Has Ireland woken up to Electric Vehicles’ value for money?

With the advent of mandatory energy audits for large businesses in 2015; many large companies will have been surprised to see how large the transport energy footprint is in their audit reports, which for the first time included transport.

A recent debate on the Journal.ie (https://jrnl.ie/2522686) prompted this blog topic. The Journal’s poll responses (from 3,728 responses  – see right) and comments showed a lot of knowledge and real world experience of Electric Vehicles (EV).

Why use electric vehicles?

In an internal combustion engine (ICE), 70+% of the fuel you pay for, is rejected as heat; an electric motor rejects between 5-25%.

That’s before the driver, congestion, wind and rain etc. take their slice of your fuel bill.

This graphic shows just what good value an electric motor offers as an alternative to the petrol or diesel powered internal combustion engine.

Taking the inefficiencies into account, you can see that it takes over 3 units of diesel to create the same motive power as electricity (see SEAI detailed explanation of the losses and gains across the grid at: https://www.seai.ie/Grants/Electric_Vehicle_Grant_Scheme/I_am_a_consumer/Power_Station_to_Wheels/ ).

Even after recent price reductions (see graphic) diesel averaged 12.4c/kWh (126.2c / 10.169kWh/L) vs domestic electricity at day rates of 20c/kWh and lower for commercial and night rates (source SEAI).

When you see the amount of that energy that is being rejected as heat, the case for considering electric vehicles is clear.  What is your company fleet doing?

With a relatively small island and 70% of journeys (CSO data via https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/more-than-half-of-travellers-use-cars-for-journeys-under-2km) of less than 8Km taken by car (its takes 5-8Km to warm an ICE to operating temperature), range anxiety should not be an issue.

If you are not replacing vehicles, consider operating them more energy efficiently; companies can avail of supports from Enprova and Enterprise Ireland to help them take a structured approach to fuel and energy management.

ISO50001 certification offers an international best practice standard approach to energy performance management; the old ‘MPG’ or new Litres/100km are performance indicators you can use to secure certification, the proviso being you must save energy (and cost) to retain certification.