How will the Chevrolet Volt be better than a Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid?

I spread the fixed fees to every kWh of the electricity I purchase, not only to the first kWh. I know the more kWh I buy, the lower it'll be because the spread is wider.

My raw electricity rate is 10 cents per kWh. After spreading the fixed cost, it came out to 36 cents per kWh.

 

Here is my question though. Lets say you plug in and charge 3 kwh into your Pip, does it add 30 cents to your electric bill or $1.08?

My take is fixed costs are fixed, I'd be paying them regardless of whether I charge a car or not so it is not appropriate to add them to the cost of charging the car.

It would be different if you installed a new metered service with its own fixed costs just for charging.

 

It'll add 75 cents.

The only fixed cost is the Basic Service Charge of $15.75. My delivery charge is 10.7 cents per kWh (yea more than the electricity rate itself!). The System Benefits Charge / Renewable Portfolio Standard charges is 0.41 cents per kWh. Temporary NY State Surcharge is 0.47 cents per kWh. Plus there are other tax and surcharges that do not have the kWh breakdown:

• GRT & other tax surcharges
• Merchant function charge

Without the $15.75 Basic Service Charge (fixed cost), I pay about 25 cents per kWh.

 

The 12.9kw for a full charge already includes the the charging losses.
Adding the transmission loss is appropriate, if you are doing well-to-wheel type analysis. All that has been done and discussed before and wells-to-wheels the national average is a bit cleaner for the prius than the volt, but regionally it varies a significantly.

Here is a map for a Telsa (which is more efficient than a Volt) CO2 Savings

Which is discussed in this thread
http://priuschat.com/forums/chevrol...nsider-chevy-volt-instead-20.html#post1472546
So a Volt/prius comparison would not be as green, but the geospatial distribution would be the same. (Shift down by 1000 g or so).

And comparing to a map of hybrid sales you'll see the areas where the EV is "cleaner" , WTW, is also generally where hybrid/ev sales are highest percentage (and in the above post.. also higher in absolute numbers).

http://priuschat.com/forums/members/drinnovation-albums-graphs-picture8180-hybrid-sales-map.png


And of course if the WTW for the average local grid is bad, as it is in CO, then an owner gets the choice to pay extra to get "green" energy.
(On the other hand, power in Cali is much greener on average but the average price there is still above my wind-power purchase. )

 

That is bad accounting.

There are two normal models (that are acceptable on my companies government contracts)

1) allocation of capital costs (fixed costs) up front and then allocation of "marginal" costs to new activities. This answers the question how much more (net cost) does it cost to add item X.

For this model your marginal power rate is then what matters. This allows you to answer the question of net cost. Last year Jan I paid X, this year I paid X+30.52, so it cost me 30.52 to drive my Volt for all of Jan (751 miles). Note the net cost rate is not always cheaper.. in some places if you exceed some threshold power becomes more expensive... and this model reflects that.

2) Allocation of capital costs based on its relative share of actual costs. So if you do TDU for If you want to allocate fixed costs, you do it on the relative costs. So if my daytime house power is $90 and my night time charging is $10 then the fixed costs are allocated 90% to the daytime usage and 10% to the nighttime usage.

It is not, however, acceptable for me to allocate G&A costs based on say person hours, as people are paid different amounts of money. Its spreading costs, over costs.. not cost over some other unit.


Edit: Updated based on your more recent post. If you have charges that are per KW, then obviously those are not fixed costs. Taxes and other non-kw charges are allocated by dollar amounts, not KW used. If you don't have time of day billing, that of course is pretty much the same. Given what you said, however, If you are looking at a PHEV or BEV you might look at Time of Day Use metering. My nighttime rate, when i do almost all my charging is 3x cheaper than the day rate.

 

I think it was pointed out to you before, but you may have forgotten ...

The Prius used in the Yale study was called 46 mpg, while the Tesla was rated 190 wh/mile. Current EPA for the Prius is 50 mpg, while the Roadster value is from steady state driving at 55 mph.

Correct this apples-oranges comparo, and the ~ correct map* for the Tesla is one comparing the roadster to an Insight in the Yale link. You don't want to know what happens in cold winter climates, and as you say the Volt is that much worse.

I may start a separate thread to discuss buying clean energy. It is much more complicated than you imply to say with confidence that the premium a customer pays for clean energy in fact introduces that amount into the grid and displaces dirty energy. You may be right about your local situation; I have not tried to analyze it critically. My basic approach (simplistic, I know) is this: if the local grid has a 'green' (or wind if broken down) daily energy supply that is greater than the sum of of energy used bought at a green premium, then it is quite doubtful that the green premium had the effect the customer expected (additional green energy on the grid.)

*
Prius 50 mpg not 46
Roadster 240 wh/mile not 190
So (240/190)*(50/46) = 1.4
The insight's 65 mpg is 1.46 times 46.

 

Did not see if I was corrected before..

My point before (and now) was not which was better but about the geographic regions where things were better.

There were lots of things wrong in the study.. 46 was a 2009 (state of art at the time). But the roadster was not the EPA numbers either.

The EPA value the roadster combined cycle, plug-to-wheel efficiency of 174 W·h/km, 630 kJ/km (28 kW·h/100 mi). (Don't know where you got the 240wh/km). So while the 46mpg was wrong, the overestimate in the roadster was much worse. If you want to correct, the factor would be .99 not 1.46.

The geospatial distribution is identical, just the scale shifted down a bit so the colors are different. Not sure what your comment is about the cold. The map includes cold weather climates. And don't forget the cold impacts prius MPG as well.

 

I agree with this 100%. The cost of, e.g. driving a Volt is the amount additional that you pay with the Volt, compared to without.

