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The cumulative transmission losses required to supply it. In financial terms any feed-in billing credit is always also worth less than a user saves by using that same energy locally without loss in reported current for credit.

At present, the TCO is about the same because the lower maintenance and fuel costs are offset by the increased up-front cost. And that is with the government tax credits included. A search for electric car TCO gives dozens of articles that seem to corroborate this.

In the long-term, I believe the TCO of electric cars will probably become lower. I'm betting that electric cars will last longer, the maintenance curve will not increase as the engine ages, and that green electricity sources will widen the gap between gasoline and electricity costs. But at some point we will lose the tax credits.

Just so no one thinks I'm cherry picking my search results: Here are the first 6 Google hits (other than PDFs) and they all agree:
http://www.plugincars.com/tota...
http://www.pluginamerica.org/d...
http://tdworld.com/site-files/...
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/to...

Most of the results are tepid, arguing things like "hey, electric cars are NOT actually more expensive" or "well, it's about the same long term." but are hesitant to declare a clear winner.

The $146 million in fines from 2008 for fraud wouldn't dissuade them from sacking US IT workers, would it? http://tdworld.com/business/ca...

Guess not.

Using more power at night actually helps the power utilities. The more evenly distributed the power usage is throughout the day, the more efficiently they can operate and the lower the costs. This is one of many videos describing how it all works. They use the term "filling the bathtub." Detroit Edison did a study on the impact of EVs. Basically it would require some upgrades in localized areas but it's perfectly manageable.
=Smidge=

Speaking of green jobs; since the recession began I have heard many politicians and pundits say something along the line of "Our district will create jobs and prosperity by leading in the green business revolution"

How has that worked out? I think that our politicians are under some assumption that no other country in the world has engineers working on this problem. That China will sit idly by as we make efficient and lucrative clean energy products. The fact is that we cannot become proffitable just by changing industries, we need a climate where businesses are able to to succeed in any industry. We need less regulation, more efficient regulation (ie; less paperwork for compliance), and more efficient taxation. We also could do with a little tort reform and maybe some tarrif reform mixed in there.

If politicians (many of whom are lawyers and assume people like filling out pages and pages of EPA forms) took one minute to realise negative impact of the procedural overhead caused by all of these convoluted and redundant regulations perhaps we would have a chance at a business revolution. Many of these agencies use violations of these regulations as a revenue gathering device, this only serves to discourage business expansion and job creation.

To recap, I am not saying that we need to kill all business regulation, but we need to cut it down to the point where any person of average intelligence could understand them and reach compliance easily while still having time left in the day to run a business. Same general thought applies to tax law.

The meters just clamp a detector around your main. They have no ability to shut off or modify your power.

Wrong. Cellnet's disconnect solution and Itron's CENTRON meter with disconnect capabilities and load limiting. Here's another solution from Aclara. There's more, but I got lazy grabbing URL's.

Probably this.

http://tdworld.com/projects_in_progress/business_in_tech/superconducting_cable/

I may not be an electrician but I do know that water and electricity don't mix and you can't effectively/safely beam the power in wirelessly so you gotta run a biiiiig cord with a lotttt of amps running through it through the ocean.

Properly done, the work well together and last for years.
"Finally, in 1951, the Bonneville Power Administration laid a submarine power cable from Anacortes to the San Juan Islands and Lime Kiln Lighthouse was converted to electricity. "
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=7704

"The proposed transmission lines would cross the international border beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca, linking Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

The Feasibility Study has indicated that without additional upgrades made to the regional system, and following the construction of the first project (550 megawatts), approximately 400 MW of transmission capacity could be available on a "south to north" routing from the Olympic Peninsula to Vancouver Island on a "pre-contingency" basis."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2005_April_6/ai_n13558803

They do sometimes fail, but protection circuits simply power down the faulted section with no major impact.
"Recently, when one of the existing 30-year-old submarine cables failed, BPA decided to replace it. This was considered the preferred investment option, because the existing "wet design" cable had reached it's design life and because of the problems involved in repairing a cable sited in deep water."
http://tdworld.com/mag/power_underwater_cables_cross/

Note, most of the rest of the cables are over 30 years old. There is even a 115KV cable.
"Cable No. 4, a 115-kV, three-core, low-pressure fluid-filled cable with a single layer of PE-insulated galvanized armor wires and cathodic protection rated 150 MVA, was installed in 1982. Polarization cells were installed in 1985, and this cable has afforded fault-free service for more that 20 years."

The brownouts we're mainly hot air. First off, very few actually happened. Secondly, they were artificial- caused by manipulations of the power grid by energy providers for profit. There was no energy shortage.

Bzzzt... Wrong.

The energy shortage was real and localized. In the Enron days, California capped electricity rates as a consumer protection move. As a result, Enron in a move to cut losses from expensive generation and as a leverage tool to negotiate new rates, took the oppertunity when fuel prices spiked to shut down a lot of ineffecient generation plants for maitenance. This was followed by a heat wave which put a spike in demand for AC. A line tripped offline. It was either blackout time as systems cascaded carrying the overload or simply drop part of the load and leave the rest of the sytem up.

http://tdworld.com/mag/power_world_technology_update_2/
"California Energy Crisis Reaches Stage Three Electrical Emergency Already under a Stage Three Electrical Emergency due to scant resources, the California Independent System Operator (California ISO) encountered a significant and sudden loss of transmission capacity Jan. 21, 2001, that forced municipal utilities in Northern California, U.S. to endure a brief 20-min transmission-related outage."

