Crush
Member
E-7 is one of the cheapest and best rate plans that PG&E has ever offered. I would never switch off of it because you will never be able to get it back.
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aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
Too late. They forced everyone off of E7 a few months or so ago. E6 is the next best thing unless you can completely adapt to EVAs schedules. We were going to go E6 but doing the numbers has us on EVA and really watching our consumption during peak hours.
But I think this is only a passing thing as soon as they get a fully developed sub metering plan in place. Then cars will be charged at their own rate and everyone will have to pick a standard TOU plan.
Merrill
Merrill
Knowing PG&E it would not surprise me as more homes go solar that they will take away net metering. It suprised me when the CPUC voted not to allow them to do that in California, but who know what the future holds and as long as there is no one to stop these monopolies they can run rampant.
Being that PG&E is a decoupled utility, I think their rate structure is more of a reflection of their (in)ability to run efficiently. They're heavily regulated by the CPUC, who determines how much money they can make. So I do think there are some checks and balances in place. The solution for them with solar could be to invert rate tiers and make energy cheaper during the day and expensive at night. This would likely harm owners who are at work all day and charge their cars at night, but it could also make it much more cost effective for businesses/workplaces to offer EV charging during working hours.
Merrill
Merrill
Decoupled is a nice word for what they do, I have other words that are not as nice.
How tied are the rate structures of community choice aggregators to those of PG&E? If PG&E were to do some dramatic change to their rate structures (as you postulated above), do the CCAs have to follow suit?
Bruce.
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
The Munis are not regulated by the PUC. They can be influenced to some degree, but set their own rates since they are not investor owned and in fact, are sort of owned by the municipalities they serve.
One reason a muni is so much cheaper is that they don't have to support such a diverse ecosystem as the three IOUs'. So they sort of have the cream of the crop in terms of infrastructure support, client cost per mile and less outages too. I bet everyone one of them would jump at the chance to dump all their rural customers if they could.
One reason a muni is so much cheaper is that they don't have to support such a diverse ecosystem as the three IOUs'. So they sort of have the cream of the crop in terms of infrastructure support, client cost per mile and less outages too. I bet everyone one of them would jump at the chance to dump all their rural customers if they could.
As an original NEM customer, I'm guaranteed 20 annual true-ups under the original terms of the NEM tariff. However, PG&E can monkey with the "Otherwise Applicable" rate schedules such that it is much less advantageous to solar customers. They have already done this by making the peak rate run from 2pm-9pm. That forces me to self-consume the power I generated during that period and I don't get the benefit of banking credit at the high price. However, these hours do match the actual peak on the CA ISO grid, so I understand why it is set that way.
I am certain that before my last true-up on the NEM tariff in 2022, I will have some kind of home energy storage system so that I won't buy any power at peak rates and I may even let the existing portion of my solar feed into the grid during that time for maximum credit. I would probably add more solar when I get the battery storage system. The most energy productive empty section of my roof is SE facing, so it's not good for direct grid tie, but would be good for charging batteries in the morning.
I know I have solar & soon will have a Tesla... but I'm likely going to stay on E1 until I can get a PowerWall as agree with some others that the EV-A has peak hours that are when solar isn't generating power and I have computer servers running + home entertainment I'm using during those hours that would possibly result in a higher overall bill if I switched to EV-A. With the PowerWall it might be possible to selectively determine when I push energy back to the grid or almost go completely off grid for everything but the EV and thus benefit from the lower charging times overnight.
Xminus6
Member
Solar and EV drive on PGE here in Northern California. EV-A, which is the rate for a single meter, works out best for me. There was someone on here who advertised the app they made called PG&E Toolkit that would monitor your usage, net metering, and energy cost across all available energy plans for PG&E and EV-A wins nearly every time except in a few occasions where it's less than 1% higher than EV-B. EV-B isn't worth it because of the high cost of installing a separate meter only for EV charging. It's a very informative app.
