Environment & Energy

[] https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-models/plug-in-hybrids/how-to-charge-plug-in-hybrid-vehicle.htm
The Volt comes with two chargers that you can use on home electric current. The smaller, 120-volt charger is designed to be portable and will plug into a standard electric outlet. It's switchable between an 8-amp recharge and a 12-amp recharge, depending on what your system will bear. If the 12-amp recharge sets off the circuit breaker, just drop the charge to 8 amps. It'll take longer to charge (see the next page of this article for details), but you'll have fewer problems.

At present plug-in hybrid vehicles aren't ideal for long trips. If you can't plug in frequently, you'll be using the internal combustion engine most of the time. Yet for a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt, this is still more cost effective than an ordinary internal combustion engine alone, as we'll see later in this article. ((unfortunately they don't -- what follows as far as cost numbers is assuming ALL the energy for the PHEV comes from the grid ... well the exception is that they give is a Chevy Volt running 100 miles, which is 60 miles more than the battery's capacity, "will run on $2.75 worth of electricity" -- the first 40 miles are on electricity, yes, but the remaining 60 miles are on gasoline which apparently runs the ICE that turns the generator to produce electricity which powers the electric motor that thruns the wheel, I am so confused, but whatever, that $2.75 is lot cheaper than the gasoline cost for an ICE car travelling 100 miles -Progree)) -- Next, however, we'll look at how long it will take to recharge a plug-in hybrid.

A couple of pages back we mentioned that the Chevy Volt will come with two different chargers, a 120-volt portable charger that runs off a typical household electric outlet and a 240-volt charger that will be hardwired into your home's electrical system. The 240-volt charger provides the fastest charge. General Motors estimates that a full recharge with the 240-volt charger will take about three hours. The 120-volt charger will take six hours for a full charge if set at 12 volts and eight hours if set at 8 volts. ((talking about the Chevy Volt I'm pretty sure -Progree)) How will you know when the charging is complete? An indicator on the dashboard will tell you when the battery is at full charge, so you can be sure you have a full 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) worth of power in your car before you head off to work in the morning. The Hymotion plug-in modification for the Prius is similarly designed for an overnight charge

... the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come up with a new measurement called the Petroleum-Equivalent Fuel Economy Calculation or PEF. It allows you to compare the fuel economy of a hybrid or electric vehicle with a car that runs on a gas engine. The calculations that go into the PEF are complicated (you can read about them on the EPA Web site http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/2000/June/Day-12/i14446.htm ), but in practice all you need to do is to compare the PEF with the normal EPA fuel-efficiency figures to see how much electric "fuel" your hybrid needs to go a given number of miles. For instance, the PEF for the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid is 230 miles per gallon (97.8 kilometers per liter), making it the first production car with a three-digit EPA rating [source: Valdes-Dapena]. Of course, it's not actually going to be using gallons of gas except when the 40-mile (64.4-kilometer) battery range is exceeded, but this gives you a rough idea of how its fuel efficiency compares with other cars that do use gasoline.

((in this paragraph they never tell you what cents per KWH or $ per gallon they are using, but maybe I can figure it out I think by working backwards and from info in previous paragraphs. What I really want to know is the KWH needed and the gallons of gas needed, but oh well -Progree)) Perhaps a better way of looking at this is that General Motors estimates that it will cost 80 cents to give the Volt a full 40-mile (64.4-kilometer) charge using house current ((so 80 cents for 40 miles means $2.00 for 100 miles if it all hypothetically came from the grid, i.e. kept charging it whenever the battery needed it -Progree)). Hymotion estimates that its plug-in for the Prius will cost even less, about 50 cents per 40-mile recharge.

Further, GM says the Volt will run 100 miles (160.9 kilometers) on $2.75 worth of electricity, or about 3 cents per mile. Obviously this is going to vary according to how much your local power company charges for electricity ((well tell us how damn many KWH it takes and we'll figure it out for our circumstances , and does any of this include gasoline being burned when driven beyone the battery ranges? --Progree)) and it'll vary according to whether you charge at peak hours or off-peak hours, but it's considerably cheaper than gasoline would cost for an equivalent distance.

Another figure offered by GM estimates that a Volt driven for 15,000 miles (24,140 kilometers) per year without ever exceeding the battery-only range would use $300 worth of electricity annually. By comparison, a car with an internal combustion engine that average 30 miles per gallon (12.8 kilometers per liter) would cost $1,500 annually for the same amount of driving.