It might sound like an obvious thing to most people, electricity is cheaper than gas, but I find that people are not really aware of the electricity rate discrepancy around the US and the world. It’s understandable. Who has time to track electricity and gas prices outside of your own market? Plugless has time and did it.
The company came up with a neat study looking at gas prices and electricity rates – without taking into account time-of-use rates where available – in each state over the last year and came to the conclusion that electric vehicles are cheaper to fuel in all 50 states.
EV drivers can see savings between $300 and $1,300 per year. Plugless explains that the result is despite gas having a significant advantage over electricity over the time period of the study:
In many ways, the snapshot loads the deck in favor of gas cars. For one, gas prices have been very low for the past year. The national average cost of gas in this snapshot is $2.20 per gallon. Another factor favoring gas is the average electricity price is higher than what EV drivers really pay in most states. The reason is that states with the most expensive average electricity rates often have discounted pricing at night. Electric vehicle owners tend to charge at night, so the snapshot overrates the cost of charging at home.
The average annual mileage really ended up making a difference with Oregon coming in first because of drivers traveling 16,000 miles per year on average.
They released their entire dataset here, but here the top 10 best and worst states to drive electric:
Top 10 States for Driving on Electricity
Rank
1 Oregon
2 Washington
3 Montana
4 Nevada
5 Utah
6 North Dakota
7 Missouri
8 South Dakota
9 Nebraska
10 Iowa