How much do you pay in electricity to charge your car

Toyota Rav4 EV Forum

Help Support Toyota Rav4 EV Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

foxwiz

Member
Joined
Jun 17, 2013
Messages
24
Location
Agoura Hills, CA
I just got a 2013 RAV4 EV last week and I just installed the 40A Leviton charger in my garage. So far I haven't received a bill yet. I was wondering if anyone in Southern California, especially in the So Cal Edison area has figured out what they pay to charge their car.
 
I believe pchilds was snidely referring to SoCal Edison and the fact that PV Solar can sell its power back to SCE during the day while you get the kWh's back at night.

Check out the "Understanding" thread for a thorough discussion of the issue as far as NoCal's PG&E is concerned. Perhaps there are some SCE folks there to consult.

For me, I found that despite the tiered pricing plans currently available (E-1, E-6, E-9), the time-of-use benefit was still beneficial to me... so I converted from E-1 to E-9A.
The plan, however, is for PGE to soon offer a new EV-A rate that drops the "tiering" aspect (and emphasizing the time-of-use aspect) w.r.t. E-9A.
 
In Anaheim my TOU tops out at $0.16 KwH. So if I was empty, a full charge would cost about $4.40.
 
cwerdna said:
I don't live in So Cal but https://www.sce.com/nrc/pev/index.html may help the OP, a little.
I think this page is more useful because it shows the actual rates.
https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/electric-cars/residential-rates

Expand the "Home and Electric Vehicle Plan" or "Electric Vehicle Plan" to see those rates. SCE appears to promote dedicated metering with the Electric Vehicle Plan, but glosses over the thousands of dollars it costs to install an additional meter. I think that money is better spent on a solar PV system.

Changing to the Home and Electric Vehicle Plan from the regular Residential Plan will cost you more during the day for your normal household usage, but filling the car is relatively cheap. At 1,000 miles per month it will only cost you $39.21/month for your car's electricity. (1000 mi, 3mi/kWh, 85% charge efficiency, $0.10/kWh Super Off-Peak).
 
foxwiz said:
Wouldn't a solar pv system cost in the 10's of thousands?

My brother just bought his PV solar system for ~$12K, 4kw system, before federal incentives, or ~$9k after.

If you have $9k upfront, it is well worth the investment, IMHO, esp. to offset your gasser car with an EV. This offset could be as much as $2k/yr depending on your annual use for your EV versus even a Prius. ie. payback period is ~4.5 yrs, then after that it's just considered free tax-free return. ($2k return on $9k investment is over 20% -- where else can you get that tax free?!)
 
Almost every solar installer around has plans that get you a solar PV system on your house for no up-front money and you pay less than your current electric bill to them each month. The total payback is faster if you pay up front, but it depends on your financial situation and at what rate you would have to borrow money to pay the installer. The $0 down plans also tend to work in your favor if you don't have a lot of federal tax liability to write off because they're taking the tax break.
 
miimura said:
cwerdna said:
I don't live in So Cal but https://www.sce.com/nrc/pev/index.html may help the OP, a little.
I think this page is more useful because it shows the actual rates.
https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/electric-cars/residential-rates

Expand the "Home and Electric Vehicle Plan" or "Electric Vehicle Plan" to see those rates. SCE appears to promote dedicated metering with the Electric Vehicle Plan, but glosses over the thousands of dollars it costs to install an additional meter. I think that money is better spent on a solar PV system.

Changing to the Home and Electric Vehicle Plan from the regular Residential Plan will cost you more during the day for your normal household usage, but filling the car is relatively cheap. At 1,000 miles per month it will only cost you $39.21/month for your car's electricity. (1000 mi, 3mi/kWh, 85% charge efficiency, $0.10/kWh Super Off-Peak).
+1.

I'm on the "Home and Electric Vehicle plan" with SCE and 3.84kw solar and I can cover all the charging for my Rav plus my wife's Leaf and the rest of the house's needs as well. Solar cost me $11k after rebates about a year and a half ago, should be a bit cheaper now. Those high on-peak rates are what SCE pays you for your solar production, while you charge your car at super off-peak (as long as you can get the charge timer to work...), so that means for every kwh your solar produces you can use 3-5 kwh to charge your car.
 
fooljoe said:
miimura said:
cwerdna said:
I don't live in So Cal but https://www.sce.com/nrc/pev/index.html may help the OP, a little.
I think this page is more useful because it shows the actual rates.
https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/electric-cars/residential-rates

Expand the "Home and Electric Vehicle Plan" or "Electric Vehicle Plan" to see those rates. SCE appears to promote dedicated metering with the Electric Vehicle Plan, but glosses over the thousands of dollars it costs to install an additional meter. I think that money is better spent on a solar PV system.

