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PG&E TOU/EV Rate Times adjusted this year?

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Does anyone know if PG&E is adjusting the effective dates for Daylight Savings Time this year (as they have done in the past)? With this approach they usually don't adjust the hours for TOU/EV rate plans to reflect the actual time until about one month after Daylight Savings Time takes effect (for example, in 2014 DST started in early March but the PGE TOU/EV hours shifted forward by an hour until early April). Please point to a web page if they have one that shows the dates for 2015, if possible.

I'm asking because the only information PG&E has posted on the shift has dates for 2014, not 2015, so I'm wondering if they finally joined the modern era of Daylight Savings Time dates (which were shifted to start earlier in early March about 8 years ago).
 
If you have PG&E as your electric utility and you are on a Time Of Use rate schedule, the time periods for the TOU rates will be one hour later than the current Daylight Saving Time from now until Sunday April 5, 2015. The reason is that PG&E is following the old DST schedule that was changed in 2007 to the current schedule. PG&E's rate calculation clocks will spring forward on the first Sunday in April. So, for the next 4 weeks, Off-Peak rates will start at the following times:
E-6: 9:00pm M-F
EV: 12:00am M-F, 8:00pm Sa-Su
E-9: 1:00am M-F, 10:00pm Sa-Su
 
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I haven't been watching closely, but at one point I got a note from them that DST would not shift due to the old style smart meter at my house. Apparently it has an old date/clock that doesn't shift with the current DST schedule. I don't think the DST stuff happens at the PG&E HQ based on policy, but rather is at the mercy of the "smarts" inside your meter.
 
I haven't been watching closely, but at one point I got a note from them that DST would not shift due to the old style smart meter at my house. Apparently it has an old date/clock that doesn't shift with the current DST schedule. I don't think the DST stuff happens at the PG&E HQ based on policy, but rather is at the mercy of the "smarts" inside your meter.
At one time, there could be an argument to be made that the dumb TOU meters were too much hassle to reprogram. However, now that a very large percentage of meters are now SmartMeters, there is truly no excuse. Today it is a simple matter of programming in the central billing system and the CPUC has made a conscious decision that they don't care and PG&E doesn't have to do it. It is fully documented in the rate tariffs for all residential TOU rate schedules.

Example:
PGE EV Time Periods.jpg


One more note shown here: they finally specified holidays in Schedule EV. They previously mentioned holidays in the Peak and Part-Peak definitions, but never specified what the holidays were. The image above is from the tariff effective 1/1/2015.
 
If you have PG&E as your electric utility and you are on a Time Of Use rate schedule, the time periods for the TOU rates will be one hour later than the current Daylight Saving Time from now until Sunday April 5, 2015. The reason is that PG&E is following the old DST schedule that was changed in 2007 to the current schedule. PG&E's rate calculation clocks will spring forward on the first Sunday in April. So, for the next 4 weeks, Off-Peak rates will start at the following times:
E-6: 9:00pm M-F
EV: 12:00am M-F, 8:00pm Sa-Su
E-9: 1:00am M-F, 10:00pm Sa-Su
This is crazy.
 
At one time, there could be an argument to be made that the dumb TOU meters were too much hassle to reprogram. However, now that a very large percentage of meters are now SmartMeters, there is truly no excuse. Today it is a simple matter of programming in the central billing system and the CPUC has made a conscious decision that they don't care and PG&E doesn't have to do it. It is fully documented in the rate tariffs for all residential TOU rate schedules.

Example:
View attachment 74776

One more note shown here: they finally specified holidays in Schedule EV. They previously mentioned holidays in the Peak and Part-Peak definitions, but never specified what the holidays were. The image above is from the tariff effective 1/1/2015.
I disagree. That is not fully documented. They say "Daylight Savings Time Adjustment", but this is not a Daylight Savings Time Adjustment, but an alternate unrelated adjustment of their own. To all those of us who have our own systems that have never had DST problems (Unix, Linux, etc.), it is completely abnormal to have to manually change anything for Daylight Savings Time, and this is a totally non-DST related problem that PG&E & the California Government has created. If it was a "Daylight Savings Time Adjustment", then it would work like every other compliant computer and just work right, and be transparent. It isn't that at all.

When I saw the rate plan the first time, I saw that title, and said "yes we know about DST" and skipped the details, but that's because they mis-titled it. It's illegal.
 
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When I saw the rate plan the first time, I saw that title, and said "yes we know about DST" and skipped the details, but that's because they mis-titled it. It's illegal.
The bottom line is that they put the DST "Adjustment" in the tariff and the PUC approved the tariff. That is the law for all intents and purposes. You were advised through official channels. Sure, only 0.01% of customers actually read the tariff, but that's not PG&E's fault ;)

Really, if you want to get upset about something, get upset about "Estimated Use". If there is anything haywire in their system, they just get to make up something and bill you for it. I was analyzing my Green Button SmartMeter data and found a discrepancy between my totals for kWh usage and what I was billed. I discovered that there were several hours completely missing from the data. Not Zero, Missing. They just made up something and added it to my bill. I have not yet found any documents that describe what the utility is officially supposed to do in this case, and the Solar department customer service agent could not shed any light on the situation. However, she agreed that the missing data was the source of the discrepancy.
 
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The bottom line is that they put the DST "Adjustment" in the tariff and the PUC approved the tariff. That is the law for all intents and purposes. You were advised through official channels. Sure, only 0.01% of customers actually read the tariff, but that's not PG&E's fault ;)

Really, if you want to get upset about something, get upset about "Estimated Use". If there is anything haywire in their system, they just get to make up something and bill you for it. I was analyzing my Green Button SmartMeter data and found a discrepancy between my totals for kWh usage and what I was billed. I discovered that there were several hours completely missing from the data. Not Zero, Missing. They just made up something and added it to my bill. I have not yet found any documents that describe what the utility is officially supposed to do in this case, and the Solar department customer service agent could not shed any light on the situation. However, she agreed that the missing data was the source of the discrepancy.
Why do they have to estimate use? Just take the new reading and subtract from the old reading.
 
Why do they have to estimate use? Just take the new reading and subtract from the old reading.
As far as I know, the SmartMeters are reporting interval data, which is incremental, not periodic ongoing totals data. So, if the data is missing, it's just missing. However, I don't actually know anything about the inner workings of a SmartMeter as implemented by PG&E, so I could be completely wrong. I'm just going on what I can see from the data reported.
 
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Was your power out during the estimated time period?

Ours did go out when a tree fell on it, and we had one estimated period. They might coincide. The use was near zero, but not zero, so that makes me suspicious.
Power outages show zero use. There are other times that there is data present that is flagged as estimated. The missing data is something else.
 
Power outages show zero use. There are other times that there is data present that is flagged as estimated. The missing data is something else.

That happened to us eighteen months ago. There was a widespread power outage at night, and we were without power for over three hours. We were assessed about 6 kWh of "estimated use" during the outage. The representative thought this estimate was based upon our historical usage during those hours. I did a quick review of our usage during those hours for the week immediately preceding the date of outage. My number was closer to 2.5kWh.

I then asked the representative: "If the outage had occurred during the day, and our PV array was also shut down, would you have estimated a credit to us during the period of outage?" Of course she had no answer.

I did not care about the 80 cents or so that their "estimate" added to our bill. But when you multiply that amount by over 100,000 customers who had some sort of outage this time and add to that all the other customers throughout their territory who have these same estimates for outages, this approach is not right.
 
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