Current U.S. energy use is ~ 10 billion kw-h per day.

1 billion kw-h / day more is a nice big tick on that, but I'm not sure it would drive prices a whole lot.

Yah, but those people won't be using refined gasoline. It uses alot of electricity just to refine a gallon of gas.

According to this web page:

http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/03/21/what-makes-up...

It takes about $0.20 to refine a gallon of gas, so ~2kWh/gal. Except, It obviously actually takes less electricity than that, because there are other costs to refining. Not a bad investment in energy terms, when a gallon of gasoline contains ~36.6kWh worth of energy.

Where on that page did you get the 20 cents? Didn't see that anywhere. From this http://gatewayev.org/how-much-electricity-is-used-refine-a-g... It's more like 6kWh/gallon.

Don't forget the cost in electricity of finding deposits, mining them, transporting the pre-refined gas, transporting the post-refined gas, and lobbying Congress.

I just imagined the Congressional Cattle Prod, wrapped in $100 bills.

Surely increased demand for a resource should, long-term, drive the price down and not up?

Potentially, if there are improvements in infrastructure to be made that reduce cost. But it is hardly implicit that increased demand will lower the price- just look at oil.

The stations generate more power (via solar) than the cars use while charging. There is a net REDUCTION in energy use if you charge solely from these stations and I'd imagine that part of the business model is selling the excess energy back to the power companies. I'd bet that getting certified for this sort of thing is also a heck of a lot easier than getting certified to build a solar farm. Pretty smart move I think.