I have a Chevrolet Bolt that I charge almost every day at my house in Bogotá. My electricity bill has gone up quite a bit since I bought it a year ago, but I don't know exactly how much each charge costs me. Is there a way to calculate it or does anyone know roughly how much it costs to charge?
The Bolt has a battery of around 65-66 kWh, so a full charge costs you roughly whatever you pay for those kWh on your Bogotá bill. In Colombia the price varies quite a bit depending on your income bracket, but it's somewhere between $300 and $600 per kWh or so, so a full charge probably costs you between $20,000 and $40,000 pesos. If you charge almost every day, multiply that by 30 and you've got an idea of how much you're adding to your monthly bill. The easiest thing is to check your electricity bill before and after buying the car to see how much your consumption went up in kWh, that gives you the exact number.
The most practical way is to look directly at your electricity bill and see how much you pay per kilowatt-hour (kWh), because it varies a lot in Bogotá depending on your socioeconomic stratum and your utility company. Once you have that number, multiply it by the 65 kWh the Bolt uses for a full charge and you'll have the approximate cost per recharge.
Now, in practice you almost never charge to 100% every day or from 0%, so you'll probably spend a bit less each time. The charger's efficiency and temperature also play a role, but those details are minor. What really matters is checking whether your bill includes stratum discounts or subsidies, because that affects the final kWh price quite a bit. If you live in a low stratum, the actual cost is much lower than in others.
A useful trick is to download your bill as a PDF and look at the "consumption" or "energy rate" section where the unit price appears. Some people in Bogotá pay something like 300-400 pesos per kWh, others pay quite a bit less thanks to subsidies. With that you can already do a pretty accurate calculation of what each charge costs you without needing any extra devices.
The thing is, it's not so straightforward to calculate the exact cost because charging efficiency comes into play, and it's not 100%. The Bolt has that 65-66 kWh battery, but what you actually draw from your home outlet is more than what ends up stored in the battery - there are losses in the process. So if you're paying, say, around $600 per kWh in Bogotá (which varies a lot depending on your utility tier, the distributor, and all that), a full charge costs you considerably more than if you just multiplied 65 x 600 🔌
The most useful thing you can do is check your electric bill from the last three months: compare how much you were paying before you got the car with what you're paying now. The difference will give you a much more realistic idea of your monthly cost. Then you divide that by the number of charges you do roughly per month and that's it. It's more empirical but it works better than any theoretical calculation, because it depends on so many variables (whether you charge at night, whether you use a fast or slow charger, temperature, all that).
That said, charging a Bolt almost every day isn't the most expensive thing in the world compared to filling up a gas car. But to put your mind at ease, do the math with your actual bill, that's what really matters 😊
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