Turn off a light, plug in your car.
 

I was thinking today about my 4 mile commute to work, while poking at my electric car, wondering how much it's going to make our electric bill go up, and useing figures from TomEV and his simaler Citicar, it looks like if I drive 10 miles per day, 7 days a week it will be around $10.80 per month increase, or about the same as if I turned a 100 watt light bulb on and left it on 24 hours a day for a month, something that it seems like alot of people do.
2400 watt hours per day is in some ways alot of energy, but when you look at how much people waste without realizeing it, it's not that much.

Ryland, or think about it this way. Overnight electrical loads are actually necessary and desirable, especially when there are nukes near you on the grid. You don't pulse and glad a reactor, they need overnight load. Perfect application!

You still use 100W light bulbs?!? Go CFL man. 23W is 100W equiv. :D

Your paying .15/KWh. If you could shift enough load to "Off Peak" hours. You can save on your electric bill. By switching to a "Time of Use" electric meter.

I'm sure he is using CFLs. It's just that the 100W light bulb is the universal unit of electrical energy, because everyone understands what it is.

If you start talking about things like 8,189.1399 BTUs per day, people's eyes glaze over!!!!!

We often talk about how many homes a power plant can run, rather than how many mega-watts it produces because it's easier to wrap yer head around.


Ah, yes, all that, then I see the :D at the end of your post!

Anyhow, it really is easier to think about!

My point was that when you sugest the idea of plug in cars, people react with "but where will the electricity come from?" and my point is that a $10 change in your electric bill is not something that alot of people would notice, and that if all plug in cars came with a list of things you could do to lower your electrical useage, then your electrical useage doesn't have to go up at all! and the point about off peek power is right on as well, throttling back on power plants is not an easy thing to do.
I brought this up because people seem to use this point as a reason not to get plug in cars, then get other electrical loads that use just as much if not more then a plug in car would.

Even if your electricity bill goes up, your petrol bill goes much farther down!

A rough calculation tells me that if I only use an EV to get to and from work (42km round trip, 182.5 days out of the year (very rough calculation :P) not for anything else) I'll be driving 7665km/year. Which in my petrol car will cost me AU$1105, whereas an EV will cost me AU$163! That's $936 difference!

And that's just the cost to drive it, the maintenance costs will be much lower, too!

Another quick numbercrunch (hooray for spreadsheets) tells me that for $1105 I could drive the EV over 50,000km! O_o

That is a good comparison.

Take all that money you save and invest it for retirement!

You'll be amazed at how much a gas car can really cost you over your lifetime!

Unfortunately the cost of batteries being what it is, those savings would be used to buy a new pack after however many years :p