The Money Part of Plug in Technology...

[ronjuan]

As a side note, I came across a thread which discussed the tax deduction for this. There is a 10% tax credit for converting your hybrid to PHEV.

[chogan2]

I own one.

Consistent with what was stated earlier, your carbon avoided per dollar invested is a lot better with rooftop PV than with the Hymotion battery. My calculation based on Virginia Power's generation mix is that my electrical miles generate about 70% as much C02 as my gas-powered miles. I estimated at some point that I'm paying about 85 cents per pound of C02 avoided with the Hymotion system, versus what would work out to be about 8 cents/lb if I did rooftop solar.

But, it does work as advertised, and it definitely reduces your use of oil for transportation.

My wife now consistently gets >99.9 mpg. So, if your driving pattern is a good match for the vehicle (e.g., lots of short-ish lower speed trips), it does a good job of substituting grid electricity for gasoline.

Pay for itself? Nah. At $2.50/gallon, with the electric rates I pay, I'd have to do 400,000 electric miles, undiscounted. That would be close to 800,000 total miles (combined gas and electric).

But it is highly leveraged with respect to the price of gasoline. At $5/gallon, it would only take 127,000 electric miles -- unlikely, but not impossible. At $8/gallon, it would pay for itself in less than 70,000 electrically-powered miles. All of that assumes that the price of electricity doesn't rise in tandem with the price of oil. Again, possible, but not too plausible.

[Arthur]

Originally Posted by Tweev

Well that is a complete lie.

If you really are interested in reducing our dependence on foreign oil, give the 10K directly to fund a MS or PhD scholarship doing research into battery technology.

Putting in an EV to reduce dependence on oil, what a load of BS! It's to show off to your friends - it's the green movement solution to the 'small penis syndrome' just like buying a hummer is to rappers. Garbage.

Well, that's a little harsh. Besides, my penis is REALLY BIG!! So, that can't possibly be why I bought a Hymotion system.

The reality is that reducing carbon emissions and our dependence of foreign oil are going to require several critical changes in our lifestyle, the way we use energy, and the way we generate energy.

You are right that hybrid cars (or even purely electric cars) are far from being the whole answer.

We need to start working to eliminate some of the urban sprawl that we have created. That will reduce the number of miles of travel required to tranport people and goods to and from the sprawled out suburbs.

At the same time, we have to change our transportation habits so that MOST of our travel is done by public transportation. The failing auto companies should not only be making plug-in and electric cars, they should be retooling their factories to make train cars.

Plug-in hybrids and electric cars ARE the logical replacement for gasoline-powered cars, but they have their limitations. They are more expensive to manufacture, and the fully-electric cars either have a limited range OR a very expensive (and very heavy) battery. Plug-in hybrids still use lots of gas, especially on long trips.

Again, the real solution is improving our public transportation system and then providing people with incentives to change their lifestyle and start using public tranportation much more. In that kind of world, plug-in and electric cars would be an excellent way to fill in the gaps in people's tranportation needs. Through rentals and car-sharing programs, people could have access to extremely efficient cars to make any trips that were impossible (or extremely inconvenient) even with a greatly improved public transportation system.

In another post, someone said that electric cars produce almost as much carbon emissions as gasoline cars. Their assumption is this: If 70% of our electricity generation is from fossil fuels, then electric cars produce 70% as much carbon as cars powered by fossil fuels.

This argument ignores the factor of efficiency. Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some percentage.

When internal-combustion engines convert the energy stored in gasoline into the energy of your car's motion, they do so very inefficiently. Generating electricity from coal in a power plant is a much more efficient process. Using an electric motor to convert electric energy into the energy of your car's motion is an even MORE efficient process.

So, even if electric power is generated from fossil fuels, electric cars produce WAY less carbon emissions than gasoline cars, because the overall process is efficient enough to use way less coal per mile than the gas that other cars use per mile.

In addition to reducing urban sprawl, improving public tranport, changing our tranport habits (using public transport more and sharing cars), and more efficient electric cars and plug-in hybrids, we should also be trying to generate more of our electricity from renewable energy sources.

We should make a goal of building no new fossil fuel power plants. New power capacity and the replacement of old plants should be done with regional wind farms and solar panels on individual buildings. The more of this we do, the more cost effective it will become.

When we factor in the cost of resurrecting a planet that has succumbed to runaway global warming, all renewable energy starts looking very cheap.

