Sue Lane Madsen: Electric vehicles – we aren’t there yet

They sound attractive. They really do. Especially for those of us who live 15 or more miles from a gas station. And especially after arriving home and only then noticing the gas gauge is on E for empty. We have fuel stored in the garage for just such a contingency, but how much more convenient to simply plug in the car?

Except the technology is not there yet. While the focus is on building more charging stations, a major barrier to more widespread adoption of electric vehicles is charging time. In five minutes, 5 gallons of gas will bump even an inefficient gas-powered pickup from zero to 100 miles of range. An all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning refills at 30 miles per charging hour, assuming a Ford-compatible 240V Level 2 charging station. 110V outlets are not recommended, and a full recharge is at least eight hours even with Level 2.

Charging time may not be a problem for people with quiet and orderly lives. It doesn’t work for everyone. A recent study published in the journal Nature Energy by researchers at the University of California Davis examined why electric vehicle owners chose to go back to liquid fuel on subsequent vehicle purchases, finding “discontinuance in California occurs at a rate of 20% for plug-in hybrid electric vehicle owners and 18% for battery electric vehicle owners.” Besides a lack of 240V charging capability and the inconvenience of charging, other factors linked to discontinuance were “having fewer household vehicles and not being male.”

Among those one in five California EV drivers abandoning their electric vehicles, there may have been one too many urgent calls for “Hey Mom, come pick me up” while the EV was on low battery.

As we prepare for a winter where the Washington state Department of Transportation has warned us to expect bad road conditions, there will be another test of another set of electric vehicle weaknesses. Winter driving pulls more energy to run heaters and defrosters, on top of typical cold-weather battery loss. Consumer Reports recommends buying a vehicle rated with twice the range you anticipate needing if you live in a cold climate.

Let’s say you’re driving a Tesla Model 3, EPA rated with a 310-mile range. You decide to drive to the Apple Cup at Husky Stadium, a distance of 280 miles. There’s been a light snowfall on I-90, nothing too unusual for November. The GPS system says you can make it in four hours, you figure six hours to allow for road conditions. But 145 miles later you find yourself parked at the charging stations at the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park just outside Vantage, waiting for the battery to refill. For eight hours.

Or maybe you didn’t even make it that far, after sitting parked on the freeway waiting for a blocking accident to clear outside Moses Lake. Keeping that heater running pulled down the battery faster than you planned, and you start rethinking those weekend ski trips you were anticipating.

Recharging time will also be a concern for the Spokane Police Department as officers experiment with their two new Teslas. One Tesla could be out on patrol while the second Tesla is recharging, just like having two batteries for your cordless drill. When one battery dies, swap it for a second and keep going. Has anyone calculated the cost of buying and maintaining twice as many patrol cars for the same amount of coverage?

Range will also be a concern. Police officers have less control over the distances they may be dispatched than a soccer mom shuttling kids to games and practice. One shift might find an officer working in a single neighborhood, the next day responding to calls crisscrossing the city. An urgent call for service in the last hour of a shift could leave an officer stranded, waiting for a tow back to a high-capacity charging station. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth experimenting with a couple of newfangled electric vehicles. It does mean looking just as diligently at what doesn’t work as at what works.

Besides the vehicles themselves and a network of charging stations, we have to address where the power comes from to feed the grid. We have to address the challenge of updating and hardening the electrical grid to withstand weather events, including geomagnetic storms. And we have to address the last distribution legs, the lines serving each neighborhood and the capacity of the electrical panels in the 57% of homes in Spokane built prior to 1970. Even in the ’ 70s, residential electrical panels often had more limited capacity than we would expect today.

Ready for widespread adoption of electric vehicles? We’re not there yet.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.