They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.
Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.
The problem with getting rid of oil is that cars currently in use will be usable even when over 20 years old, replacing them with EVs is expensive, and the good enough and economically accessible EVs are only now starting to get to market.
It's really hard to quickly replace millions of vehicles.
In California my electricity to drive my Chevy Volt is more expensive than gasoline, if gasoline is less than $5 a gallon.
So for basically the last 100k miles I've owned it, electricity was more expensive.
The same goes for many plugin hybrids. Luxury EVs still win out because luxury sedans usually only get 25 mpg mixed max.
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A first gen Volt takes 10.3kwh. It also uses electricity to cool the batteries while charging. If you leave it plugged in one a hot day it will cool the battery just for health overall but I'll ignore that. Then, add in the losses on the charge conversions.
It easily takes 11kwh to charge a Volt. It'll go about 35 miles in the summer on that charge, and more like 28 in the winter.
It also gets 35 mpg on gasoline, while providing free heat in the winter from the gas engine heat, and for most of the last few years was doing this for $3.50-$4 a gallon.
There are people on Southern California/San Diego that pay more. Over there people say the Prius Prime is WAY cheaper to operate on gas because it gets 50mpg gasoline.
I've even heard people running their home off gasoline because it's cheaper but that would require an impressive gas generator to do long term.
That won't "solve" anything. Car prices will rise, many people can't afford the switch regardless, too much new EV demand could destabilize the grid in population centers, and throwing away vehicles that are already on the road by replacing them with newly manufactured ones is terrible from an emissions perspective.
Yes, but it is not enough. It helps a lot when sunny, and weekend mid-day gross market prices for electricity hover just above zero, but there's not enough batteries, flexibility, and other renewables to avoid price spikes in the morning and evening peak, when hydro and gas plants are still covering a lot.
It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.
Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.
Yeah, if you're buying a new car, electric makes sense if at all possible. But a lot of people are not buying new cars, because new cars are not cheap. There's a saying that a new car loses half of its value the moment it's driven away from the dealership.
But I agree, operational costs of an EV can be much lower, if you can charge at home rates.
We're looking for a new car. I'd love to go electrical, but there are a few problems:
1) I have no garage and no parking space next to my home. I can't charge it.
2) We have no trustworthy garage for repairs. It turns out the garage regulations require a separate space for electrical forcsafety, and nobody has room to expand.
Apart from that, electricity in Belgium is expensive. I did the math on swapping our gas heater for a heat pump, but I'd pay more for energy even of the amount of watts is so much lower.
Just spraying dust with water will not remove it. Detergent helps, but most of the cleaning effect is done by mechanical agitation, eg. wiping the glass.
The problem here begins even before the mathematical issue - it's that web sites that live from listing bookings have an incentive to offer a way to delete reviews that are not in line with what the owner wants to see.
You were commonly given a network uplink and a list of public IP addresses you were to set up on your box or boxes. IPMI/BMC were not a given on a server so if you broke it, you needed to have remote hands and probably brains too.
Virtualisation was in the early days and most of the services were co-hosted on the server.
Software defined networks and Open vSwitch were also not a thing back then. There were switches with support for VLANs and you might have had a private network to link together frontend and backend boxes.
Servers today can be configured remotely. They have their own management interfaces so you can access the console and install OS remotely. The network switches can be reconfigured on the fly, making the network topology reconfigurable online. Even storage can be mapped via SAN. The only hands on issue is hardware malfunction.
If I was to compare with today, it was like having a wardrobe of Raspberry Pies on a dumb switch, plugging in cables when changes were needed.
Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.