Europe is facing an energy crisis, thanks to the low wind power generation, the interruption of the connection through which electricity can be shared between countries, and the shrinking of nuclear energy resources. The UK’s response was to burn more natural gas to generate electricity-but natural gas prices hit a record high.

The result is that wholesale electricity costs are at their highest levels in many years, which will have a knock-on effect on everything that uses electricity.

One benefit of owning electric vehicles (often abbreviated as EV) is that they usually have lower operating costs, even if the purchase cost is higher. The average cost of driving an electric car for 100 miles is about 4-6 pounds ($5.50-8), compared to 13-16 pounds for gasoline or diesel vehicles.

In the first half of the first ten years, almost all public chargers in the UK can be used for free. In 2013, when I drove my first EV, I shuttled between public charging stations, frustrated by the insignificance of this car driving less than 100 miles on a fully charged condition.

But I persevered, because I not only made a better sacrifice for the environment, but my fuel was also free. Even if it is not free, it is still much cheaper than running my old diesel car.

Although fossil fuel prices are indeed rising, motorists need to have a good reason to abandon their old cars and switch to electric vehicles. But with the increase in electricity prices—and the subsequent operating costs of ordinary electric vehicles—what will this make for electric vehicle owners and those who consider being a part of it?

In 2019 and 2020, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the UK is about 18p. The data for 2021 has not yet been released, but an online quote from one of the UK's six largest energy suppliers shows that the average cost in September 2021 is about 24 pence per kilowatt hour.

At the average rate in 2020, the cost of charging a car equipped with a 50 kWh battery is approximately £9.50 (considering some energy loss during the charging process). At a rate of 24 pence per kilowatt-hour in September 2021, the cost of charging the same car is about 13 pounds, and the charging can travel 200 miles.

Refueling your electric car is still half of the fuel cost of a gasoline or diesel car. But public charging rates vary widely, from around 24 pence per kilowatt hour for some fast chargers to 69 pence for other units at highway service stations that provide ultra-fast charging.

At 69 pence, a full charge will cost £34.50, which is equivalent to using fossil fuels, or higher in some cases. Of course, you are unlikely to charge an electric car from completely empty to completely full, so some of the energy will be cheaper. But even so, when electricity costs are high, the economic benefits of switching to electric vehicles do not seem to be so strong.

Although electricity prices are rising, one of the lasting benefits of electric vehicles is that they are what researchers call "energy agnostics." Vehicles equipped with internal combustion engines usually require fuel derived from petroleum and have been designed for more than 100 years to use fossil fuels.

Electric cars run on energy stored in batteries, and these batteries are actually independent of the source of energy. It can be nuclear power, hydropower, or solar energy generated by photovoltaic panels on the roof of a house.

Again, it costs money to install these panels (although the price is declining every year), but once they are installed and the sun is shining, you can charge the car while it is parked on the drive.

When you consider that an ordinary car is not used 95% of the time, it has enough time to charge free from the sun.

Let us also think about the era when the national power generation network generates too much electricity. This may seem unbelievable in the energy crisis, but sometimes the electricity generated by the national grid is so large that operators don't know what to do.

This phenomenon is more common during the peak period of the COVID lockdown, when some energy companies even paid customers to use renewable energy instead of shutting it down. Electric car batteries are the perfect sponge to absorb excess power.

Many countries are building more resilient electricity networks to generate electricity when it makes sense — to capture sunlight when the sun shines and when the wind blows — and store it in large grid-scale batteries called large battery packs , To be used when renewable power is insufficient. t has been generated.

Electric vehicles may also become part of this storage, and trials are underway to evaluate the feasibility of vehicle-to-grid technology that allows car batteries to transmit their power to the local grid during periods of shortage.

If you charge your car at the energy rate that applies to your home (remember, the price of electricity is priced according to your household’s electricity needs, and the amount of electricity to charge your car’s battery does not exceed 50 kWh per day), your costs will almost certainly rise .

However, if you are smart about when and how to charge an electric car, then you can benefit from very cheap fuel, if not for free in the next few years. Electric vehicles may even become an important part of how the energy network balances supply and demand and controls costs for everyone's benefit.

In the energy crisis, electric vehicles and their huge grid-connected batteries can actually help prevent future crises and high prices, rather than increase fuel costs during the energy crisis.

Tom Stacey, Senior Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management at Anglia Ruskin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original text.

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