The charging of electric cars isn’t free. However it is often shift in full or partially to a third-party. Therefore, although charging my Tesla at a local ChargePoint Level 2 charging station isn’t going to cost me anything to make the charge, it will cost my taxpayers in my city a tiny amount of tax money which is transferred to the electric utility in my city.
The price for 1 kilowatt hour for my region is 13Cper. My car can hold around 75 kWh, which is a typical 90% charge per day. I consume about 20 kWh on my commute every day and that translates into the retail cost of 20 times $0.13 = $2.60 for charging at the city charger. In addition, the spot I use is metered parking, and I pay $2 per 2 hours of parking. This will be enough to cover my 20 kWh surplus. This assumes that the city pays the retail cost for electricity.
Since the parking space is reserved exclusively for electric vehicles There is a slight decrease in use for ICE vehicles.
Thus, for a sum of 60C/day my taxpayers in my city pay the cost of my “free” charge, and the exhaust from their vehicles is polluting our air and releasing lots of carbon in our atmosphere.
I have an original Tesla P85 that comes with free supercharging throughout the life of the model. I’ve logged more than the 25,000 miles supercharged that constitute the break-even mark to pay the $1500 extra charge that was included on earlier models. Therefore, Tesla is currently paying wholesale electricity costs every time I supercharge. This makes it completely free for me, however, it’s not the case for Tesla.
The supercharger free for life program is coming to an end with Tesla which means that all Teslas that are new that have any model must purchase electric fuel. However, when compared to ICE vehicles the cost of energy per mile is significantly lower.
Even though there is no cost electricity generated by the use of fuel (e.g. solar or wind, hydro) but there’s the cost of amortizing equipment (panels turbines, dams) and the cost of maintaining the electric grid.
However it is always cheaper than hydrocarbon fuels, even if it is produced through burning the most smuggled Chinese coal at a deteriorating power plant from the 1950’s.