Charging My Electric Car Is MUCH Cheaper Than Most People Think

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Most people have no idea how cheap it is to charge an electric car. This hit me this morning while unplugging my car, so I decided I should write an article about it. Ironically, a few hours after I had the idea to write the article, Jake Richardson submitted the following piece: “EV Owners: How Much Are You Saving?” It’s a good article and I am super curious to see how readers respond. Luckily, Jake didn’t discuss the key things I was planning to explain, so I will go into those here. There are three factors that I think any normal person wouldn’t know, or at least two big ones.

First of all, this initial point is not going to apply to everyone, but it is going to apply to a lot of people. Many utilities have different electricity rates at different times of day. (And utilities that don’t yet have this “time-of-use pricing” will probably get it in coming years.) When there’s very high demand for electricity relative to supply, it makes sense for a utility to charge more money for each Wh of electricity at that time, and many of them do. On the flip side, when there’s relatively low electricity demand, those utilities charge less. That’s pretty much always in the middle of the night. When is a car most likely to be parked at your house for several hours? That’s right — in the middle of the night! In my utility district, this is how it goes:

• 23¢/kWh on-peak (2:00 PM to 6:00 PM from April to October, 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM from November to March)
• 7¢/kWh super off-peak (12:00 AM to 6:00 AM)
• 9¢/kWh off-peak (all other hours)

That’s a dramatic difference in pricing depending on when you use electricity, and if you can charge during those super off-peak hours, that’s some seriously cheap electricity.

Another thing most people don’t realize is that an electric powertrain is about 3–4 times more efficient than a gasoline powertrain. A lot less energy is needed to move an EV one mile than to move a gasoline-powered car a mile. Gasoline cars convert about 12% to 30% of the energy in gasoline into movement, whereas about 77% to 90% of the electricity from the grid is used to power an EV (with the rest lost to resistance, friction, etc.). If electricity cost $100/kWh and gas cost $10¢/gallon, it would be cheaper to operate a gas car than an electric car, but with current electricity and gas prices, powering an EV for 100 miles is far cheaper than powering a gasoline car for 100 miles in most cases. You can figure out your own potential savings using this calculator.

This last part is basically just a side note on EV fast charging. When people don’t yet have an electric car, they try to compare by analogy. They think about their experience with a gas car to try to replace that in their mind with what they expect from an EV. So, they often think about charging at a public charging station somewhere, and wonder how long it takes to charge and what it costs. Now, if someone was to look at the price of fast charging, they would find the cost much more similar to the cost of gas. So, they may think there’s no financial savings at all. But most EV drivers use fast chargers very seldom. They are much more likely to use home charging or even workplace charging, which is much cheaper if not free. There are also other “Level 2” charging stations available at various grocery stores, shopping malls, and other places that offer cheaper charging — and, again, some of them offer free charging. All of the ones around us were free for several years and we used them regularly for a few years.

Overall, until you’ve really dug into the matter, it’s hard to understand how much cheaper an EV is to operate. Even many EV owners don’t realize it! I almost always charge overnight, so I’m paying just 7¢/kWh for that fuel.

The result: I could go almost 200 miles on what it would cost a comparable gas car to go 30 miles. That’s nuts, isn’t it? It would cost me more than 6 times as much to drive a similar gas car than an electric car. You can plug in your own numbers here.