I agree with this. If people were up for that, they’d be doing it right now, because that’s what the market offers.
[quote]You also conveniently inflate (and massively) inflate the savings of electric vs gas. We will probably need to start another thread for why gas prices will remain low for the medium term future (HUGE supply in the 80ish/barrel range in the US/CA) but electricity is only 1/2 the price equivalent gasoline. energy.gov/articles/egallon-what … -important
Facts are important if you actually want to talk bigger picture. And the bigger bigger picture is that all you have done is replace dirty technology with slightly less dirty technology. Taiwan gets a significant amount of its electricity from coal. And coal is imported…[/quote]
I agree with this up to a point. The price comparison on the website is in the right ballpark, but the two fuels are not directly comparable. The cost of operating a BEV is mostly the depreciation cost of the battery. Only 20-30% is the cost of the energy, especially when you’re talking about a scooter in stop-start traffic. Simplistically, you can look at it this way: gasoline costs NT$50/liter, or NT$1.5/MJ(th). Electricity is ~$4/kWh, or NT1.1/MJ. An electric scooter is about 80% efficient at converting your battery charge into motive power, whereas a scooter ICE is about 20% efficient in city traffic. Therefore the net energy costs are $7.5/MJ(mech) for gasoline and $1.5/MJ(mech) for electric.
However, a 1kWh LiFePO4 scooter battery only has a lifetime of ~1500 cycles (I’ve no idea what the Gogoro uses, but LiFePO4 is a popular battery chemistry for scooters). That’s a total energy cycle of ~4000MJ, so if the battery costs NT20000 (which it will) then your storage cost is NT$5/MJ, which brings you right back up to NT$6.5NT again. And we’ve ignored recycling cost - it’s a safe bet that those batteries would end up in a landfill.
Still, it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that a street full of electric vehicles will be a LOT quieter, and less stinky, than the gasoline-powered equivalent. You could sit on the sidewalk and drink your coffee without feeling your cortisol levels creeping up into the red zone. Pollution from power stations can at least be scrubbed. And BEVs might be a necessary stage that we have to go through so that people can grok electric vehicles.
Where it gets a little unfair is that oil proponents pretend that gasoline scooters don’t depreciate at all, or don’t cost anything. The embodied energy in an electric scooter (minus the battery) is less than that in the gasoline version. It will last longer and it can be recycled in much the same way. But the battery is a problem. It’s one reason why I’ve rather lost interest in BEVs and really wish governments would go straight to wired PRT networks. Sadly, your average politican would discount that out of hand.