Costs for charging an electric bike in Australia

How much does it cost to charge an e-bike?

So you bought your dream electric bike and you are curious about what it is costing to charge it. How does this compare to catching the bus, train or driving your car?

It’s pretty cheap and we based this calculation on an average small ebike battery taking you about 30km. Most will take you further so really it is a very conservative calculation.

Here’s how to work out the cost of charging an e bike battery in your state:

• Multiply the battery voltage and amp hour rating to get watt hours ie. a 36 volt 10 amp hour battery has 360 watt hours (divide by 1,000 to get Kilowatt hours) = 0.36kwh
• Check your local electricity prices, the average cost per Kilowatt hour in Australia at the time of this article was $0.27
• Multiply the Kilowatt size of your battery by the cost per Kilowatt hour electrical rate = 0.36 x $0.27 = a complete charge cost of $0.0972 or roughly 10 cents
• Estimate your trip distance cost by dividing the charge cost by the average range of your battery pack. I estimate the lowest range per charge by dividing the watt hour capacity of the pack by 30 ie. 360 / 30 = 30 kms per charge and now we divide $0.0972 by 30 to get $0.00324 per km. That’s approximately 1/3 of a cent per kilometre on an electric bike looking at just the electricity cost alone. You may actually get more than 30km per charge. If you use you solar panels to charge your bike the cost of each charge would be even lower of course.

(courtesy of original figures in Electric Bike Report)