Two years ago I took an environmental science class at Iowa State. One of the lecturers was about alternative fuels and my professor was really excited about the prospect of plug-in electric cars, especially because they’re cheap to operate. The idea of an electric car is cool, I admit, but they might not be the most practical of vehicles for us just yet.

Plug-in electric vehicles, or PEVs for short, require no gasoline at all and run on a battery. All you have to do is charge the car and you’re good to go. PEVs also happen to be cheaper to operate than gasoline cars.

Ecoworld provides a cost comparison for PEVs and gasoline cars which results in a cost of 10 cents per mile for a gasoline powered car, assuming that the price of gas is $3 a gallon and 3 cents per mile for an electric car, assuming that the price of electricity is 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

What they won’t tell you, is what the price of electricity would be assuming that all of the cars on America’s roads were replaced with electric cars. Something tells me it would be a lot higher than 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

Could our electric grid could handle the increased load? The city of Ames has a website that has a power load gauge to keep Ames residents mindful about power usage. Naturally, more PEVs would translate into higher power demand, which means more coal burning plants, which also increases greenhouse emissions. Although you would be replacing most of the gasoline powered cars.

Electric cars also have very long recharge times. Their PEV will use a 110V charger pulling 20 amps from an outlet, but the website does not list the recharge time, according to the Nissan Leaf website. People may elect to have recharging stations installed in their homes, which will run at 220V pulling 40 amps that will recharge the batteries to full capacity in around eight hours. Nissan notes that 480V charging stations are being tested and may be introduced in the future. The good thing about recharging time is that it can be reduced if you put in higher voltages and higher amperes, although this also tends to reduce battery life.

PEVs also are limited to their battery capacity. Initial estimates state PEVs can go from 60 to 120 miles on a full charge. If your job requires you to drive 40 miles both ways you might have to rely on your fossil fuel powered car. And even if you could make it to work, you would have to explain to your boss why you would need to run an extension cable from your office or garage to your car.

So maybe the PEVs are an awesome idea. We can reduce our reliance on oil. We’re probably not saving the environment all that much because that electricity as to come from somewhere. We can travel anywhere we want to, as long as the cars can recharge quickly and provided that there are recharging stations more numerous than gas stations.

Or maybe you should just wait it out at least until PEVs can get us somewhere between the 200 to 300 mile range on a single battery charge. At this point, the huge limiting factor seems to be battery capacity. What good is a vehicle if it can only go 60 to 120 miles on a charge?