My little effort is to be a plug-in hybrid pioneer AND put solar panels on my house (not because of personal physical inadequacies but because I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem).

I could also donate money to the development of battery technology or other renewable energy technologies, but funding those efforts with tax dollars is probably a better idea. They are too important (and urgent) to be left to the whim of philanthropists. After all, that's what governments are for.

Arthur

[scienceexpert]

I am considering a conversion to qualify for the tax credit. This is an article cut on the current credit.

The new tax credits for plug-in vehicles will range from between $2,500 to $7,500, with factors such as battery capacity determining how much owners would receive. Cars like the Chevrolet Volt, due in late 2010, would be eligible for the maximum credit of $7,500. The total cost of the program over the next ten years is estimated at $2.8 billion - a significant sum of money, but a drop in the bucket next to the $700 billion bill it's a part of, or the money received so far by Chrysler and GM.

To meet the tax incentive's standards, a plug-in vehicle must have a battery with a minimum capacity of 4kWh, though an additional $200 of tax credit is added for every kilowatt-hour thereafter, which is how the Volt gets to the maximum $7,500 limit with its 16kWh battery..

Can you add enough Lithium to get the max credit to make it worth wild? Comments!

[hobbit]

I'll point out, however futile doing so may be, that folks
like Theforce and Chogan are among the few people who actually
know *how* to drive a PHEV system as adapted to the Prius for best
benefit. Most of the people [google, various power companies
that make the gesture, etc] who are piloting these things are still
getting high-fifties effective MPG, which you can do on the stock
system without spending any more money. The benefits from using
the Prius as the platform for this depend heavily on an intimiate
understanding of how the systems play together [or don't] and
how to best utilize the benefits of each.
.
_H*

[Arthur]

Originally Posted by hobbit

I'll point out, however futile doing so may be, that folks like Theforce and Chogan are among the few people who actually know *how* to drive a PHEV system as adapted to the Prius for best benefit. Most of the people [google, various power companies that make the gesture, etc] who are piloting these things are still getting high-fifties effective MPG, which you can do on the stock system without spending any more money. The benefits from using the Prius as the platform for this depend heavily on an intimiate understanding of how the systems play together [or don't] and how to best utilize the benefits of each.
.
_H*

Hobbit,

With all due respect, it doesn't matter how efficiently you drive your Hymotion-converted Prius. You can drive as many gasoline miles as you want. The thing that determines how much money you are saving is the number of electric miles you drive.

If you can figure out a way to charge your battery four times a day and use up all four of those charges (even if it takes you a couple hundred miles to do it), your savings will be four times as great as someone who charges once a day and uses their charge by driving 20 miles in EV mode only.

Arthur

[ronjuan]

Originally Posted by hobbit

I'll point out, however futile doing so may be, that folks
like Theforce and Chogan are among the few people who actually
know *how* to drive a PHEV system as adapted to the Prius for best
benefit. Most of the people [google, various power companies
that make the gesture, etc] who are piloting these things are still
getting high-fifties effective MPG, which you can do on the stock
system without spending any more money. The benefits from using
the Prius as the platform for this depend heavily on an intimiate
understanding of how the systems play together [or don't] and
how to best utilize the benefits of each.
.
_H*

If you purchase and new Prius and add the Hymotion 123 package you can only receive a 10% credit for the Hymotion install. The deduction for the Prius is gone so the Max deduction for the Hymotion is $1003.00 + $200 since it is 5kWh. I have decided to follow dree's advise and go for the roof solar panels for about the same money after all the tax credits and deductions.

[chogan2]

Originally Posted by Arthur

...
In another post, someone said that electric cars produce almost as much carbon emissions as gasoline cars. Their assumption is this: If 70% of our electricity generation is from fossil fuels, then electric cars produce 70% as much carbon as cars powered by fossil fuels.

This argument ignores the factor of efficiency. Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some percentage.

When internal-combustion engines convert the energy stored in gasoline into the energy of your car's motion, they do so very inefficiently. Generating electricity from coal in a power plant is a much more efficient process. Using an electric motor to convert electric energy into the energy of your car's motion is an even MORE efficient process.

So, even if electric power is generated from fossil fuels, electric cars produce WAY less carbon emissions than gasoline cars, because the overall process is efficient enough to use way less coal per mile than the gas that other cars use per mile.
...

1 KWH delivered by Virginia Power creates 1.2 lbs CO2 (per US DOE):
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oiaf/1605...f/e-supdoc.pdf

I get roughly 4 miles per KWH. (That's been cited already in this thread, and matches the findings of the US national laboratories tests of a Hymotion-converted Prius.)

