July 6: The skinny from the power company

After getting a full recharge at the 120-volt wall plug in the parking garage at work I drove home and only used maybe three bars. It was about 3/4-full when I got home that night. I didn't plug it in all weekend and it still had that amount of charge when I went to Southern California Edison (SCE) for a meeting today. It was a short drive on city streets. I thought it would be fun to plug in directly to the Southern California Edison company tap and get some free juice from the very people everybody has to pay for volts. After a few unsuccessful attempts to get into the charging area (SCE has more security than the Berlin Wall), one of the SCE people I was meeting with came down, swiped a card, a gate opened and I plugged into 120 volts straight from the source.

Turned out it was no different than any other electricity. It's all the same. Like gasoline, which all sloshes around in big supertankers until each oil company adds their secret mix of detergents to it and then sells it, backed by some really big marketing extolling how different it's supposed to be. Sort of like those malooks who pay extra to get electricity from “green” sources. Once it's in the pipeline it's all the same, dudes. Oh well.

I was going to meet with some SCE people about preparing Southern California for the coming electric vehicle onslaught. Talk to your electrician now, if you're going to use 240 volts, they said. You won't need 240 volts, I said.

They asked me as many questions as I asked them. The thing I was most impressed with after a week in the EV, I told them, was that I was able to meet all my charging needs using only 120-volt wall plugs and that all the worries I had about needing 240 volts were for naught. If my case is the same as the thousands of coming EV owners, and if they all recharge at night from 120-volt outlets when the rates are lower and the juice is 10 cents per kWh, then everything could be groovy. Ten cents per kWh is amazingly cheap, especially if you've ever cranked an electric generator by hand or by bike pedal. Even those little generator lights that spin on the front tire of your bike take a huge amount of effort. The stuff is hard to manufacture yourself but incredibly cheap when you buy it from a utility.

One thing they said, which has been said before, is that we here in California have electricity that comes from much cleaner sources than they do back East. Naysayers will cite all the coal-fired generating plants in coal-happy West Virginia and throughout the East and claim an EV is no cleaner than a gasoline-powered car. But even there it's still way cleaner, maybe twice as clean.

SCE uses nuclear from San Onofre, hydro from the Pacific Northwest as well as smaller hydro plants in the Sierra foothills, and powerplants fueled by natural gas. Since the decommissioning of the Mojave generating plant several years ago, SCE gets no electricity from coal-fired generating stations. There is even some electricity coming from wind and solar. So you can get much cleaner electricity out here than if you owned an EV back East.

Another point: SCE looked at 12 studies to see how many EVs would be in SoCal by 2020. The high-end estimate is 1 million, which seems completely whack to me, even for 10 years from now. But the low-end estimate is that there will be almost 200,000. That's just in the SCE service area, which is essentially Southern California minus some local municipalities that have their own deals like LA's Department of Water and Power. Even the California Air Resources Board claims in its literature that there were only 4,000 EVs ever in California total. That's from the dawn of the machine age 'til now. Why would the number of EVs in this part of this state suddenly go up to 200,000 or a million? Especially if gas continues to be relatively cheap? I don't see the numbers going that high unless there's another oil embargo bigger and longer than the one in 1973.

SCE also wanted to clarify something about baseline allocation assessment as determined by the government, i.e. billing. My electric bill is going to go up, they said. They produced maps, charts and graphs to show me that the increase I was going to experience in my bill this summer would not be solely as a result of my new electric car. Effective June 1, 2010, the electricity usage zones in which it classifies customers based on how much electricity they are likely to use in a year were redrawn. The deserts use more electricity than the coasts, for instance. As a result of this gerrymandering I am now in a higher cost area.

My previous annual usage cost $651 and my new annual usage will likely be $985. That's for 4605 kWh a year. That last figure surprised me, since I consider myself pretty good at conserving electricity. That's 12 kWh a day. We have a brand new, very efficient refrigerator, a gas stove, gas oven and we line-dry all the laundry. On sweltering summer afternoons we do turn on the air conditioning and it is central air. They said that if you use central air four hours a day for a month it costs $80 a month. But we don't have any of the following high-energy appliances that were also on the list: pool pump and motor ($36/mo), freezer ($24/mo), evaporative cooler ($23/mo), portable heater ($23/mo), clothes dryer ($14/mo), plasma TV ($13/mo), electric stove ($7/mo). The only thing we had was a dishwasher, which was less than $7 a month. So where were we using all that juice? Who knows? I go through the house constantly turning off lights. I blame my kids.

Adding an EV to those costs would seem like it'd be a lot of dough. Turns out it's not that much. And it's still way less than the cost of gas for a gasoline car.

All utilities are approaching the coming electric vehicle in their own ways. SCE will offer three different rate options for households with an electric vehicle:

1. You can stay the same, with your EV charging billed as just another huge, huge hair dryer that's on all night;

2. You can be charged different rates for different times of day that you use electricity;

3. Or you can get a second meter installed free just for your EV and be charged different rates depending on what time of day you charge it.

At the very top of the sliding scale it's 31 cents per kWh (if you left a 1,000-watt hair dryer running for an hour that would use up a kWh of electricity). But that's if you're in Tier 5 usage and I don't know how anyone with a regular house could ever get into Tier 5. We have never gotten out of Tier 1 in our household.

On the other extreme I could be charged as little as 10 cents a kWh for electricity used at night. If I got a separate meter (which is free from SCE) for the car and recharged the car overnight, it'd be 11 cents/kWh billed separately from the rest of the household appliances. If I was billed Whole House Time Of Use and recharged at Super Off-Peak times and was in Tier 1 it'd be 10 cents a kWh. Using the separate meter method, my annual $985 bill would grow to $1,269, if I drove 20 miles a day. But since I drive my EV 44 miles a day minimum, my actual charge with the second meter would be a little over $1,637, or $657 more assuming I recharge at a 120-volt wall plug.

Level II chargers, which recharge electric cars much faster but do it using 240 volts, cost no more to operate than 120-volt chargers, you just get the electricity into your car battery faster. There are some costs involved in setting up your house for 240 volts which are not included in these numbers. But you don't need 240 volts with an i-MiEV, as my experience has shown. So why rewire the house?

Regardless, it's still way cheaper than gasoline. If I use, say, six or seven kWh to get to work and back, at 11 cents per kWh, my daily fuel cost is 66 or 77 cents.

SCE expects to have an online bill estimator up and running by next month. SCE customers considering EVs or plug-in hybrids will be able to calculate the costs of their new rides.

EVs are the second car in a two-car, four-member family. They're the perfect vehicle for commuting. In stop-and-go traffic and wretched freeway misery you might as well drive one of these. Save the planet, or at least cut back on the rate at which you are killing the planet. And maybe reduce some smog. Is that a bad thing?

I still have a minivan at home for all the stuff the EV won't do. I'm not saying EVs will replace cars, trucks, SUVs and minivans, at least not in the foreseeable future. But they can and should be the second car in a family where one or even both parents work. The i-MiEV would suit the commuting needs of my family. My wife could drive it to and from her part-time job then hand it over to me to drive to and from mine. With both of us recharging it at work then plugging it in at home overnight we'd have more than enough range. Or I assume we would have more than enough range, since I haven't tried this full scenario yet.

An update: I have heard from representatives of the building in which I work and they officially do not mind if I use the building's 120-volt outlet to recharge my EV. So there is no moral quandary anymore. At least not at work. I still have no idea how I will expense the electricity from my home outlet. In these early stages of EV-dom, there is still lots of free electricity out there for the poaching. Costco has recharging stations. There are plenty of them. I looked at CalStart's website and got a list.

By Mark Vaughn