[Astro]

Originally Posted by P-hack

we don't all have a place to put solar panels or a windmill, or even have access to 240v for efficient charging though. The grid is going to be a major factor for the foreseeable future.

My old electricity company had a program where you pay for the solar panels and they would install them at their facility. The electricity generated by the panels was credited to your electricity bill. Not sure if they still run the program but i once visited their facility and it was acres and acres of land covered with panels of the same type that people normally install on their roofs.
This electricity company's coverage area was predominantly inner suburbs where there are mostly multi story apartments or small attached houses.
Not many people would have had the roof space or permission to install panels on their roofs. So the program was very popular.

Originally Posted by sendler

We finally agree! Take the total $ amount of your electric bill and divide it by the kWh. This is what your electricity costs regardless of where it goes after it goes through your meter. Simple accounting.

The discussion about electricity costs for an EV seems to be hung up on whether to include the access/service charges.
Personally i don't include those charges when working out a single devices electricity cost.
But when i think of the total cost of my electricity i do include the service/access charges. So my kWh cost is not the tens of cents per kilowatt the bill states but rather the entire cost of the bill divided by my usage. But that is when i am thinking of my total electricity costs.
If i look at an individual appliance i just look at it's kWh usage as it's cost to me.
Every appliance in my house requires a connection to electricity grid so they all require me to pay the access/service charges.
If i was to be totally accurate i would have to count every device that plugs into the electricity grid and then divide the access/service charges by that number. Then that portion of the access/service charges could be included in the figure for how much each device costs me.
I would estimate somewhere around 100 devices (actually it is probably more) so dividing say a $20 access charge by the number of devices gives a figure of $0.20 that i would need to add to each devices monthly kWh cost to get it's true cost.
For high kWh users like an EV a $0.20 per month access charge wouldn't make much difference.
With the number of devices in my house changing all the time it would be more of a pain to calculate than it was worth.

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I agree that the only accurate way to account for the cost of an EV is to measure the energy used from the utility meter to charge the battery. Just looking at how many Ah the battery took would not account for considerable charging losses due to inefficiencies in transformers, cables, and chemistry.
Dem beans gotta be counted.

With regard to charging inefficiencies, i would certainly suggest using either a kill-a-watt meter at the power outlet or a wired in kWh meter. That way any charging inefficiencies would be included in the EV's power usage.
For my EV the charger will be on board and so adding a wired in kWh meter before the charger will be quite straight forward. I am planning to add one during the build but the main reason for having an on board kWh meter was so that if i charge at a friends house i can reimburse them and they can be confident that the figure is correct.
Most of the people i visit probably wouldn't accept an offer of cash but at least it would allay any fears that my EV was responsible for their next unexpectedly high bill. Seeing as most people never expect their bills to be as high as they are. I think people who monitor their power usage down to the kWh and so know what their bill will be before it arrives are in the minority.