SDG&E Introduces New EV Rate Sept. 1, 2011

[DoxyLover]

Friday SDG&E in conjunction with So. Cal. Ed. and PG&E requested the PUC to approve an "electric grid storage fee" to net metering PV customers!

Can you give a link for this? I've Googled and not found any reference to this storage fee.

Thanks

[wsbca]

Friday SDG&E in conjunction with So. Cal. Ed. and PG&E requested the PUC to approve an "electric grid storage fee" to net metering PV customers!

Can you give a link for this? I've Googled and not found any reference to this storage fee.

Thanks

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011 ... el-burned/

http://www.nctimes.com/blogsnew/busines ... 50fa1.html

[DaveEV]

Have you looked at natural gas fuel cells?

No, what's the advantage over a conventional genset burning CNG ?

No CO2. Not sure about the economics.

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

If you convert nat gas to energy, you're going to get CO2 out - sorry.

Nat gas fuel cell example would be a bloom box. I think there are others - I keep seeing ads for this "ClearEdge" box - don't know anything about it, though.

Bloom box is about 50% efficient - 1 therm of nat gas has about 30 kWh of energy in it so you get about 15 kWh out (Edit: Found that the ClearEdge residential box uses 0.43 therms for every 5 kWh of electricity generated, so about 40% efficient but you can also use the waste heat to heat water which boosts efficiency - could be really good if you have a hot-tub!)

Residential rates for gas are about $1.20 / therm, but they are tiered - not sure what the rates jump to but lets assume they double and all your nat gas fuel cell usage is at the higher rate - so for $2.40 you get 15 kWh or about $0.16 / kWh. The first 15 therms in the summers months are $1.20 / therm (225 kWh worth out of your bloom box) and in winter you get 46 therms at $1.20 or about 700 kWh out of your bloom box.

Heck - at those prices screw the PV array - just buy gas service and a fuel cell. Of course, I understand that ramping up a bloom box takes a good deal of electricity to get things up to temp and running - so there goes your demand charges! Might want to keep that PV array and a battery bank for starting up the fuel cell.

[TonyWilliams]

Just got off the phone with one of the NG fuel cell companies in Oregon.

5kW, $56,000, 40% electric efficient, 50% heat, can be reduced below 5kW, but currently needs a grid tie to feed unused power. Temperature from heat exchanger is 150F.

[electricfuture]

I wonder if an unintended consequence of the new solar rates might be many homeowners installing small battery storage systems. Huge battery systems sufficient to carry you through a week of cloudy days are terribly expensive. But a much smaller battery would absorb your entire afternoon peak production on a single day, and feed it back into the house after sunset. So a net-zero house would in fact send no energy onto the grid during the day, would draw much less from the grid at night, would pay virtually none of the new transmission fees, and would still get all the benefit of the grid for atypical power needs. I don't know if this is technically or economically feasible, but I'm checking into it just in case PUC accepts the solar rate proposal unchanged.

I think this is our future - PV and micro wind turbines charging a battery pack that can at least re-charge the Leaf if not anything else. I recently saw a solar PV/ Solar thermal installation where the solar thermal panels are directly under the solar PV. Now this is efficient! With a heat exchanger you would reduce or eliminate the need for heating water or your house and hopefully generate enough PV juice to power the Leaf.

The more electric cars there are the more likely we will see these systems in the near future (except in Seattle where they pay $.0461 per KWH for 10-16 KWH and $.096 thereafter!).

Here is Seattle's rate table: http://www.seattle.gov/light/Accounts/R ... an_rsc.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[ttweed]

To clarify my comment about the study, the rates created for the study (EPEV-X, Y, and Z) are expected to be good through April 2013. After that, people on those study rates will be asked to choose which of the traditional EV rates they'd like to move to (EV-TOU or EV-TOU2 at this time). We don't know yet if any new rates will be created besides those two, but there could be other rates at that time to choose from.

I'm dredging up this old thread this morning after attending the workshop last night for "SDG&E Plug-in Electric Vehicle Time-of-Use Pricing Study Participants" to provide us with information about our rate options once the study ends, which is set for Dec. 31, 2013.

I was fairly disappointed to learn that after two years of experimental study, there would be no change at all to their pre-existing EV-TOU rates, and that we would all be transitioned to them automatically next year with no new options, adjustments, or modifications of the two rate plans that have been available since 2011. I guess that collecting data for all that time only reinforced the "correctness" of their previously determined rate structure? Did they learn nothing??

