How Much Does it Cost to Charge a Chevy Volt?
I’ve gotten feedback lately that as much fun as it is to read my very long detailed cost of charging by time of day analysis combined with expected weekly usage analysis, that people just want a simple layman’s answer to the basic question – how much does it cost to charge a Chevy Volt?
This is a fair question – and instead of nerding it out over graphs, I will try my best to explain it in simple to understand terms comparing electricity costs to gasoline costs. For this explanation, I will leave out the complexity of situations when someone starts to use burn gasoline after you’ve used up your battery energy.
The cost to charge your Volt is based on 2 numbers. How much electricity you used how much it costs for a unit of electricity. Because many are not familiar with the terminology, I have a little table below to compare the two.
|
Gasoline |
Electricity |
|
|
Usage Amount Units |
Gallons of Gas |
Kilowatt-Hours |
|
Cost Units |
$ per Gallon of Gas |
$ per Kilowatt-Hour |
Before I explain how to put things together, here’s a little definition for a word you might not have heard about. A Kilowatt-Hour is the unit we use to describe how much electricity is “put into” your Volt. You will normally see this in your electricity bill. Depending on how big your home is, most families will use somewhere between 300 to 600 kilowatt-hours (If you use heavy air condition obviously it could be a lot more!) of electricity per month. Check your bill and look for the total number of KwH you used to see just how much electricity you used for your home. You can see an example of an electricity bill here.
Now to make the comparison, lets think in terms of a normal gas powered car and make the comparison to electricity. To know how much you spend on gas for a car, you typically know…
1.) How many miles you drive
2.) How many miles do you get per gallon of gasoline
3.) How much does it cost per gallon of gasoline
When you have those three, you can calculate your estimated fuel costs.
Example 1 – Gasoline: You drive 1,000 miles per month, your car gets 25 Miles Per Gallon, and you pay $4.00 for a gallon of gasoline. That means:
1000 miles / 25 Miles Per Gallon = 40 gallons of gasoline
And
40 gallons of gasoline * $4.00 a gallon = $160 per month in Gas Costs.
If you can do the math above – you can easily do the math for electric costs! Just substitute a few numbers.
Example 2 – Electricity: You drive 1,000 miles per month, your car (The Chevy Volt) gets 2.7 miles per kilowatt hour used (EPA estimated average), and you pay $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (national average) That means:
1000 miles / 2.7 miles per kilowatt-hour = 370 Kilowatt-Hours
And
370 Kilowatt-Hours * $0.12 Per Kilowatt Hour = $44.44 in Electricity per month.
Now you know the basics of how to calculate how much it costs to charge a Chevy Volt. Here are some important considerations.
1.) Electricity Costs, unlike gasoline costs, typically increase when you use more electricity. (That is just how most utilities are). So with this calculation, you need to be careful and understand how your electric rates changes as you use more electricity.
2.) Some utilities will charge you more if you use electricity during the peak of the day and less when you are sleeping. You often need to sign up for special rate plans for them to give you these rates. During off hours, you can pay as little at $0.06 per KwH (Half Price!) Or as much as $0.40 per KwH during peak times (3.5x more than average!) That’s why it’s important to charge at night in many cases because it save you lots on your electricity bill.
In the example above – if you pay $0.40 per KwH, you save nearly nothing vs gasoline on a 25 MPG Car! Which is bad! However, if you pay $0.06 per KwH, you can save as much as $120 per month.
This example is a quick and dirty way to understand how electricity costs work. In actuality, if you really want to know – read the following articles to learn more about the complexity. Or if you know you electricity rate and how much you drive a month, you can do a quick calculation and be done with it 
-Chevy Volt 240v Charging Efficiency
-First Chevy Volt Electricity Bill
Patrick -
This is great info, but I think it’s best to provide an even shorter answer to curious people, and here’s what I tell them.
Ten dollars a month.
That is in fact how much it costs me to fuel my Volt. Now, I personally am benefiting from A) slightly low mileage, 8000 miles per year typically, and B) wonderfully low electrical rates. Here in Georgia, our utility offers a TOU rate plan that drops my overnight rate to 5 cents per kWh.
