, that same 100 miles

7:10would consume 4 gallons of gasoline, costing around $16 bucks at $4 a gallon. Electric cars are a huge step toward a safer, cleaner world because they don't consume fossil fuels. Transportation is our second largest producer of greenhouse gases, and spending $3 to travel 100 miles instead of $16 is a deal that's hard to beat. Those in Carter tried to save America and lead the world away from the climate disasters that are killing Americans, killing millions of people around the world every year when he put into place his solar bank and other incentives. The fossil fuel industry and the Reagan administration killed his efforts. The Republican Party continues to deny climate change, calling it a hoax, and Republican politicians do everything they can to block green and renewable fuels, all in service to a grotesque industry that makes billions in profits every week from killing our planet. And Trump tripled down when he killed off the green incentives Biden had passed. But we are not without solutions.

8:12Eating our houses in places of business, for example, represents our biggest use of fossil fuels. Yet in Urbana, Illinois, Vancouver, Canada, and across Germany, they're building homes that are so efficient they can be, wait for it, heated with a single hair dryer. A new and better world is possible. If we can only overcome the money of the fossil fuel industry, the corruption of the Republican Party, and stop squandering the little remaining time we have before, if we don't act, climate disasters overwhelm us. Instead, Republicans are still disingenuously arguing about where the solutions exist and they're already sitting in our driveways. Every day we delay, we send more money to oil companies, Russia and the Middle East, more carbon into the sky, and more power to the greedy bastards who got us into this mess. But this is one of those rare moments in history we're doing the right thing is also the cheaper, smarter, easier thing. You can keep feeding the machine, or you can unplug from it, literally.