What if you could drive a car that gets 100 mile to the gallon and the only thing you needed to do differently was to plug it into a wall outlet at night when you come home, just like you do your cell phone?

(Photo courtesy of Jurvetson. Some Rights Reserved.)

Sound good? The City of Austin thinks so, too. That’s why the municipal electricity company, Austin Electric has been lobbying auto manufacturers to create plug-inhybrid electrics (PHEV’s), first for fleets of vehicles, and then for consumers. It’s part of their Plug-in Partners National Campaign.

What kind of difference would 100 mpg make in your wallet? What kind of difference would that make in our economy if everyone drove a car like that?

Think Toyota Prius with a larger battery and a plug. On the whole, the PHEV’s run on battery power far longer than the Toyota Prius hybrids that are on the road today, primarily because of the larger battery packs. They still will get charged by braking, called “regenerative charging,” but the internal combustion engine (ICE) will turn on less, kicking in when the driver puts the pedal to the metal, or when the battery runs low.

Reducing foreign oil consumption

Many people feel that given terrorism, we need to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. This position is well articulated by organizations like Set America Free.
To reduce foreign oil consumption, there are three commonly discussed options:

- Drill locally
- Develop new sources of energy, especially renewables like solar, wind, geothermal, etc.
- Conservation

I’m going to concentrate on alternative sources of energy. First, its important to understand that renewables like solar, wind, and geothermal generate electricity. So, the more we invest in these new, renewable technologies, the more we’re investing in an electric future, as opposed to an internal combustion engine future. I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.

There’s an important property about electricity you need to understand to put everything in perspective: electricity is fairly inefficient to store. Most of the electricity you use in your house, for example, comes directly from the electricity generation station in or near your town. If that facility shuts down, so will your lights.

Electricity is moving electrons. The electrons you’re using right now to read this are being set in motion — “generated” — in real time at an electrical power station.

This is different from, say, water supplied by your city. Water is stored in tanks on the ground and on towers. It sits there until you turn on your tap. Generally with electricity, there’s no “electrical reservoir” that holds electricity for your home until you turn on your light. Your light comes on because the moving electrons get put in motion at the power plant and go directly to your lightbulb. Generally, they don’t get stored anywhere. There’s no big field of batteries that soaks up electricity until you need it.

Given all that, in a nutshell, here’s the case for PHEV’s:
- electricty is cheaper than gas per mile. At $3.00/gallon for gas, electricty it’s at least 1/3 the cost of an electric “equivalent” gallon of gas, according to advocates.
- Plug-ins will get charged at night, when there’s less demand. Most proponents of PHEV point out that the electric grid is underutilized at night, so PHEV’s hitting the road will not necessarily mean we’ll need to build more power stations.
- PHEV’s can significantly cut our dependence on foreign oil.

Living in Austin, we have an interesting and compelling wrinkle in the case for PHEV’s. Austin’s wind farms in West Texas currently generate more energy in the evenings than is consumed, a spokeperson for Austin Electric recently told me. The excess is currently wasted as there’s no effective means for storage. PHEV’s can soak up that excess. So for Austin and other cities like it that have invested in wind energy, PHEV’s fit well into the electrical ecosystem.

This video from Plug-in Partners makes the case.

More on PHEV’s and the future of Electricity in Future posts.