So, that's 0.3 lbs C02 per mile (1.2 lbs/KWH / 4 Miles/KWH).

A gallon of gasoline generates 19.5 lbs C02 when burned (per US EPA):
Emission Facts: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle | US EPA


I get the EPA 46 MPG when burning gas.

So, that's .42 lbs C02/mile (19.5 lbs/gallon / 46 miles/gallon).

Finally, 0.3/0.42 = 0.71

Electrical miles produce 71% as much C02 as gasoline miles, in my car, when charged from the grid.

I had been buying wind power through my utility, which, in theory, gave me clean electric miles. That was part of the reason I went for the Hymotion kit. But the vendor dropped all Virginia residential customers early this year. So I'm back to buying the standard mix of power here in Virginia. It's not very different from the US average. It gives me a modest reduction in C02 per mile. But it is not what I would call low-carbon transportation.

[chogan2]

Originally Posted by Arthur

Hobbit,

With all due respect, it doesn't matter how efficiently you drive your Hymotion-converted Prius. You can drive as many gasoline miles as you want. The thing that determines how much money you are saving is the number of electric miles you drive.

If you can figure out a way to charge your battery four times a day and use up all four of those charges (even if it takes you a couple hundred miles to do it), your savings will be four times as great as someone who charges once a day and uses their charge by driving 20 miles in EV mode only.

Arthur

The answer depends on what your goal is. My goal is to minimize the amount of gasoline used, for a given travel distance. This also minimizes C02 and maximizes bragging rights. (My brother owns a Prius, and until we got the Hymotion conversion, he always claimed much better mileage than my wife and I get.) So, I drive it purposefully to maximize the fraction of energy derived from electricity. Which means trying not to demand more power at any given instant than the electrical side can produce.

From my perspective, if I want to go 100 miles, I can do that on five charges driving conservatively, or one charge driving un-conservatively. The first case uses no gasoline, the second case uses slightly less gasoline than a stock Prius. So for me, the right metric isn't to maximize the number of charges, it is to maximize the number of charges per mile.

[Arthur]

Originally Posted by chogan2

The answer depends on what your goal is. My goal is to minimize the amount of gasoline used, for a given travel distance. This also minimizes C02 and maximizes bragging rights. (My brother owns a Prius, and until we got the Hymotion conversion, he always claimed much better mileage than my wife and I get.) So, I drive it purposefully to maximize the fraction of energy derived from electricity. Which means trying not to demand more power at any given instant than the electrical side can produce.

From my perspective, if I want to go 100 miles, I can do that on five charges driving conservatively, or one charge driving un-conservatively. The first case uses no gasoline, the second case uses slightly less gasoline than a stock Prius. So for me, the right metric isn't to maximize the number of charges, it is to maximize the number of charges per mile.

You're absolutely correct. It depends on your goal. This discussion was about the goal of paying for a Hymotion system with the money that the Hymotion system saved you. With that goal, the more you use the Hymotion system, the sooner it will pay for itself. It doesn't matter if you also use lots of gas. Unless, of course, you decide to drive much less efficiently than you did before you got the Hymotion system. Then, you're fooling yourself if you think that your calculations mean anything.

Like you, my main goal is to use as little gas as possible, regardless of whether my Hymotion system ever pays for itself. Here is my personal data for the last 9 days:

date _mi_ gal_ kWh mi/gal
5/12 15.8 0.11 4.50 139
5/13 27.7 0.28 6.42 100
5/14 12.2 0.04 3.72 296
5/15 12.5 0.00 3.98 infinity
5/16 08.3 0.13 1.79 063
5/17 00.0 0.00 0.00 000
5/18 12.6 0.03 3.84 490
5/19 39.2 0.66 4.86 061
5/20 24.8 0.21 6.35 123

The miles and gallons are raw data from my ScanGauge. The kWh comes from my Kill-A-Watt meter. The mi/gal numbers are adjusted for known inaccuracies in the ScanGauge data.

You can see that my mileage drops quite a bit when I exceed the range of my Hymotion pack (5/19) or am in a hurry (5/16). On days when I have to make two round-trips to work (5/13 and 5/20), I only have time to recharge about halfway between trips. Even so, I usually manage to keep my mpg over 100 on those days.

So, yes, bragging is one of my goals, too.

Arthur