"The California ISO issued the controlled outage to keep the ac lines from overloading at Path 15, a group of high-voltage lines in central California already at their limit because of low resources in the northern part of the state."

There was a blackout because there was not enough in area generation online. The capacity of the system was stressed. A line failed. The already loaded lines couldn't take on the replacement load. Part of the area was shut off to preserve the remaining area. It was small blackout time of watch the entire area go dark as the system collapsed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
"Due to price controls, utility companies were paying more for electricity than they were allowed to charge customers forcing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric and the public bail out of Southern California Edison. This led to a shortage in energy and therefore, blackouts. Rolling blackouts began in June 2000 and recurred several times in the following 12 months."

"Energy price regulation forced suppliers to ration their electricity supply rather than expand production. This scarcity created opportunities for market manipulation by energy speculators."

If you need any more proof that price controls cause shortages, just re-read the above. You can mandate $1/gallon for gasoline, but don't expect to find it for sale anywhere.

Read between the lines.. they didn't pay high prices for fuel for ineffecient plants.

"Despite the action, PG&E said it still is having trouble getting gas suppliers to comply with the emergency order originally issued January 19. PG&E has said it has enough gas in storage to make up for the lost supply under such a scenario until the first week in February. According to a company spokesperson, PG&E's storage currently is well below 50% full, or less than 16 Bcf and depleting rapidly by about 500 MMcf/d to 1 Bcf/d."

They used their reserve fuel, but could only buy fuel at a loss due to price caps and high fuel cost. Gas suppliers were not selling below market. They sold at market rates, a price the utilites could not afford.

Expensive to run generation plants were shut down for upgrades and maitenance while they waited out the high fuel prices. The spike in demand caused the inevetible. The lines into the area could provide only part of the cheaper power from elsewhere.

http://www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/pninter.html This is the list of the lines from Oregon into California and their capacities.

The short version is that those outages where engineered to drive up the price of energy.

The long version is they were able to do it because there was not enough transmission capacity to import the power to replace the spike in demand from the heat wave and the shortage of online generation capacity.

Enrron was fighting price caps. It was done by selecting an upcoming period of increased demand as a time to shut down several plants for maintenance knowing the transmission infrastructure couldn't carry the load. They were hoping to use the shortage to force their hand. They pushed higher prices to ensure increased generation capacity. It fell apart when the books were examined. Somehow they didn't see that one coming.

look for the movie 'Enron
That's the Hollywood version. They take some facts and then add scriptwriters to make a drams out of it. Often the facts are ignored to make a good drama even though the movie is based on a true story. The movie doesn't have time to educate the moviegoers into the VA limitations of transmission lines, the problems with high power factor loads such as air conditioning putting additional reactive power components on the line. (How many times was MegaVars mentioned?) I'll have to watch the movie just to see if they even mention the Volt-Ampers capacity of the line. I wonder if they simply mention Mega Watts and ignore Power Factor.

The delivery capacity is real. The GP was right. The parent missed some simple homework. Here is a couple items on the capacity issue.

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/001581.html
"The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees transmission, has been trying for years to prod power companies into forming new, multi-state regional grids with authority over planning and system reliability measures. But utilities in the Southeast and Northwest fear that a more wide-open system would allow their cheaper power to be siphoned away from their customers. They have made war on FERC's plans and some members of Congress are trying to block the commission's transmission initiative from going forward until 2005 or 2007."

http://tdworld.com/mag/power_california_bulks_provide/
"The Path 15 upgrade in California represents the first public-private partnership organized to improve a transmission system that has become seriously congested. Pointing out that Path 15 is not the only circuit that has suffered from congestion problems, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI; Palo Alto, California, U.S.), estimates that US$100 billion must be spent to upgrade the U.S. electricity grid."

"When the lights went out in Northern California in 2000-2001, a long-standing transmission bottleneck received national attention. A contributing factor to the crisis was a transmission constraint in Central California known as Path 15, where three 500-kV lines linking northern and southern California narrowed to two lines for 84 miles (135 km) through the Central Valley. The corridor's lack of transfer capacity hampered efforts to move available generation north from southern California and the desert southwest."

California may have enough Santa Anna winds to localy provide much wind power, but in the dog days of summer, the transmission system is not up to the task of importing sufficient power from out of state.

"By late 1998, load growth had become a significant factor for grid operators, who were prevented from moving power across the congested Path 15. The congestion hit hard in 2000 and 2001 when scarce generation forced the ISO to declare stage-three emergencies, indicating reserves were so low that rolling blackouts were imminent and resulting in several days of rotating outages of firm customer load. The emergencies extended into the winter with threats of outages continuing. Between Sept. 1, 1999, and Dec. 31, 2000, consumers spent an

Actually... even in residential areas (US and Canada), the line voltage on overhead transmission wires is typically 13800 volts, and long distance power transmission is done at 45000 volts and higher, up to 500 kV for really high power, long distance lines.

Hey Hydro-Quebec uses 735 kV transmission lines. They made a nice buzzing sound when you walk under them... :-)