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Everything we think about the cost of running an EV will be dumped on its head when cap and trade gets in.
Even right now, some people pay $.05 and others pay $.22 per kWhr of electric energy. Try to make sense out of that as a comparison.
Sorry to say, EVs are not better than anything else. They are better than some things. The biggest con I know is the plug-in Prius, where a guy spends $10,000 for extra batteries thinking he is doing a lot to fight CO2 emissions, but in fact the globe would be better off if he had just left the production Prius alone.
As for everything being tied to coal in the end, this is not an assumption. The important thing to try to understand is what happens as a result of something we do. It does not matter what the local power company tells you. That is their accounting. The first thing that happens when you plug in an EV is that the load on the grid is instantly balance, simply by the effect of network impedances and sources. If the sources start to weaken, fuel is added or new stuff is started up. It all follows a law of economics, maybe the most basic one of all, which says the system will select the lowest priced available source to meet any increment in demand. That is coal. Why would anyone turn up the natural gas when it costs 5 to 10 times as much as turning up the coal?
It gets tricky for California where we have restrictions on coal imposed by law. If all the country had the same restrictions this it might mean something, the that is not the case. True, California burns more natural gas than would otherwise make sense, but by doing so we just increase the national demand for natural gas which makes the price go up, though just a little. The rest of the country immediately rebalances all their systems in response to the increase in natural gas price, and the result is they choose more coal.
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