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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

>No one is arguing that absolutely no changes to the grid shall take place.

Yes. In fact one common demand is an almost total replacement of current fossil and nuclear plants.

The viability of electric cars is directly related to the local price of electricity. If you want to see more electric cars on the street the first step should be to reduce the price of energy and the stability of the infrastructure.

EU countries are planning to ban fossil fuel powered cars in the next decade, is energy production actually catching up? Or to rephrase: when will Germany stop being the country with one of the highest energy prices in the world?

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"The viability of electric cars is directly related to the local price of electricity."

Is there anywhere on earth where gas is cheaper than electricity? Outside of like the middle east maybe. I suppose you'd have to remove gas taxes for a clearer picture. But that just shows that the government can make electric viable whenever they want by raising gas prices.

> Is there anywhere on earth where gas is cheaper than electricity?

This is a bit complicated, since the two are not directly equivalent.

But as an example example, we can compare a 30mpg car with an EV rated at .24kWh/mile (advertised consumption for a Tesla Model 3). 250 miles would be around 60kWh or 8.33 gallons. Power averages (in the US) around $0.20 per kWh right now, gas about $3.38 per gallon. There's a lot of variance by state for both of these, of course.

And so, for 250 miles, gas would be $28.16, whereas electricity would be $12.

So the answer to your question is: Probably. It's only around 2.5x difference in price, which could easily be inverted somewhere that has a significant oil supply but low power generation capability.

I have a Toyota rav4 plugin in europe. Gas costs 1.7€/liter, gets about 6l/100km for about 10.7 cents per km. On electric it goes about 73km for 14kwh which costs about .60€ per kWh which is about 11.3 cents per kWh. Of course the at-home rate is about half this cost so you will do better there, but fast-charge rates are about the same gas and electric.

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