NATIONAL: Let's talk Electric Car Economics & the Environment

PLEADING WITH JOURNALISTS: Please use MARGINAL electricity rates when telling us how cheap it is to drive an All Electric Vehicle. It is DISHONEST to quote the cheapest possible rate for electricity, when they know that it is the MARGINAL rate that we pay when we add an Electric Car to the household electricity budget.

I was just reading an article today in the SLO Tribune about the new Electric Honda Fit. I am a huge Honda fan (1974 Civic, 1983 Accord, 1994 Accord), or at least I was until we recently replaced the '94 Accord (manual trani) with a 2010 Hyundai Elantra Touring (automatic - bought in November 2009). The article in the Tribune points out how the average buyer can save $1,000 to drive 12,000 miles per year in the All Electric Honda Fit compared to the All Gas Honda Civic. All good and well? Save $1,000, assumedly by charging batteries instead of buying gas.

Then the article goes on to quote an electricity rate of 12 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh). Pulling out my monthly electrical bill from PG&E, I find that I pay an AVERAGE of 19 cents per kwh. However, the marginal rate for the next kwh of electricity that I would pay, were I to own the All Electric Fit, would be 31 cents per kwh, or 260% higher than the rate quoted in the article. I'm sure that punitive marginal rate from PG&E would move the needle on the savings calculation from the article.

LITHIUM-ION BATTERY SUSTAINABILITY: Electric Honda Fit and Nissan Leaf Lithium-Ion type batteries are made from some pretty nasty materials that have to be mined out of the ground. I'll track down some scientific articles on this subject, but here's one I found in just a few minutes: Lithium Battery Sustainability Analysis. This article notes that the Lithium-Manganese battery used in the Nissan Leaf is composed of a number of chemical compounds and aluminum and polyethylene foils, copper foil, graphite, and lithium based salt brines. Last time I checked, mines used a lot of dynamite and diesel and electricity to come up with their desired end product (see the popular reality TV show Gold Rush, to see how much material and energy is expended to get an ounce of gold).

BACKGROUND: My family (2 parents, kids) are careful users of electricity, especially considering that my wife and I spend all day behind a computer for our work. We routinely spend less than our neighbors on electricity, despite the fact that we both work all day at home. In fact, that's the reason we temporarily decommisioned our All Electric Hot Tub until we could plumb a Natural Gas Heater up to it instead. Because of the punitive marginal PG&E rates, our Hot Tub (back when we used it), added AT LEAST $100 per month to our electrical bill. Had we been charged the same rate per kwh for the FIRST kwh as for the LAST, our hot tub would only be costing us $30 / month in electricity, and we would probably still be using it.

NOTE: I am not pro or con All Electric Vehicles. However, I am in favor of factual reporting about the economics and environmental impacts of competing technologies, such as gas vs. electric vehicles.