To compare, say, PiP to Volt, you would look at your cost for electricity without either car, and call that a baseline, B. Then look at your total cost of electricity + gasoline if you drove the Volt, and call that BV (baseline plus Volt); and then the total cost of electricity plus gasoline if you drove the PiP, and call that BP.

Then the cost of driving the Volt is BV minus B = V (cost of driving the Volt), and the PiP is BP minus B = P.

Comparing V to P tells you which car is cheaper to drive. It would make sense, though, to amortize in the price you paid for each car plus maintenance and out-of-warranty repairs for a full cost of ownership.

Using average, rather than marginal electric rates is wrong because you have your baseline costs with or without the car, and what matters is the cost of adding the car. You might as well include your property taxes and house payments as part of the cost of driving the car.

 

It would still cost me 25 cents per kWh after delivery charge, surcharges and taxes. That's much higher than the raw rate of 10 cents per kWh.

Can someone else provide a breakdown of the electricity bill?

 

I would say this is now quite a vampire thread that will not die. A different thread on distribution and power sources of plug ins might be appropriate. In colder climates BEVs like the leaf, focus, imev become less viable as range becomes much less. We should therefore expect lower sales of these vehicles there than hv. Phevs do not suffer the range limitation, but become less efficient. Here having the ability to preheat the car such as the volt has, will allow it to leverage electricity more. The volt has been tagged with poor heating though so you may have to dress warm, not a problem for most. The phv gives you a switch to start out on the ice to warm up, then switch. All in all, phevs have an advantage over bevs in the cold, but lose part of their advantage over hv. It will be interesting to see how many phevs and bevs go to the midwest and mountain states.

Then you should use $0.25/kwh for comparison. My electricity costs base charge is $6.50/mo, with $0.05kwh for wind (locked in), and anouther $0.045kwh for other costs and these other costs are higher in the summer than winter. These variable charges are a little lower since I am on smart grid and allow the utility to do things like reduce my air conditioning if there is a power shortage. I would use $0.095/kwh for my electricity. Its crazy that NY has such high charges. Renewables are hard to add in NY, but lower cost natural gas/biogas/biomass should not be.
http://www.teddersrandomnotes.com/blog/2009/01/06/why-are-electric-rates-so-high-in-new-york/

 

It will be easy to keep track of the gallons used, but how can you keep track of the actual kWH being used to charge the car? One will charge at home likely on a shared meter. They won't know what went to the car. Or may charge at work, friends house, etc....

Will the Volt or PiP say how many kWH expended, then you upscale for charging loss?

 

Yes the 2012 volt will say how many kwh expended and you can upscale. In places like austin the utility will give you a free charger in return for you letting it monitor how much the plug-in takes and when it charges.

 

I estimated off the chart available at the Tesla website.
I wrote 240 wh/mile for battery-wheels, not 240 wh/km.

174 wh/km = 280 wh/mile plug-wheels.
If charging efficiency is .85, then battery-wheels is 238 wh/mile. One error present in my earlier calc is using 190 wh/mile for the Yale number. I think they used 204 wh mile (based on 4.9 miles a kwh.)

So The Yale error is (50/46)(238/204) = 1.27. Keep in mind this calc does not include the 10% power use of the electric power plant itself, so a closer approximation of the Yale underestimate of the Roadster CO2 compared to the Prius is 1.27/.9 = 1.41

 

Marginal kwh if I brought an EV home would be about 13 cents/kwh.
This is electricity almost entirely from coal.

 

I don't see the delivery charge. That is the big one added on for mine.

 

Perhaps you have gold plated cable ?

 

usbseawolf

In NY the rates are unbundled and delivery is separate from the commodity. Many states never unbundled so the rates are all in inclusive of delivery and the electrical energy.

Your delivery charges will generally be at a fixed unit rate for a year or two. Your charge for the electrical energy (commodity) will vary with the market prices and will in general be higher in the summer than the winter.

 

+1

All the deregulation schemes also have some regulation in them, and proper regulation is necessary. I have no idea how NY's form of deregulation has made power there so expensive. Separating grid charges from power plants in principal is a good thing and allows addition of cleaner power choices. Getting power to NYC will necessarily make it more expensive, but the prices seem far out of line with most of the country. Someone must be making a lot of money, and some people are getting screwed It has gotten power usage down in NY though.

 

I would argue that deregulated markets are far more heavily regulated than regulated markets. Regulated markets were/are actually quite simple. Deregulated markets require oodles of regulation to avoid Enrons and so forth.

 

Now we have vered completely off topic to the politics of it all, but I will try to advance it in a non-political way. Good deregulation requires clear simple rules, that actually make sense. California's deregulation, regulated some prices at utilities, but did nothing to control costs from producers or promote good supply. These rules practically guaranteed under low production caused by low rains that someone like enron would take advantage. That the regulators did not quickly fix the regulations led to the rolling blackouts, bankruptcies of the utilities, and higher prices paid by utility customers, that is the voters. Those policies have been reformed, but nothing in the California version of deregulation incentives companies to produce enough power. From the NY prices someone, probably multiple someones are taking advantage of the deregulation to make a large profit at the expense of utility customers.

The most highly regulated areas of the country on the other hand seem to have the blackest or brownest power. This is because the UCs grant monopolies, and these make the most money selling from the oldest most polluting plants. There needs to be a middle ground. My own utility is completely regulated and run by the city, but provides the option to by greener power. Its in a mostly deregulated state. Blackouts last winter were caused by the regulated part, the grid operator. The epa and grid operator may be setting us up for black outs this summer. The deregulation has greened the grid, but needs to be improved.