And now she wants to jeopardize our national security and safety and hobble our military.
So our military can be dead in the water when they run out of battery life and our infrastructure cannot recharge a battery for hours? Sounds legit! NOT!! Sorry, war on hold while we recharge!!
— SamJ❤️🇺🇸💙 (@SamJuneau) April 26, 2023
.@SecGranholm knows zero about battlefield realities. There’s zero chance of our military forces being able to field an all EV fleet in a mere 7 years. More importantly such an effort would make the military almost completely dependent on China for its source of fuel.
— James Hutton (@JEHutton) April 26, 2023
National Defense Magazine reports on this pipe dream:
Despite the Army showing interest in electric vehicles, the study, “Powering the U.S. Army of the Future,” noted that all-electric ground combat platforms and tactical supply vehicles are not practical now or in the foreseeable future.
Several reasons accounted for its findings.
First, the energy density of batteries today is roughly two orders of magnitude less than JP-8, the report said. That results in excessive package weight and volume to meet maneuver requirements.
“Advances in battery energy density will undoubtedly take place, but not enough to offset that magnitude of a disadvantage,” the report noted.
Additionally, recharging all-electric vehicles in a short period of time would require massive quantities of electric power that are not available on the battlefield, the study said.
“We believe that electrification of ground vehicles is highly desirable,” said John Luginsland, the committee’s co-chair and senior scientist and principal investigator at Confluent Sciences.
“There are all kinds of advantages in terms of torque … as well as fuel efficiency,” he said during a webinar unveiling the report. However, the committee concluded that the service’s future inventory “should be hybrid-electric vehicles with internal combustion engines, not all battery electric vehicles.”
While commercial vehicle companies have made strides in electric technology, the military has unique challenges, said John Szafranski, division chief for vehicle electrification at the Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center.
With “silent watch and the off-road usage, we would typically consume twice the energy of an equivalent commercial vehicle,” he said in an interview with National Defense. “That means that with the battery technology today, we wouldn’t meet our range requirement or operational duration requirement.”
Recharging would also be a major obstacle for electric platforms, he added. “We can’t rely on an electrical grid to tap into.”
The numbers aren’t on the side of electric vehicles, Szafranski said. For example, if the Army had six 300-kilowatt hour battery trucks and officers needed to refuel them in 15 minutes — the same amount of time it takes to refuel vehicles with JP-8 — it would require a 7-megawatt mobile charging system, he said.
“We don’t have anything like that,” he said. “Today, our largest mobile generator is less than a megawatt and it doesn’t have vehicle charging capability. So, that would have to be developed, and then all the logistics of moving those generators around and fielding them would be very complex.”