It's hot outside let's have some AC!

It was 94 degrees here yesterday. Maybe I'll take a mileage hit, but (of course) I'm using the AC. So the question became, how much of a mileage hit would running AC result in?

First, I'm not an engineer, but it would seem obvious that doing air conditioning in a hybrid is alot different then a conventional vehicle. That's because the AC compressor in a typical non-hybrid runs right off of the engine power. If I'm not mistaken, it is usually a compressor hooked onto that long belt that snakes around the front of the engine. And it doesn't take a detective to deduce that it probably takes quite a bit of power to run that compressor.

But in a hybrid this set up clearly doesn't work, simply because the engine doesn't run all the time, so the AC would start and stop which would not work at all.

So the AC in a hybrid must run off of the battery, and must pull alot of juice to keep it going. If anyone can shed more light on how this works let me know, but hope I'm in the general ballpark.

So getting back to the mileage hit, what I'm seeing is about 10 mpg when the AC is running continuously. So a trip that I might score a 60 mpg on now falls back to around 50 mpg.