[455dan]

Originally Posted by Jay S

Many years ago we did a project for a public power company, and also a University that made and sold it’s own power (Univerty of Missouri in Columbia). I wrote a feasibility study on the projects. Part of the study was on power costs, and how it varies for uses and the time of day it is used. I can absolutely see the merit’s of electric charged vehicle’s when there is excess power on the grid. With a recharge at night, or better yet a cool night when there is not much demand. Charging up a car on an average night, would cost next to nothing. Not looking at anything but cost, plugging in the battery operated (fill in the blank-it does not matter) it is cheap!

As long as you can use what ever battery operated item through out the day, and make it to the charge point in the evening, it works awesome and is cheap. If there is a shortage on the grid, then it isn’t cheap at night either.

When it won’t make it too that evening recharge, and you have to recharge during “peak” hours.. That gets dicey, at a charging station during the day costs a lot more than $5.45, maybe closer to $30???

Our little local utilities has big diesels they use for peaking units. They rarely ever use them because my area is surrounded my large public power plants that send power all over the grid. They generally lost money running them, it cost more to run them than the revenue they bring in. At least they use too. A couple years ago the price for a short time, because peak use went up, AVERAGED $9000 per MWH… Using that number ($5.45) it would have be $435 to take that trip 200 mile trip. It had been a few years now, and I can recall what the peak was, I think it was over 20,000+ per MWH. It was from a big ice storm in Texas in 2020. You would not have wanted to plug an electric car in at that time. Point to point, a full recharge would have been several thousand dollars. Utilities have a few details to work out before everyone is running battery power stuff charged off the grid.

We are part of an electric Co Op and has been really stable price No off hour or peak pricing or major rate changes over the years here. Also being where we live ~75 % of the grid is supplied by hydroelectric.
Yeah definitely would not want to buy while in Texas when that Ice storm spike happened.

Only 1400 miles on the car so far and the only public charging was done at the Tesla service center before picking up the car. Tesla ap said they sell for 33 cents a KWH so almost 3 times what home charging costs. If we needed a truck it would be a hybrid or another diesel. I can understand electric for SUV or car use, but using a truck to do any real distance towing just don't think it (electricity) makes much sense.