Williston Basin Deals; Why Norway Is The Ideal Place To Buy An EV -- October 16, 2015

A reminder: at the sidebar at the right, about a third of the way down or so, there is a section with links to "all" the major Williston Basin deals.

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Hardly Worth Reading ... Except To See How Well This Is All Working Out

Refinancing One's Primary Residence To Buy A Tesla

The New York Times has one of those articles I loved reading when I was a sophomore at Williston High School ... and then I entered the "real world." The story, with some excerpts, follow.

An $87,000 Tesla vs a used Skoda:

Berit Nordgarden and her husband, Eivind Tellefsen, loved their nonpolluting Nissan Leaf electric car. But they found its 85-mile battery life too short for weekend trips to their cottage with their two young children.

So the outdoorsy couple took a deep breath and bought a second car: a Tesla Model S luxury sedan with three times the battery range, the best of any electric car on the market. Buying an $87,000 car was a stretch, requiring them to refinance their primary residence, a cozy wooden home in Oslo.

But the Tesla would have been completely out of reach — costing perhaps double the price — without generous subsidies and incentives that the Norwegian government offers to encourage the adoption of e-cars.

“If there were no incentives, we couldn’t have afforded it,” said Mr. Tellefsen, a computer engineer, as he squinted into the dazzling sun of an autumn afternoon. “We’d probably have bought a secondhand Skoda.’’

There are doubts that the incentives are really cost-effective, but who cares:

No other country can yet match Norway’s proportion of all-electric cars. Though still only 2 percent, the figure is double that of the runner-up, the Netherlands, and is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. More than one-fifth of new car sales in Norway are of electric vehicles.

Some skeptics wonder whether the Norwegian program is cost-effective, or even an efficient way to reduce air pollutants. And some elements of the program simply may not be replicable in other countries. But for many, Norway is showing a path forward.

The "poor" folks splurge on a Leaf:

Ms. Nordgarden said she and her husband had made do for years with their bicycles, public transportation and a car-share service. It was the government program that induced them to choose a Leaf over a fuel-burning car two years ago.

Wouldn't work in the rest of the world:

Making Norway’s project to shift away from fossil-fuel cars all the more notable is the fact that the country is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil and natural gas. But it is also blessed with an abundance of fast rivers, allowing it to generate virtually all of its electricity from hydropower.

That makes Norway’s electricity cleaner and relatively cheap — a further impetus for adopting e-cars. (A country where much of the electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants would not see as many environmental benefits from switching to electric vehicles.)

Even with that, it still requires all these "subsidies":

The cost of operating a car in Norway can also include pricey parking fees, high tolls for bridges and tunnels, and expensive ferry tickets. So e-cars were exempted from those, too. And it doesn’t hurt that fully charging a car battery from the grid costs the equivalent of only a few dollars, while gasoline retails in central Oslo for more than $6 a gallon.

“But my wife made an Excel spreadsheet,’’ Mr. Arnberg said. And after factoring in tax breaks, fuel costs, tolls, parking and all, “the Leaf came to about half the price” of a gasoline-powered car, he said.

Fortunately, Norway is a small country because there's not many places to recharge:

Mr. Arnberg, like many Norwegians interviewed for this article, bemoaned the fact that the country’s vehicle-charging infrastructure had not kept pace with the number of new electric cars on the road. It is an issue that plagues other places that have embraced e-cars, including California, where the competition for public plug-in sites sometimes grows hostile.

Oslo now has only about 700 public charging spots, although city officials aim to raise that to above 1,000 before the end of the year. For most people, that means most of their charging is done at home.