Once you’ve bough an electric vehicle, how will you charge it?
The transportation sector is the biggest source of planetwarming emissions in the United States.
Most of those emissions come from cars and light-duty trucks — the vehicles people drive to work, school, the grocery store and Grandma’s house.
This means one of the most powerful individual actions people can take against climate change is to change the way they get around.
One way to achieve that is to buy an electric vehicle, which produces about a third as much carbon dioxide per mile as a gasoline-powered car. If you’re able to charge your car from completely renewable sources — say, solar panels on the roof of your garage — you can drive as long as you want without generating any emissions at all.
Traditional vehicles aren’t just bad for the environment — they’re wasteful. As little as 12 percent of the energy from a car’s gasoline fuel goes toward making it move. Most internal combustion engine cars are so inefficient that the vast majority of energy produced by burning gas gets lost as heat or wasted overcoming friction from the air and road.
In other words, instead of filling my car’s 16.6-gallon tank, I might as well put 14 gallons of that gas in an oil drum, light it on fire and watch the smoke drift upward. It’s not getting me anywhere anyway. And ultimately, all that carbon is destined to wind up in the sky, where it
helps drive up the average temperature of the planet.
By contrast, battery electric vehicles are between 60 percent and 100 percent efficient. Even if the electricity that powers them comes from fossil fuel sources, they’re using a lot less of it, so their emissions are far lower.
New EVs can be expensive — even the most affordable have a suggested sale price between $30,000 and $40,000. But as more car manufacturers start
producing electric vehicles the cost of these cars is expected to come down.
Electric vehicle purchases also qualify for federal tax credits of up to $7,500. Depending on where you live, your city or state might also provide additional financial incentives to go electric.
Once you’ve decided to buy an EV, the next big question is: How will you charge it?
There are three categories, or “levels” of charging option.
Level 1 is a standard 120-volt outlet, which generally adds about 2 to 5 miles of range per hour. If you mostly use your car to travel short distances and are able to charge it every night, and there’s a free outlet in your garage or near your parking spot, then you’re all set. Just make sure there’s no other equipment like a refrigerator using the same circuit — otherwise you’re setting yourself up for an overload.
If you want to boost your charging power, you can pay $500 to $2,000 to upgrade to a Level 2 charging station. This requires special equipment, and your electrical system will have to be capable of providing 240 volts of energy (the same amount required for big appliances such as clothes dryers or an electric stove). But many places offer tax incentives to help cover the cost of installation. These stations provide 10 to 20 miles of range per hour of charging.
If charging at home is not an option — if you live in an apartment building, for example — you can go to a Level 3 fast charging station, which supplies direct current electricity to your car. A Level 3 charging station can add 60 to 80 miles of range in 20 minutes — the amount of time it takes to use the bathroom and buy a cup of coffee for the road. President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure package also contains millions of dollars to expand the country’s public EV charging network.
Numerous websites, including the Energy Department’s, provide maps of public charging stations. The cost of fueling up at these stations can vary based on the price of electricity and whether they charge per minute plugged in or per kilowatt hour of energy provided. But it’s generally cheaper than gas; a Tesla Model 3 battery costs about $17 to fully charge and will last roughly 300 miles, whereas the gas to drive an equivalent distance in my combustion engine car costs twice that amount.