Is there somewhere on 05 HAH to plug into to start my daily drive off with full charge on batteries. Would this be an advantage? I have PV panels that can charge the batteries.

 

not to my knowledge at this time. The concept of a plug in hybrid will be approaching reality within a few years, but maybe you could research this modification and provide a guide to others to try to perform this recharge function.

 

Does anyone know if it makes economic sense to plug in a hybrid, when/if it can be done? In other words, what's the breakeven point for a kW-hr of electricity and a gallon of gas to have electricity be cheaper to run your car on than gasoline?

For example at $2.30 per gallon for gas, how cheap/expensive does electricty need to be? I pay about 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. It maybe that gas is relatively cheaper than electricity, or maybe it's the other way around.

Another way to look at it is that lots of electricity comes from oil, natural gas, etc. The electric utility has to buy the oil (without the taxes we pay on gasoline, but including profit to the oil company), convert it to electricity (which costs money to do and isn't 100% efficient), send it through the power lines (which have line losses), and sell it to consumers (and various taxes and sometimes profit are added). So, whichever is cheaper (charging a hybrid with home electricity or just using gaspline), isn't immediately clear, but I doubt one is clearly cheaper than the other.

It kind of reminds me of the Prius modification that someone was doing, where they converted it to plug-in. Then they bragged that they got 720 mpg or something out of their gasoline. Well....right, but they somehow neglected to include the cost of the electricty. Hmmm, I can get infinite mpg out of my HAH if I pull it with a tow truck, or only coast down hills with the ignition off!

 

I believe there are too many variables to easily answer your quesiton. This would depend on the performance of the specific plug in systems - once they are developed of course.

Not much electricity comes from oil. The vast majority of electricity in the US comes from coal or natural gas. Hydro would be another big producer and then Nuclear. Oil fired electrical plants are rare.

The numbers I have seen on electric cars appear to indicate that Electrical cars will have the cost efficiency and the lower emmision performance when compared to the VERY inefficient internal combustion engine. Remember that even the best ICE's have very low efficiency.

 

Bob is right on - the internal combustion engine's awful efficiency makes even partial-electric (a.k.a. plug-in hybrid) cars a better choice. I recall electric motors can yield upwards of 95% efficiency, compared to well below 30% for an ICE (even worse before they're warmed up!)

The comparisons I've seen for cost per mile indicated the break-even point for gas vs. electricity was $1/gallon, so anytime gas costs more than that, driving on electricity saves you money. Going from memory here, apologies for that.

All comparisons I have seen also favor electricity over gasoline for well-to-wheels (total system) energy efficiency, and for well-to-wheels greenhouse gas production. Somewhat surprisingly, even the US's coal-heavy power mix for generating the electricity yields less GHG's per mile through an electric car, again because of the huge disparity in engine efficiency vs. the venerable ICE.

I say if you can find a way to charge your HAH overnight, it's worth it. You may eventually find a larger battery pack aftermarket kit (like Hymotion and others are working on for Prius and Ford Escape) for converting to a full plug-in hybrid that can drive 20 or more miles on all electric. I did find one link about the plug-in world: http://www.calcars.org/vehicles.html. Enjoy.

 

I don't know if that's correct or incorrect, but I'm positive that the break even point also depends on the local cost of electricity. Some places in the USA pay 3 times as much for electricity than other places. I pay a little over 6 cents per kWH. That's on the cheap end. So maybe that means my break-even point is $1 per gallon. But it means that somebody on the East Coast paying 18 cents has a break-even point of $3 per gallon. Big difference.

(That 18 cent figure is a guess based on some older numbers. I did find that wind power costs as much as 30 cents per kWH to generate, just as interesting info).

 

Dale:
Thanks for the reply. I did some looking. That $1/gal figure that I took from memory is from http://www.calcars.org/vehicles.html, and I'll quote their assumptions below.

An aside (on your aside ) on wind energy: Scientific American had a nice article about renewables in September last year; their doesn't necessarily negate your numbers; I think their numbers be referring to the low-cost (large projects with good average winds) and you may be referring to the high-cost (smaller projects with poorer winds perhaps)...
I think they charge for the article if you're not a subscriber, but here's the link just in case. http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cf...2B0E6B5CCA067F