Some of you may not know what I do when I’m not blogging. I have been working on making electric car conversions. Without going into lot’s of details. I have just completed a conversion of a Porsche Speedster replica. The challenge was to make a car with more than a hundred miles range, and still have a usable car. That is, to have some space left for the occupants and their stuff. Now the Speedster is a small car to start with. There was just a small bit of space behind the seats and a little under the hood. I’ve used the space behind the seats for some of the batteries, but have a trunk now. The engine was placed in the back before. The electric motor is still there but is so much smaller that I have a trunk big enough for a suitcase and a packpack. In front there is enough room for a small suitcase. My wife and I have driven to Palm Springs a couple of times now. The trip is 124 miles with enough energy left over to go to the market or liquor store before we plug in at the Ace Hotel. So that works out to a total range of 140 miles. The Ace has six charge outlets. Three at 240 volts and three at 110 volts. The whole trip uses about 20 kWh of electricity. That works out to around 2 bucks at LADWP daytime rates. But with their EV night time rates, that is around a quarter. To make things even better, the Ace Hotel will be adding solar panels to their resort to take the hotel off the grid and make the driving even greener. I will be adding a solar awning to my building to charge my car, so that all my trips will be off the grid.

That is the amount of energy I use for the entire trip is the amount that the refineries buy from the grid to produce a little over 5 gallons of gas. All that without burning the gas or any of the associated costs of petroleum. I drove eight thousand miles last year for a total cost of about two hundred dollars in electricity.