ttweed said:
Frank said:
Is there anyone that is serviced by SDG&E that is participating in the EV Project but does NOT have a second dedicated meter installed by SDG&E to measure the EV electricity consumption?
I don't understand how you can be part of the EV project and not have the separate EV meter installed, or not be subject to one of the experimental TOU rates.
We are in the project, with a single meter, and not using the experimental rates...we have a solar PV system with net metering. I'm not sure that is a requirement for being given the choice, but it is why we elected to forgo the second meter when, at the last minute, we were offered that option. This was a topic of much discussion last summer...the issue was, if you were going to have any excess PV generation (beyond your household consumption), you were not going to be able to use it to charge your car. You would have to pay the bill for the meter upstream of your EVSE, and then apply under AB920 for reimbursement for your excess solar separately. And, at that time, one of the 3 experimental rates had a lowest (super-off-peak) rate far higher than the likely (wholesale) AB920 reimbursement rate. So you might end up using no net electricity, and still end up paying out of pocket. Which would undoubtedly skew any data they collected from your EVSE, because a rational consumer would then charge from the house account at L1 as much as possible to use their own electricity before buying any.
Further - the experimental rates were going to be strictly randomly assigned. So you wouldn't know what you were getting into until it was too late. The idea that your behavior would not be "normal" if you got stuck with the worst case rate (and were driven to use L1) seemed to be OK with SDG&E, they said it would be accounted for in the subjective (interview) aspect of the data collection. But I surmise that the Project was less enthusiastic about that potential skew.
At some point along the way someone realized that PV overproducers were not the completely insignificant minority that one might have assumed (probably because the very people who would buy an EV would also be likely users of solar). So they changed the rules...not only did they eliminate the low-spread experimental rate (the one with super off peak higher than any conceivable AB920 reimbursement), but they allowed you to turn down the second meter and remain on your current rate schedule.
For us that made the most sense - we sized our solar system to accomodate most if not all of our car usage.
As to data collection - we'll still have a Blink, which will report to the project. They will know what our electric rate structure is, it just won't be one of the experimental rates. They will also be able to collect data from our charging habits at other project EVSE sites etc.
If you don't have solar, the super off peak experimental rates (6-7c per kWh) are super attractive, and I don't think there'd be any reason to turn down the (free) second meter and that rate structure.
I don't know if this option persists, but it's the configuration we are currently operating in - we got our Clipper Creek EVSE in December, our car in January, and we're now waiting for our Blink to take the place of the Clipper Creek. We have a single net-metering compatible smart meter, which has been in place for about a month (before that we had an analog net meter), which reads 000006 kWh as of this morning (probably more now since it's been a bad solar day).