Changing to the Home and Electric Vehicle Plan from the regular Residential Plan will cost you more during the day for your normal household usage, but filling the car is relatively cheap. At 1,000 miles per month it will only cost you $39.21/month for your car's electricity. (1000 mi, 3mi/kWh, 85% charge efficiency, $0.10/kWh Super Off-Peak).
+1.

I'm on the "Home and Electric Vehicle plan" with SCE and 3.84kw solar and I can cover all the charging for my Rav plus my wife's Leaf and the rest of the house's needs as well. Solar cost me $11k after rebates about a year and a half ago, should be a bit cheaper now. Those high on-peak rates are what SCE pays you for your solar production, while you charge your car at super off-peak (as long as you can get the charge timer to work...), so that means for every kwh your solar produces you can use 3-5 kwh to charge your car.
I think you went too big on the solar!

SCE is different than PG&E because the Super Off-Peak on SCE is not tiered. You pay a fixed price between midnight and 6am. However, the peak and part-peak are tiered. The solar will have the fastest pay-back if you keep the system small and just cut the usage down to the baseline.

SCE_HOME_EV_Rates.png


So, if you can just pay the 9-12 cent rates in the table above, you would be in great shape. Anyway, SCE has annual true-up just like PG&E, so you have to look at the whole year in total. A good solar installer can run all these numbers for you. They will be most accurate if they have access to your past bills.
 
miimura said:
I think you went too big on the solar!

SCE is different than PG&E because the Super Off-Peak on SCE is not tiered. You pay a fixed price between midnight and 6am. However, the peak and part-peak are tiered. The solar will have the fastest pay-back if you keep the system small and just cut the usage down to the baseline.

SCEHOMEEVRates_zps2abf2d2e.png


So, if you can just pay the 9-12 cent rates in the table above, you would be in great shape. Anyway, SCE has annual true-up just like PG&E, so you have to look at the whole year in total. A good solar installer can run all these numbers for you. They will be most accurate if they have access to your past bills.

Super off-peak was tiered until just 1-2 months ago, prior to that it was .10 and .16/.17 (winter/summer) for tier 1 and tier 2. I'm a little brain dead at the moment, but wouldn't designing your system to bring you to baseline always have the fastest payoff regardless of whether or not super off-peak is tiered?

Back when we switched to a whole house TOU plan 2.5 years ago, SCE really pushed against the plan despite the fact that it saved us money even without the EV as most of our usage is off or super off-peak. It was also kind of funny that they had just changed out the meter to a "smart" meter but had to change it to an interval data recorder that I think someone still comes to to read.
 
miimura said:
I think you went too big on the solar!
...
So, if you can just pay the 9-12 cent rates in the table above, you would be in great shape. Anyway, SCE has annual true-up just like PG&E, so you have to look at the whole year in total. A good solar installer can run all these numbers for you. They will be most accurate if they have access to your past bills.
I think minimizing the payback period is a silly way to look at solar - you ignore the decades of pure profit that come after. I prefer to look at the monthly 30 year amortized cost of the system + the monthly electricity bill that remains to get a "true" picture of how much money you're saving. And doing that I just calculated that the cost of energy from my panels amounts to about 8c/kwh, which is less than any rate offered by SCE, implying that zeroing out the Edison bill is the best approach. Also, note that with the new non-tiered super off-peak it pays to get into tier 2 as fast as possible. It's all about maximizing the on-peak to super off-peak ratio.

yblaser said:
Super off-peak was tiered until just 1-2 months ago, prior to that it was .10 and .16/.17 (winter/summer) for tier 1 and tier 2. I'm a little brain dead at the moment, but wouldn't designing your system to bring you to baseline always have the fastest payoff regardless of whether or not super off-peak is tiered?

Back when we switched to a whole house TOU plan 2.5 years ago, SCE really pushed against the plan despite the fact that it saved us money even without the EV as most of our usage is off or super off-peak. It was also kind of funny that they had just changed out the meter to a "smart" meter but had to change it to an interval data recorder that I think someone still comes to to read.
Haha and I had just had a "smart" meter put in for TOU myself, but when I put in solar they had to come out to change it again. You'd think one type of "smart" meter should be able to handle all of these possibilities.
 
fooljoe said:
.... I had just had a "smart" meter put in for TOU myself, but when I put in solar they had to come out to change it again. You'd think one type of "smart" meter should be able to handle all of these possibilities.
I am on a TOU-D-T rate with SCE and when my solar came on line in February, they didn't have to change out the smart meter.

