pricing energy in a Covid19 world

T. S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month..." -- and he didn't even own an electric vehicle.

As a Prime owner, my numbers for April are a mere 169 miles of coronavirus-free electric driving and my EVSE power consumption meter showing only 42 kWh used for the month.

At 20.5-cents per kWh here in eastern Massachusetts, that 42 kWh works out to an energy cost of $8.61 or about 5-cents per mile driven.

But, cruel April, here is the irony: regular gasoline at my local filling station is $1.86 per gallon. If I were to assume a nominal 45 mpg for the Prius, that would be 3.75 gallons costing $6.98 which would be only 4.1-cents per mile.

That means that running in electric mode was about 22% more expensive that burning $1.86/gal gasoline.

Looking at it another way, the $8.61 spent on electricity would have purchased 4.63 gallons of gas at $1.86 per gallon. And, were I to have driven the same 169 miles on 4.63 gallons, my vehicle would have needed to averaged only 36.5 mpg.

I suspect that this kind of harsh mathematical reality also extends to all kinds of renewable energy -- which has just become much more costly and less attractive when compared to dirt-cheap fossil fuel.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

 

I appreciate your comments and agree.

Let me redo my calculation using 53 mpg instead of 45 mpg:

Regular gasoline at my local filling station is $1.86 per gallon. If I were to assume a nominal 53 mpg for the Prius, that would be 3.19 gallons costing $5.93 which would be only 3.5-cents per mile.​

That would make electric driving at 5-cents per mile 43% more expensive!

At 5-cents per mile electric and 53 mpg gas, gasoline would have to cost $2.70 per gallon to make the two costs equivalent.

Of course, my driving in April was almost all short trips to and from the local supermarket in urban traffic starting with a cold engine, so it is very unlikely that I could have come close to 53 mpg.

And please understand that I'm not complaining. Mrs. Bear and I love our Prime and take great non-economic satisfaction in its plug-in convenience and comfort.

 

Unfortunately, I live within the city limits of Boston and, while most of my trips are short, they generally consist of accelerating from a traffic light, traveling a few hundred feet, and accelerating from another traffic light. Repeat.

Now, I'm not really into neck-snapping acceleration -- even though I admit that I occasionally enjoyed the rush of exiting the toll-booths on the Mass Turnpike when it still had toll-booths. However, when driving in Boston within a stream of ordinary city drivers, it is not wise to experiment with hyper-miling when leaving a traffic light unless one wants to be rear-ended by someone screaming curses and making exceedingly unpleasant hand gestures.

Back in the mid-1970s during the energy crisis, I lived in Maine and drove a 4-cylinder Chevette. Frequently making the trip between Portland (the state's largest city) and Augusta (the state capital), I felt that a tremendous amount of gasoline was being wasted just because the state refused to move these two cities closer together.