Some electric scooters are being recharged with good old gas generators on a truck.
Often we like to think of electric cars, scooters, and e-bikes as being very carbon neutral choices thanks to no tailpipe emissions but this mobile charger of electric scooters brings to home a dark truth, these electric scooters aren’t as green as we like to imagine. As per one of my favorite Instagram accounts chronicling these electric scooters out in the wild, @BirdTurdsLA on their Instagram story, there’s a mobile charger going around, most likely in an unofficial capacity, charging up birds to “send back into the wild.”
This guy’s got the right idea lmao. Why haul electric scooters away when you can charge them near their “nests.” Go follow BirdTurdLA on IG lol pic.twitter.com/51Adyvgma5
— Paulo NonVTEC Acoba (@ferio_252) October 4, 2018
As hinted at, it’s easy to think that electric scooters, bikes, and cars, in general, are green choices, but, it all depends on where you’re charging up. If you own an electric scooter in the middle of Nebraska, chances are that your electric scooter is inadvertently being powered by coal. You’d think that the electric mix is drastically different in progressive California, especially in a forward-thinking community like Santa Monica, but that is unfortunately not true.
Santa Monica Next reports that, while the S.M. energy mix has a large number of renewable sources powering their outlets, by and large, more than 3/4’s of all energy is made by oil, coal, and nuclear power plants, energy sources that will eventually run out, hurt the environment and leave waste behind.
Purely as profit is concerned, these mobile charging stations with gas generators are pretty smart if you already own a gas generator. It looks like this particular generator is a Honda, one of the most efficient gas chargers out their. Honda says that generally, their newer generators can run between 3-8 hours, depending on the load, on just .95 gallons of gas, more than enough time to charge an electric scooter to full.
Ridester reports that it takes just five hours to charge an electric scooter from empty, and, I’m going to assume less time since most scooters aren’t run all the way to empty. At just $4 a gallon for gas and the time saved not having to drive home, this isn’t such a bad idea to charge with a gas generator. Typically, chargers make between $5-10 dollars per charge.
I’ve reached out to BirdTurdsLA on a little more insight on this particular charging setup but, as it stands, it looks like this is definitely not an official Bird representative, so, I’m going with an independent bird charger.
Electric scooters are great, but, don’t think for an instant they’re particularly green.
