Getting your Goverment Rebate Running a Car on Rechargeable Batteries
There are only a few days left to take advantage of the $5000 California State rebate for anyone who buys a car that runs purely on rechargeable batteries, or one that is a plug-in hybrid. This might be harder than it sounds, because most of these all-electric cars that we've been promised, the Fisker Karma, the Chevy Volt and many others, aren't going to be available until early next year - a time when the billions of dollars set aside to fund the rebate, will probably be all spent (the billions of dollars, if you're interested, come from the smog abatement fees you pay on your car). Well, let's say that you buy one of these cars that are actually available now - like the Honda FCX Clarity fuel-cell car; how exactly does this whole plug-in business work to let you recharge and start saving?
Lots of people are going to be putting up those charging terminals in their garages in preparation (the official name being a Level 2 charging station); and these are wired up to their home's 220 volt lines. These aren't just simple wall sockets though - they are sophisticated computerized outlets. For instance, when your area's off-peak rates kick in, that's when you could want to charge your car. And these computerized outlets can be programmed (remotely, say from your cell phone even) to do your bidding. You can expect your car to be all juiced up in about eight hours. However, as the lots of things in life, there is the role of diminishing returns that applies here. Charging rechargeable batteries up to, say, 80%, will take no longer than about a couple of hours. Completely filling it up, that's what will end up taking the full eight hours. You know how it is - when you're really hungry, you'll probably polish off most of your meal in the first 10 minutes; getting every last scrap down, after the edge has been taken off your hunger, should take more time.
How much is all of this going to cost though? To begin with, if you have a really old home, it may have been wired for an age when there wasn't air-conditioning and electric heating all over the place, and it may not be able to handle the kind of load an electric car full of rechargeable batteries will draw. If your house has wiring for anything less than 200 amps, you could need to get some major rewiring done, that could cost you some. An average home wiring upgrade to handle an EV, could actually cost something like $4000. And that is before you start to count the cost of the charging outlet itself - adding on another $2000. That sounds like it could wipe out your gas savings just getting everything set up.
But often, you'll find you won't have to actually pay for the charging outlet; you buy a car, and they put it up for you free of charge; or else, the government picks up half the $2000 tab. This must be why the state of California is offering a $5000 rebate. It can often take weeks to get all the installation people to come and actually get everything done - because any plain old local electrician isn't qualified. There are only a few electricians to go around, who are trained enough. You could factor in the cost of your time waiting around for everyone too. To calculate how much the charging of the rechargeable batteries in your new EV will cost, you estimate things something like this in Southern California. If you charge your car after 9 PM every night, it could cost you about 10 cents for every kilowatt-hour; and you will use up about 20 kWh per charge. That should work out to only two dollars for an 80-mile range. That's not much, is it?