I was hoping for some rate change that would encourage EV usage, and reward "super-off-peak" charging to a greater extent. Instead, they seem to have garnered the conclusion that it doesn't matter how high or low the rate is, you will still charge at night even to save a few cents/kWh, as 80% of the charging that was done by study participants was during the super-off-peak period, regardless of whether you had the X, Y, or Z tariff. Thus, they can soak us for the $.14/kWh rate that was established years ago and most people will go along, since there is no alternative (other than spending mega-bucks for a solar/storage/NG system to avoid them entirely). My EV "fueling" costs will double on Jan. 1, since I was in the Z group, being charged $.07 kWh for super-off-peak charging. I am happy that I got 2 years of cheap rates, but was hoping that the final schedules would be somewhere between the old rates and the experimental rates. This did not happen--another disappointment to add to the lack of infrastructure development that was touted to the early adopters.

I was hoping that they would at least throw us a bone with some kind of refinement of the 7-day-per-week structure for the time periods of EV-TOU rates along the lines of other utilities like PG&E, at least giving us a break on weekends and holidays from weekday peak rates, and actually asked a question at the end of the presentation about why weekend and holiday peak periods were the same as weekdays, when it is obvious that the demand for electricity from the grid is less when commercial users are not sucking juice like they do during business hours. The answer was that commercial usage was not considered in setting the rates, only residential usage profiles were included. This seems illogical to me, since it is certainly the high commercial demand during peak periods that causes the high rate at those times, so why would they be ignored during the off-peak periods? Why is it possible for PG&E, a "sister" company with comparable demand on its grid, to offer their customers this structure:
Peak: 2:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Holidays.
Partial-Peak: 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Off-Peak: All other hours.

Maybe Randy can answer my question in a way that makes more sense to me than the one I got from his boss last night? I feel like we are getting screwed and not even getting kissed, here. For all the noise that is being made about being "EV-friendly," SDG&E is ending up with some of the most onerous EV residential rate tariffs around.

TT

[walterbays]

I was fairly disappointed to learn that after two years of experimental study, there would be no change at all to their pre-existing EV-TOU rates, and that we would all be transitioned to them automatically next year with no new options, adjustments, or modifications of the two rate plans that have been available since 2011. I guess that collecting data for all that time only reinforced the "correctness" of their previously determined rate structure? Did they learn nothing??

How I interpreted their remarks was that the new EV-TOU rates were as yet undetermined and would be announced Sept. 1. Hence my surprise that they were asking people last night to go ahead and choose one of the rate options at unknown prices. (Though the deadline for choosing is December.)

I was hoping for some rate change that would encourage EV usage, and reward "super-off-peak" charging to a greater extent.

Remember he said they would be doing an econometric study using our data to determine the optimal rates? Of course "econometric" means "calculated to extract the maximum profit" but I hope they will also consider that if the next 100,000 people decide to "Just Buy the Prius" due to high SDG&E rates then the profit will go to Exxon instead of Sempra.

Instead, they seem to have garnered the conclusion that it doesn't matter how high or low the rate is, you will still charge at night even to save a few cents/kWh, as 80% of the charging that was done by study participants was during the super-off-peak period, regardless of whether you had the X, Y, or Z tariff.

A couple of years ago I was urging people who drew the X tariff (highest super off-peak rates) to charge during peak as much as possible, lest SDG&E draw just this conclusion.

Another bit of good information last evening was that they have all our smart meter data even if our house is on net metering tiered rate, and either through their web site or on the phone will help us evaluate different rate options. If the EV-TOU night rate is very high it might make sense to put the car on whole house tiered rate, adding a couple more solar panels if necessary to stay near net zero or in a low rate tier.

[SanDust]

Interesting. That even a few cents will cause people to charge off-peak doesn't surprise me. If your car is going to be parked overnight why not start charging at midnight rather than 8:00 PM? It also doesn't surprise me that SDG&E wants to maximize revenue. That's what it does.

What's surprising is that they haven't figured out it's a better idea in the longer run to have lower prices for EV owners. EV owners by and large are higher income and own their own homes. This makes them perfect customers for solar. The EV TOU plan makes them super great candidates for solar because on the EV-TOU plan you can sell back during the day at almost 2X the rate SDG&E charges you at night.

On the one hand, SDG&E is complaining that it's losing high use customers to solar, a process which is compromising its business plan. On the other hand its EV tariffs are strongly encouraging its high use customers to install solar.

[walterbays]

Interesting. That even a few cents will cause people to charge off-peak doesn't surprise me. If your car is going to be parked overnight why not start charging at midnight rather than 8:00 PM?

It's also a big deal to them that people set timers to stop charging at 5am rather than to start charging at midnight. That spreads out the load more, and avoids spikes by randomizing the start times instead of a couple thousand EV's all starting to charge at the same time.

It's better for our cars too, with less time sitting at high state of charge especially if charging to 100%, and pre-warmed batteries on colder winter mornings. For the first year I couldn't charge that way due to Blink unreliability: I had to verify the car was charging before going to bed. But in the past year my Blink has been reliable and I'm comfortable using an end timer.

[Randy]

Hi Tom and others,
Thanks for attending our workshop last night. I've read your comments. I need to gather some internal information and will use it to put together a response and try to address your questions and issues....

Thanks, Randy