How Much Will My Electric Bill Go Up?

Electricity is a different way to make your car go, so it’s reasonable to want to know how much that will cost. In a number of discussions lately a lot of people have asked how much their electric bill will go up, whether because they are truly interested in moving to an EV or because they are wanting to sow doubt in people’s minds.

While it is easy to figure out how much your electric bill might change, it’s not something that just anyone can answer. In order to figure out the total monthly cost, there’s a lot of information specific to you that is needed. Here are the three core pieces of information you’ll need to figure this out for yourself.

Your Electric Rate

Different regions of the country will have a variety of electricity plans and rates available that can dramatically change your monthly cost. You will find your current electric rate, expressed as cost per kWh, on your electric bill. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average electric rate for the United States is $0.147/kwh. Look into your own rate because you could be paying less than average, like Idaho residents and their $0.0986/kWh. You could also be paying significantly more, like residents of Hawaii that pay almost forty-two cents per kWh. For the purposes of this demonstration, we will use the national average.

Monthly Driving Distance

When your car is moving it is consuming energy. You will need to know how much you drive in an average month to understand total electricity cost. The average American drives 14,263 miles per year, so we will use that as our basis for the example below. That works out to 1,189 miles per month.

Electric Vehicle Efficiency

The final piece of information you need to figure out how much your electric bill will go up is how many miles your car will go on a kWh of energy. If you already own an EV, you can simply look on the dash at the miles/kWh that you typically get for a full charge. If you don’t currently own and EV, but have an idea of which one you want, you’ll need to know two pieces of information to figure this out:

• Battery Size
• Rated Range

Once you have that, simply divide the range by the battery size. As we discussed in our article on Range Rage, the Kia EV6 is rated at just over 3.5 miles/kWh, so we will use 3.5 as our efficiency number.

How Much Does Your Electric Bill Really Go Up?

Now that you have all the information you need, it’s a simple matter of doing the math to understand how much your bill goes up. The formula to figure out the monthly cost looks like this:

(Miles Driven / Efficiency) * Fuel Cost

In this case, fuel cost is the cost of electricity. Using the numbers that we have defined above, here’s the completed formula:

(1189 / 3.5) * 0.147 = 49.896

So you would end up paying $49.90 in electricity per month to go that distance.

Let’s take this one step further and figure out how much it would cost to go the same distance in a gasoline car. You will need to know the same variables that we used previously, just for gas. The efficiency of the car (25 mpg average fo the US) and how much gas costs (we will use the cheapest average gas as of this writing of $3.867/gallon in TX according to GasBuddy) will plug into the formula we used above. With our numbers that looks like:

(1189 / 25) * 3.867 = 183.914

Going the same distance in an average gas car using the cheapest fuel currently available will run you $183.91. This is important to understand because while your electric bill will go up when you use an electric car, your gasoline bill will go down by more than three times the electricity increase!