Posted on 11/11/2011 4:51:26 AM PST by Libloather
Duke Energy urges electric car owners to stop using charging stations after fire
Updated: 1:37 pm EST November 9, 2011
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Duke Energy officials are asking customers who own the company's electric car charging stations to stop using the product after a house fire in Mooresville last month.
A representative from the company has confirmed to Channel 9 that an email was sent to about 125 customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Indiana who have the same type of charging station installed in their homes.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsoctv.com ...
It’s likely that simple economics, and free markets, will eventually lead to widespread use of electric vehicles.
But not now. The batteries are too inefficient. Too heavy. Too expensive, and the cost of charging them is not low enough to overcome consumer inertia.
A while back I did see online where a guy in a sunny part of the country in fact drives an electric SUV (An Escape, or some such) he charges from a solar array on his roof. In effect he drives free.
If one disregards the $40,000 or so he paid for all that solar panel hardware. And the cost of the battery-powered SUV.
Fact is, it’s a large array of solar panels, for a pretty small job. He can’t take the Array with him obviously, so he’s trapped within the radius of 1/2 his battery capacity.
Not to mention, unless he works graveyard shift, he needs to drive his car, during the time of day, it would most efficiently recharge from the solar panels. Most solar systems use panels to charge batteries during the day, which then run lights and appliances round the clock.
With an electric car, what’s the approach? Solar panel array charges a battery, which then ... charges another battery? Not very efficient.
It’s not so much that it doesn’t make sense to use electric power. It’s just that the technology is still in its infancy.
The market will drive all alternative sources of power, as the sources of power are ready.
On page 83,437 of the Internal Revenue Service code, Paragraph 910.268.469.873 sub heading XIV (A)ee. 31, The items subject to the carbon credit loss are limited to the credit producing item and the associated production equipment.
I interpret that to mean the car and it’s valuation and the plug in station are covered. That means that items not actually part of the car, but in the car at the time of loss are not included. The House and garage and all other contents are of course not included, being merely ordinary stuff and not subject to the loss of carbon credit provision.
Yikes!!
What a relief! Those plugs are hard to replace!
example: Nissan.Leaf, 24kWhr battery, @10¢/kWhr = $2.40 which is good for 100 mi. = 2.4¢ per mile, but it takes 8 hours to recharge, which is why you need a home charger.
Electric car toasted.
Electric cars are toast.
Driver could have been toast if he was taking a nap in the car.
In that case, the car would have been transformed into a toaster-oven.
Solar and Wind Power will never work. Why? Because they are not available 24/7. We all know this, but the libtards don’t.
You have the wind that doesn’t always blow and possibly not even strong enough at certain times.
Then you have Solar (the sun) which goes down at night and hides behind the clouds sometimes too.
Whenever I see a hybrid, ie Prius, I laugh. I am sure the people driving are libtards. I get a kick out of them thinking they are morally superior and more intelligent, when quite the opposite is the truth.
Electric vehicles are only incrementally advanced after over a century of work;internal combustion engines have been proven far more useful in the real world.
ALL these government mandates for electric cars should be scrapped;if electric cars are ever to be viable it will be inspite of, not because of, government.All government programs have done is waste billions of dollars proving pigs can’t fly.
The so-called enviros have touted electric cars since the mid-70s and the truth is they just are horrible in terms of economics and enviromental damage.
Hybrid cars are simply a way of better managing the output of the internal combustion engine through temporary load shifting and secondary power storage.
Liberals call electricity ‘clean energy’ because they are pie-in-the-sky idiots and fools. They are very much like children.
If you ask a Liberal where the electricity for their car comes from, they will tell you that when the unicorns are pooping rainbows, natural electricity is made which somehow automatically recharges my car.
Libs are idiots. Their fanatic adherence to whatever the Leftist ideology de juer is prohibits them from thinking thing through. Libs just do what they are told to do by the elite. They don’t care if it is right or wrong.
“Limited Range” is the whole reason the elite are pushing electric cars.
You can’t control people that can travel hundreds of miles in a few hours.
The next generation of eco-friendly cars are being designed to run on unicorn p*ss - no problems with either garage fires or carbon footprint.
I wonder, though, how long it takes that guy to charge with his solar array. A week?
My Favorite Greenfail stories:
1. The environmentalists squawked Mightily at the building of the Alaska Pipeline years ago. They claimed that the pipeline would interrupt caribou migrations. In the ensuing years it was discovered that the caribou LOVE the heaters that are set up along the pipeline to keep the oil flowing. They find these spots ideal for making whoopie, thus MORE CARIBOU! LOL!
2. The beloved manatees of Florida were suffering terribly during the last couple of freezing winters. Over 500 of them died from the cold...until some enterprising manatee discovered that the effluvia from a NUCLEAR POWER PLANT warmed the water near the outflow pipe just enough to ensure the manatees’ survival, as long as they clustered themselves near the pipe and stayed near till the seasons changed. (This is one of my favorite stories, as it involves FOUR sacred cows of environmentalism..Manatees, Nuclear Power, Global “Warming”, and “Rising Ocean Temperatures”)
3. Story number three is ongoing. It seems as though “Wind Farms” are killing MASSIVE numbers of migratory birds. Unforeseen! Unexpected!
4. And now we have this Electric car Charging Debacle.
5. One final word: “Solyndra”.
440VAC 3ph 60hz power is not available in most residential areas.
This is on purpose, as 3 phase power is not needed for the average home power consumption. Usually 200 amp service is more than adequate for most homes. Single phase 220VAC is used for dryers and ovens. Most everything else is 120vac.
It is almost impossible to add 3phase power to residential areas. The grid will not support it. The transformers would have to be changed, additional conductors pulled into each street and into each home.
So, in conclusion:
There is no way to charge an electric car using a 440VAC transformer in probably 99% of homes.
That is AWESOME! And they should, like, have the unicorns grown with, like, X-Boxes in their necks, so you can, like, ride ‘em around to the hippie hangout and not miss out on any playing time! Just keep the corporate Unicorn Farmers out of the game!!!!
We need to march on Detroit and get them working on that car that runs on... free love!
I think they’d do better with a car that runs on lice. They could fuel a fleet of spaceships if they get that going, and the whole bunch of em can head to the moon.
I’m actually having fun tech-wise using a small amount of this sort of thing in my own life.
I don’t ask government to help me. I don’t do it because the government told me I should. It’s just for a hobby. Same reason I’ve started using a couple LED light bulbs around the place. (they’re not bright enough to use for most things yet)
Nothing wrong with technological advancement. It’s just when government gets involved, things go wrong.
At the moment I’ve got a small electric scooter I use on weekends to run short errands with. It goes about a mile round trip.
Hypothetically it can be charged solar. That’s not available with the scooter, but I rigged together a small solar charger.
Thing is, it takes about a full sunny day, to charge for that one mile round trip.
It’s fun to jump on it and zip over to the market, without using gas. It’s interesting to be marginally able to recharge it without the grid. As a hobby.
But the technology just isn’t ready yet for prime time.
Not even close to being better than gasoline yet.
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