Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I recently had the great pleasure of going back for a week to Alaska, where I’ve spent many exhilarating summers. I was reminded of the winter cold by seeing all of the electrical outlets by the parking meters in Fairbanks. Every car that is parked there in the winter plugs in their “block heater”. This is an electrical heating element that keeps the engine block of the car from getting so cold that the engine refuses to start.

Figure 1. Fairbanks monthly temperatures, averaged by decade. You can see the huge change in these sub-Arctic temperature over the last eighty years … or not …

That started me thinking about how much energy it might take to heat a car in Fairbanks, versus the energy to drive it around. Here’s how I would do a back of the envelope calculation for a place like Fairbanks, just below the Arctic Circle.

Block heaters run from about 500 watts to a high of 4,000 watts. Most seem to be in the range of one thousand watts, a kilowatt (kW).

In Fairbanks, the average temperature is below freezing for seven months out of the year. So to calculate total use, we could estimate that heater usage will average out to say four months of the year, fulltime. So the car will be drawing a kilowatt at all times except when it is being driven. Call it 23 hours a day.

So 23 hours / day times 1/3 year times 365.25 days / year times 1 kilowatt = 2,800 kilowatt-hours (kW-h) per year.

The price of residential electrical energy in Fairbanks is about 19 cents per kW-h. So that’s about $500 worth of electricity per year …

Gas (petrol) prices in Fairbanks were about US$3.80 per gallon when I was there. Assume 10,000 miles driven per year, and say 25 miles per gallon fuel efficiency for the car. That’s 400 gallons of gas, worth about $1,500.

My envelope tells me that the Fairbanks car might have a total energy cost of say $2,000 per year.

So car-owners of Fairbanks, when the EPA Police want to arrest you because you haven’t kicked your evil fossil fuel habit, tell them they’re too late — a quarter of the energy to run Fairbanks cars is already electrical, you are already so green it hurts.

(Don’t tell them that due to local conditions and US opposition to nuclear power, Fairbanks electricity all comes from fossil fuels … those kind of folks need their illusions.

w.

PS—Before anyone accuses me of being paranoid about the EPA Police, consider this:

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