I recently came across a post talking about how insane it was for a diesel generator to be generating electricity for an electric car charging station. Well, yes but it might not be quite as bad as it seems.
The first thing to bear in mind is that very few cars will charge here unless they really need to – most car users will charge at home and will only use public chargers when they have no other choice. And this one is undoubtedly in a remote location where a suitable electrical feed is not available. As a remote location, it’ll get even fewer users than most public chargers.
Probably only those who haven’t properly charged their car overnight and are ‘caught short’.
The second thing to bear in mind is that although it’s a more polluting solution, it is still almost certainly far less polluting than using a petrol car. For a start, most of the electricity used in an electric car is off the grid which whilst not completely clean is at least getting cleaner (the UK is currently generating 36% with renewables and is in late winter when demand is quite high).
Next, a diesel generator is a very efficient device – far more so than a diesel vehicle because it can always run at its most efficient (assuming a sensible load and it’ll have been picked to supply the load for an electric car).
But hopefully it is just a temporary solution until someone has enough nous to set up a solar farm and a battery backup.
