[ausev] Opportunity charging...

[Chris Robison]

jefoy at mindspring.com wrote:
>>From the PHIL website, the home compressor uses 800 watts. So a fill-up uses 12.8kW?

I'm going to guess that the Phill has an "800 watt motor" or is rated at 
800 watts maximum continuous. It's unlikely that it uses this 
constantly; I would expect that it only reaches 800 watts at the end of 
a filling cycle when the backpressure is highest. Shop air compressors 
have a similar behavior.  A day or two ago I was told privately that 
it's somewhere around 65 cents per full charge for the electricity, 
which I guess means somewhere around 5-6kWh depending on what 
electricity price they were basing it on.

I hadn't thought to look at the Phill site before; thanks for pointing 
it out. In the faq they mention that it's good for 6000 hours of 
operation. At 16 hours for 200 miles of range in the Civic, this means 
an hour of operation is good for 12.5 miles (not too bad, similar to a 
small EV charging at about 30A/240VAC). Ultimately, the Phill device 
will serve for 75,000 miles of driving in the Civic before it has to be 
remanufactured, and that can be done up to 3 times.

I don't have the time to do the math right now (about to go to a job 
interview, I should be preparing instead of typing this)  :o) but I'd be 
interested to see the total refueling cost per mile. People will make 
choices based on what's important to them and there's only so much that 
advocacy can do to change that, but I'd like to know what sort of 
"competition" an NGV really is for those who look more at operating 
costs than at efficiency, renewable energy, or any of the other 
non-monetary reasons that interest me in battery powered cars.

   --chris