Xminus6
Member
Yeah. It is confusing. Here's what I've gleaned.
When you're producing during Peak Hours you sell back at retail price. So, yes, one kWh of generation during peak hours pays for 3 kWh of off-peak energy. That's why I'll occasionally have days where my overall energy usage is positive but I still have a $ credit for that day. My PV was only turned on in March of this year, so I'm offsetting the money I paid to PGE during the first couple months of the year with excess generation. So it is paying back at retail rates.
At the end of the year, if your electricity bill is completely offset by the credits from your PV system, they will buy back the additional kWh at a wholesale rate, which is something like $.03/kWh. At that point, you're better off finding something to do with the electricity rather than selling it back for almost nothing. This is why the solar contractors will try to size your system to offset about 80% of your usage. The payback for having a larger and larger system decreases the closer you get to or exceed your overall energy consumption. The cost of an additional panel at $800 (or whatever) takes forever to pay off when you're selling at only $.03/kWh.
It's very confusing because there are two metrics that they seem to use and they switch between them. There's the dollar amount and there's the energy usage amount. You're paid back in dollars UNTIL you're overall energy usage goes negative, then you're paid back at a low wholesale rate for each kWh.
SoccerMan94043
Member
I just got billed for my first month entirely on EV-A. It added roughly 120.00 to my bill as I have a young family that needs to run the dryer pretty much all the time (and likes to waste energy otherwise) on top of the Tesla charging for around 4 hours each night (at 24 amps).
I need to do some calculations to see if the standard rate would be less :\
I need to do some calculations to see if the standard rate would be less :\
It's actually very simple.
1. If your True-Up bill is positive, you pay that amount.
2. If your True-Up bill is negative, but you still pulled in more kWh than you pushed into the grid, you owe $0 and receive $0. There is no credit for the monthly minimums that are now just over $10/mo.
3. If your True-Up bill is negative and you pushed out more kWh than you pulled in from the grid, then they pay you something around $0.04/kWh for your Excess Generation.
Ouch.
If you have a swimming pool, running the pump at night instead of the day (at least for some portion of your turnover time) will likely flip everything in your favor. If not, you need to pay attention to the clock and shift everything away from 2-9pm. Weekends and holidays are more favorable on times (3-7, I think), so you can offload to then as well.
I run my pool pump at night mostly, and charge both cars at 3am. On EV-A, I run a ~$1k sacrifice credit at true-up, but that represents about 1MWh of consumed energy. I've got bids going to install panels on our new pool house so that I can net out energy despite the finances.
You really need to run the numbers for yourself. I see you're in Chico, so your daytime energy use in the Summer is probably very different than mine. Off-Peak charging is so much cheaper than E-1 that it's not even close in my situation.
My calendar year 2015 rate comparison for estimated annual True-Up charge:
E-1 $1,786
E-6 $1,418
EV $908
I have a small 4.3kW solar system and the above includes about 16,000 miles of EV charging overnight spread across two cars.
Xminus6
Member
Make sure you look at the year as a whole. Winter/Summer rates differ, and your usage changes quite a bit as well.
My only concern about this app is when I tried to visit their homepage it was flagged as a potential phishing webpage when I was on campus... I can't find much information in terms of reviews of the company/app either. And it sounds like it needs to be able to log-in to my PG&E account to work...
Xminus6
Member
Good advice. I can tell from even my early days with it in March that the production will vary wildly. My brother in law has a system on his house and he estimates that he generated around ⅓ of his summer production during the winter. So I'm not sure if we'll actually zero out our bill over the course of a whole year, but it's definitely taking out a significant chunk of it.
As far as the PGE toolkit app, it does, my necessity, need access to your PGE account information. I haven't noticed anything odd since I started using it though.
SoccerMan94043
Member
My wife put in a SPA (50 AMP circuit) a year ago and it self regulates during the day, running on an off on it's own, but not a lot. I'm looking into whether the SPA can be programed for time of day (I don't think it can). Are there circuits that have timers?
