First day with my Prius Plug-in

For those that want a 220 vac Kill-A-Watt, I just emailed P3.

Hopefully they will reply.

 

Saying gas is the "same energy" as 34kWh is somewhat misleading. After all, if you need to burn (for example) 12kWh of energy, in order to ultimately get the gas into your tank (amortized the R&D for well drilling, or worse, deep water drilling, pumping it out, pumping it to holding tanks, pumping it onto super tankers, pumping it off the tanker, pumping it to the refinery, energy to refine, more pumping into delivery vehicles etc ... maybe a percentage of military costs, spill clean-ups, health issues, etc), then you're actually only maybe 22kWh of energy ahead. On the other hand, PV solar costs can get amortized over 5 to 10 years. Then your charge isn't 10 or 12 cents per kWh ... it's zero cents. On the 'other' other hand, you can't build a refinery at your home.

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I don't think it's misleading at all. Every form of energy requires resources to produce and provide, and every form carries environmental costs to produce and/or use. We generally factor these as the cost of the energy.

But the MPGe is another thing altogether; it's a measurement of how efficiently the vehicle converts alternative energy into miles. Consumers in America understand MPG, but there's no such thing as a gallon of electricity, so the 34kWh figure is used. If EV Car A gets 94 MPGe and EV Car B gets 135 MPGe, then you know that Car B is more efficient. The consumer can easily compare the cost of a gallon of gas (let's say $4.00) to a "gallon equivalent" of electricity (let's say $0.12 x 34 = $4.08). At 0.12/kWh, the PiP with 95 MPGe* costs about half as much to drive in EV mode than in 50 MPG ICE mode.