https://www.cartalk.com/car-owning/how-much-does-it-cost-to-charge-an-ev
Does anyone here have an experience they’d like to share?
It doesn’t cost anything to charge a BMW i4 for the first two years as long as you keep your charging sessions to 30 minutes or less and use their preferred charging company.
Read that an ev is about 1/4 cost per mile vs gas. But, if you don’t drive much and don’t charge much I guess it can be real cheap.
Is elec 12 cents per kWh? Or 20 cents? Is gas $3 gal or $5/gal?
After I get a utility bill reflecting a full month of charging, I will post my experience.
Unfortunately, my ownership of a plug-in coincides with an increase in utility rates, but hopefully that will be offset by my enrollment with a solar company that guarantees a 21% saving, as compared to the regional utility company.
The nice thing about this solar company is that they have set up their panels on the roofs of warehouses and industrial buildings in my area, so that I didn’t have to install any panels on my roof. It should be interesting to see both my total electrical usage as well as how much this solar project will help with my electricity bill.
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I think there are only 2 or 3 EV owners in the regular forum members… Pretty small sample.
Good article, though. Looks like John Goreham’s current cost per mile for a Bolt EV is 8.5 cents/mile, or darn close to the 10 cents a mile for gasoline. If his electrical rates do increase 30% and gas stays below $3.00 a gallon, John’s 11 cents a mile is MORE expensive than the gas car. That picture only gets worse at the commercial pay-as-you-go charge points by a factor of 2 or 3.
My cost for electricity is 13 cents per kWhr. I am considering adding solar to my south-facing Florida home but an EV would be great encouragement to speed that up. I’m retired so charging during the sunny part of the day would be easy.
FWIW, The performance of solar panels during hurricane Ian was impressive. I saw not a single solar panel blown off a roof nearby my home.
I doubt if 1 out of 10 EV owners even bother to try and figure the cost of charging. All of the Utility Companies in Oklahoma have been granted raye increases to pay for the energy they had to buy last winter . Plus the fact that certain times of the day have higher rates .
This cannot be determined because electric rates are all over the place depending on where you live. Plus any cost today will not reflect the rapidly rising cost of electricity. Solar gardens around here have been mandated by state law and the vendors supplying them are desperate to sign people up to participate. More unknown cost issues due to increasing costs of the materials, life span of the panels, recycling cost of the old panels, and so on. Normally these long term calculations are not made public in their solicitations.
I think an EV owner could figure it out if they want to. Rates at commercial chargers are published. I’ve seen articles that show how to calculated how much it costs to charge at home, including inefficiency. Utilities publish their rates too. A half hour with a spreadsheet and published data would show how much EV charging would cost. Could electricity costs go up? Sure, and gas costs could go up too.
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Yeah sure everything ca go up. But how many follow their utility rate setting meetings to see what is being projected? Then the other elephant in the room is in some jurisdictions, you get thrown into a higher rate if your usage increases beyond a certain threshold. Kinda like property taxes in Minnesota. Once your house value is increased, whether you sell or not, the homestead credit goes away and you get a double whammy. It’s the dirty little secret of government finance. They can keep the rate the same but end up collecting 10% more by doing nothing.
The government never has enough money and the portion of utility costs due to solar and wind generation is never really clearly reported. Just trust the experts.
IMO it makes sense to make decisions based on expert opinion. As long as the experts are independent and their income is not based on expressing a particular opinion. It’s the “as long” clause that causes me the most concern when considering expert opinion.
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During peak solar hours in California, which is something like 10 AM to 3 PM, it should be free since California pays neighboring States to use their excess electricity that those States don’t want (negative pricing). Of course it’s not really free to consumers. Then at 5 PM peak demand starts and solar is mostly gone and they have to pay to bring electricity in from those other States. You’re not supposed to charge your car during this time.
In my area of Calif electric rates are highest from 4 pm to 9 pm. I don’t charge an electric car, but try to run household equipment outside that timeframe. The difference in rates peak vs non-peak isn’t huge though as I recall. I’d prefer much higher peak rates in return for much lower off-peak rates. Hours where there’s not much household usage like midnight to 6 am, imo the rates should be very very low then.
In my neck of the woods, electric rates have always been the same at all hours of the day. However, the major utility recently sent out notices that they will begin installing “smart meters” in a few months.
The most obvious part of that change-over is that they will be able to save money by laying-off all of their meter readers once all of their meters can communicate directly with the utility, but the less obvious part is that they will likely begin charging different rates at different times of day.
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When PG&E first offered a smart meter (circa late 80’s), I jumped on the opportunity. At that time the rates varied widely depending on the time of day and day of the week. Super-expensive in the afternoon on weekdays, very low cost late at night, esp on weekends. My monthly electric bill went from $100 to $40 immediately after switching to smart meter.
Funny story, smart meter failed at some point, and was getting a 15 cent per month bill for a while. Eventually they figured that the meter had failed and replaced it …
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It goes even further than that. The average residential rate is $0.14/kWh. When you look at the rates for plans you’d have if you owned an EV, they’re more like $0.07kWh to $0.08/kWh. Except for New York, most of the major states have very low EV or TOU rates. The PNW is approximately $0.02/kWh. GA is $0.01 per kWh.
I’m one of them.
My Bolt tells me how many kWh I’ve used since my last full charge, and I can set what my “full charge” actually is with my settings(i.e. 100%, 95%, 90%, etc). I honestly don’t know if other electric vehicles display this information when you shut the car off, but mine does, so the calculations are simple. kWh used times the price of your electricity rate equals cost to “fill up”.
My rate right now is 24 cents per kWh, but I am currently being supplied by a solar and wind energy supply company in Ohio. So, if my Bolt tells me it used 30kWh since my last top up, that’ll be $7.20 to recharge, I then look at how many miles I traveled and divide my cost to recharge by how many miles I’ve driven and I get my cost per mile. If I got 150 miles out of that charge, it’s 4.8 cents per miles, 200 miles and it’s 3.6 cents per mile.
However, if I take advantage of the chargers at work, it cost me nothing as work absorbs that cost into their electric bill. And in the long run, even if all 4 spots are taken up and used, the cost is minimal to them
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I just got my utility bill, and according to the electric supplier, the average temperature for the past 30 days was identical to the average temp for the comparable month last year. With that as a benchmark, the increase in my electric bill was $47.46 for driving ~740 miles in EV mode.
When I break down that number, in comparing it with how much it would have cost to drive that many miles in my previous vehicle (which got 23-24 mpg), my cost for electricity is less than half of what I would have paid for gas.
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You can get an idea with todays rates but you know electric rates will double if they force feed this down everyones throat so in the end it may not be much .
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Are you not aware that, unlike the oil companies, the electric companies are public utilities subject to having their rates approved by the boards of public utilities for the states in which they do business? And as being “force-fed” electric vehicles, i won’t comment, because that would be getting too political.
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About 6.4 cent per mile. And when you factor in the oil change(s) each year, the cost will go down even more