If you put more like 15000 miles per year on your car then the Volt might cost you about $20 per month to run. If you drive 15000 miles and have more typical electrical rates (say, 11 cents) then it would be about $40/month.
My point is that while all the cents per mile calculations are neat, they don’t drive the crucial point home, which is that the operating cost of this car is trivial! $40 is less than a single fill-up for most people, and stating it in terms of dollars per month illustrates it best.
When standing around in a parking lot (or an outreach event) answering questions, I think it’s important to start with the simple, dramatic answer. I do love the look on their face when I say “ten dollars per month”
- Chris
P.S. By the way, you said that a typical household consumes 300-600 kWh per month. Maybe that’s true in sunny, temperate California, but across the southern half of the United States it’s far more due to heavy A/C loads. I’m in an average sized house in Atlanta and my last bill was for 1900 kWh! Of course I’m working on bringing that down, but that’s frankly typical.
However you want to spell it out the volts electricity use is not as costly as most vehicles that run off gas. A on the road comparison would be very interesting. Gas mileage always varies greatly depending on how the driver drives the vehicle. I wonder how this car is driven affects the mileage? I have not had the chance to actually see an electric volt here at the Joplin Car Dealership in Joplin, MO.
I’ve added solar electricity, PV, to my house so the government is not only subsidizing my new Volt, (thank you very much!), it is subsidizing my cost to prepay for all of the electricity my Volt will need for the next 25 years. And a bonus for those of us who care about these things, the electricity generation creates near zero carbon emissions.
To make this simple, let’s assume you drive 27 miles a day. You’ll need 10 kWh of electricity to get you through the day, (2.7*10). An average solar panel will make 1kWh of energy each day, (more here in the sunny Southwest and less in the Northeast). So you would need about 10 solar panels or about 2500 watts to keep you passing gas stations.
The US has no standard way to subsidize renewable energy so your costs will be very dependent on where you live.
Your missing the true cost of owning a Volt. The per mile analysis (fuel or electricity cost) is only part of the equation. You also need to add the cost difference between a similar size and quality gas operated car. A similar gas engine car will cost about $15,000 or more less than the Volt, even after the taxpayer provided rebate.
Using 15,000 miles for 5 years or 75,000 miles and the cost difference of $15,000, the built in cost to operate is 20 cents per mile or $250 per month (1,250 miles x .2)
To enjoy the savings shown in the above comments, the plan is to drive from to work and back. What about the times you travel further and have to recharge away from home? That is not free not to mention the amount of time you have wait for the recharge. A cost that should also be added.
Yes, nothing is for free.
Minor correction for a typo above:
Example 2 – Electricity: You drive 2,500 miles per month,…..
Should read
Example 2 – Electricity: You drive 1,000 miles per month,….
to be an apples to apples comparison to the gasoline calculation above it. The equation following in Example 2 is correct since it uses 1000 miles, not 2,500:
1000 miles / 2.7 miles per kilowatt-hour = 370 Kilowatt-Hours
The end comparison in the article is still accurate
Thanks Edward!,
Corrected!
Patrick
All falls apart in NY (long island)
$0.45 /kwh
Yep 45 cents $0.36/kwh service charge + at least $0.0857 usage.
http://www.lipower.org/pdfs/account/rates_resi.pdf
So using the above cited formula a Chevy Volt would cost $166 /month v $160/month for gasoline (gas is $4/gal today).
another way to look at it is that the $15000 could buy you 3000 gallons of gas at $5 per gallon and a car that small should get 30 miles per gallon giving you 90,000 miles paid for before you spend an additional penny on fuel.
Take $9,000 off that number in California for federal and CA rebates = $6000 = 1200 gallons of gas = 36,000 miles to break even.
the guy in the adverisement says he did not buy gas in two months….get real he should also said he only drives a few miles a day!
i consider that false advertisement !…. i drive my vehicle from point Ki to point A everyday and and i accumulate 35,000 kilometers a year if i buy a volt that means i will only put gas every two months? i dont think so!