If you drive to work, imagine reducing the fuel cost of your daily commute to 80 cents from $7.You would also contribute to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles and power plants.

It's possible to achieve those things by driving a plug-in electric vehicle, according to research by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

"The council is assessing the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on the Northwest electricity supply as part of developing our next Northwest Power Plan," says council Chairman Bill Booth. "While these vehicles pose a potentially large new source of demand for electricity, they also have the potential to store electricity that could be tapped to ensure the stability of the power supply during periods of high demand."

The council's Northwest Power Plan directs the electricity generation and conservation acquisitions of the Bonneville Power Administration, the region's largest electricity supplier, and also provides guidance to electric utilities in assessing their own decision-making about how to meet future demand for power.

Meeting two weeks ago in Coeur d'Alene, the council reviewed research on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by its staff and also listened to a presentation by Michael Kintner-Meyer, a scientist at the Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, in Richland, Wash.Kintner-Meyer said Battelle's research suggests that between 43 percent and 73 percent of all the cars and light trucks in the nation today could be replaced by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles without adding new power plants or transmission lines, depending on the time of day that the vehicles would be charged.

If plug-in hybrid vehicles replaced such a large share of the nation's cars and light trucks, America's net oil imports would fall by 52 percent, total emissions of carbon dioxide would be cut by 27 percent, and the batteries in all of those vehicles would provide an important source of storage capacity that could enhance power-system stability, he said. The amount of carbon-dioxide reduction also depends on the time of day the vehicles are charged, as time of day—and the higher or lower level of demand during those hours—determines whether natural gas or coal are being burned to generate electricity.

Public interest in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles is growing in response to volatile prices for gasoline and concern over potential climate impacts from carbon-dioxide emissions. The council's 80-cent commute estimate is based on data from last July: an average commute of 33 miles round trip (the national average), gasoline at $4 a gallon (recent gasoline prices are closer to $2.00 per gallon), and an average vehicle efficiency of 20 miles a gallon.

The equivalent amount of electricity to power an electric vehicle equates to a gasoline price of about 45 cents a gallon.

The council's primary interest in plug-in electric vehicles isn't tailpipe emissions or fuel cost, but rather the impact of increasing the number of electric vehicles on the region's electricity system. Electric vehicles likely would be recharged overnight, when both the demand for power and its cost are low.

"Smart" plugs for vehicles could be operated remotely by electric utilities and turned off or on as needed to spread the charging load around the service territory to minimize the impact on the power supply and avoid brownouts or blackouts. The council's research assumes that 25 megawatts of electricity would be used to recharge electric vehicles in the Northwest by the year 2020.

Spread across all power plants in the interconnected power grid of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council area—basically the U.S. west of the Rocky Mountains—emissions from power plants that burn coal and natural gas would increase by about 1 million tons above current levels to serve the 25-megawatt load of electric vehicles in 2020. But when that increase is combined with the reduction in exhaust emissions achieved by replacing fuel-burning vehicles with electric vehicles, there would be a net reduction of about 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020.