Meanwhile, enough electricity to take your car as far as a gallon of ethanol/gas does, still costs  only 66 cents.

With your own solar panels, after a few years payback in energy bill savings, your daily dose of electric "gas" would be free.

Energy based on fuel sources, biomass, corn, sugar cane, wood chips, whatever will always go up in price with demand.  

Energy sources based on renewable resources become essentially free once the device that collects the energy, wind machines, wave machines, solar pV/heat cogeneration; has paid for itself in costly fossil energy saved.

Ethanol in the tank, corn prices soar, people starve.  

Plugin hybrids plugged into a renewable smart grid would tend to level off energy prices at around the market price at the average payback period of this energy revolution.

In ten years maybe half the systems needed to replace the status quo energy mess, would be paying off for their owners.  Energy inflation could be defeated.