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Tech in the country. Programming & Technology inovations.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Plug-in Hybrid Cars - I was reading my issue of Tau Beta Pi, the magazine of the engineering honor society, and found a nice article on plug in hybrid cars from an engineering perspective. They specifically gave some interesting numbers on the cost effectiveness of Plugging in Hybrid cars. It depends on the cost of gas, electricity and the efficiency of the car of course. The break even point for switching was when a gallon of gas cost 20 times a KWHr of electricty. My electricity costs about $0.11, so that works out to $2.20 per gallon to break even, which it could easily reach pretty soon. That could mean if there is another spike in gas prices, another round of hybrid adoption could take place, and no doubt, plug in hybrids will be coming along soon. (You can already hack a hybrid by adding more batteries and a charger to convert it to a plug in hybrid) The problem is that we would need 320 new 1000 GigaWatt Power plants to come online handle the new load. Not to mention, double the capacity of the nationwide power grid. Also, since there is so much tax on gas, that would have to be recovered with a Electricty tax. Looks like we need to start building power plants if we ever want electric cars to take off.