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Huh, how does having options of ICE or EV cars mean high oil prices won't mean people try to use less oil? If gas prices go up, expensive public EV chargers wi

Huh, how does having options of ICE or EV cars mean high oil prices won't mean people try to use less oil? If gas prices go up, expensive public EV chargers will be more appealing. I hope you get better infrastructure re: charging soon; here in California (not known for low energy prices nor for infrastructure-building capacity) most fast chargers are between US$0.50 and US$0.70 (£0.37-£0.52) per kWh, so it is definitely possible. (You also need non-fossil-based electricity generation to truly decouple from oil/gas prices.) I share your worries about industry, though — although trucks, earth-movers, etc could theoretically run on batteries or hydrogen or something, industrial processes using petroleum and natural gas may be around for a lot longer.

ItsBob 5d ago
When I was referring to ICE vs electric I was referring to personal transportation only. Sometimes you just _can't_ use less oil. My own situation is that I make 5 sub-100 mile round-trip journeys each week now. It's the poster-child for home charging an EV. It saves me at least £3k a year on petrol alone. However, I had to pay an additional £7k over and above what I sold my petrol car for (just last week, in fact) in order to get a secondhand EV. I could have gotten a much older, higher mileage one for around the same as I sold my car but that was too big a gamble for me. So I was in a position that I _could_ use less oil by switching. Not everyone has a spare £7k lying around. I was told by a friend of mine (he's been driving electric for 5 years I think!) that a few years ago, the 92p/kWh fast chargers used to be about 30p. We now have waaaay more of them available and the price has gone up by about a factor of 3x so I don't see the price coming down any time soon and more infrastructure isn't helping in our case. The UK energy prices are really high too: £0.13/kWh is the global average and we pay £0.27/kWh [0]. So electric isn't always the answer either unless you can get a cheap tariff. Plus if you need to have a car and you live in a flat, you're only real option is petrol/diesel and a great many people here live in flats. In terms of industry, it will have some luck changing the last few miles of delivery over to electric. That may be fine though - leave the mega-miles to the diesel trucks and then city and town deliveries could be made by electric vehicles where they only need to do 200 miles of stop-start driving. Energy isn't free... if we want to power things we need to expend energy somewhere in the chain in order to do so. [0] - https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/tariffs/world https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/tariffs/world

ItsBob 5d ago

When I was referring to ICE vs electric I was referring to personal transportation only. Sometimes you just _can't_ use less oil. My own situation is that I make 5 sub-100 mile round-trip journeys each week now. It's the poster-child for home charging an EV. It saves me at least £3k a year on petrol alone. However, I had to pay an additional £7k over and above what I sold my petrol car for (just last week, in fact) in order to get a secondhand EV. I could have gotten a much older, higher mileage one for around the same as I sold my car but that was too big a gamble for me. So I was in a position that I _could_ use less oil by switching. Not everyone has a spare £7k lying around. I was told by a friend of mine (he's been driving electric for 5 years I think!) that a few years ago, the 92p/kWh fast chargers used to be about 30p. We now have waaaay more of them available and the price has gone up by about a factor of 3x so I don't see the price coming down any time soon and more infrastructure isn't helping in our case. The UK energy prices are really high too: £0.13/kWh is the global average and we pay £0.27/kWh [0]. So electric isn't always the answer either unless you can get a cheap tariff. Plus if you need to have a car and you live in a flat, you're only real option is petrol/diesel and a great many people here live in flats. In terms of industry, it will have some luck changing the last few miles of delivery over to electric. That may be fine though - leave the mega-miles to the diesel trucks and then city and town deliveries could be made by electric vehicles where they only need to do 200 miles of stop-start driving. Energy isn't free... if we want to power things we need to expend energy somewhere in the chain in order to do so. [0] - https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/tariffs/world https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/tariffs/world