I am driving more miles lately and using the free chargers in town less so my bill is moving close to tier 2. I guess I should go to the TOU-D-TEV schedule to get the super cheap pricing. If I do that I will now have to figure out the timer issue to start my charging after midnite.
 
Here's a comparison of PG&E E-9A to SCE TOU-D-TEV using SmartMeter data from my house in May 2013. The SCE Tariff is really hard to read, so I just used the simplified numbers from their web page that I posted above.

PGE_SCE_May2013_EV_Comp.jpg


You can see that the hours of the SCE Peak period collect a LOT more solar energy than PG&E. Just for comparison, I kept the same baseline quantity as my PG&E allocation. SCE baselines vary widely all over the map. Inland areas get a much bigger Summer allowance for A/C than coastal areas. Anyway my baseline in Santa Clara County is roughly the same as the middle part of Orange County. It doesn't matter much because it's inside Tier 1 and the SCE Plan goes to 130% before it bumps to their Tier 2.
 
fooljoe said:
miimura said:
I think you went too big on the solar!
...
So, if you can just pay the 9-12 cent rates in the table above, you would be in great shape. Anyway, SCE has annual true-up just like PG&E, so you have to look at the whole year in total. A good solar installer can run all these numbers for you. They will be most accurate if they have access to your past bills.
I think minimizing the payback period is a silly way to look at solar - you ignore the decades of pure profit that come after. I prefer to look at the monthly 30 year amortized cost of the system + the monthly electricity bill that remains to get a "true" picture of how much money you're saving. And doing that I just calculated that the cost of energy from my panels amounts to about 8c/kwh, which is less than any rate offered by SCE, implying that zeroing out the Edison bill is the best approach. Also, note that with the new non-tiered super off-peak it pays to get into tier 2 as fast as possible. It's all about maximizing the on-peak to super off-peak ratio.
I actually agree with you, the "too big" comment was kind of tongue-in-cheek because it sounded like the other guy was generating enough kWh for the Leaf and RAV, when he was probably talking about dollars, not kWh. Sizing to zero out your annual bill is the way to go. I was responding with the earlier poster in mind that was assuming you had to put up 10's of thousands of dollars to get into solar. That is not true. However, I think if people "go cheap" and start with a small system, then they really see how the solar works and they want to go bigger and it's not so easy to add to an existing system.
 
An update to the earlier thoughts on this thread for me.

I added a Kilowatt of additional solar panels using microinverters. I also went to the SCE TOU EV rate and it became effective July 8th. I can already see a difference on my month to date charges. Thanks to Miimura's chart I figured how to shift my loads to the times when I pay less for electricity. The EV rate is good for solar because the peak rate runs from 10am until 6pm versus Noon until 6PM on the regular TOU rate. That gives me 2 more hours of solar production paid at the higher rate of $0.26 per Kilowatt.

The off peak rate is $0.12 per kilowatt and that is not a bad rate to pay for charging my car, except the super off peak rate runs from midnight until 6AM and only costs $0.09 per kilowatt. I bought a $6.00 110v relay and a $30.00 Intermatic timer switch and connected them in front of my EVSE. I programmed the timer to close the relay at 12:01AM and open at 5:59AM. Now I just plug in the car when I want to charge and at Midnight the EVSE lights up and I am done before the higher rate kicks in. This way I don't have to mess with the quirky Toyota timer.

The interesting thing is I will probably be a net consumer of Kilowatts but my bill will still be negative because of the difference in rates. I will need to build up a little reserve because the annual true up comes in the winter, when my solar production will be at its lowest.
 
Ampster said:
The interesting thing is I will probably be a net consumer of Kilowatts but my bill will still be negative because of the difference in rates. I will need to build up a little reserve because the annual true up comes in the winter, when my solar production will be at its lowest.
This is really the key point with solar and TOU rates. You don't have to get anywhere near zero net usage to zero out your bill. My mid-June to mid-July statement had 385kWh of net usage: 451kWh Off-Peak, -23kWh Part-Peak, -43kWh Peak. The billed energy charge on PG&E E-9A was only $2.81. The same net usage on E-1 (straight billing) would have been $51.93 and the normal solar TOU rate E-6 would have been $30.05
 
miimura said:
This is really the key point with solar and TOU rates. You don't have to get anywhere near zero net usage to zero out your bill. My mid-June to mid-July statement had 385kWh of net usage: 451kWh Off-Peak, -23kWh Part-Peak, -43kWh Peak. The billed energy charge on PG&E E-9A was only $2.81. The same net usage on E-1 (straight billing) would have been $51.93 and the normal solar TOU rate E-6 would have been $30.05
Thanks for pointing that out earlier, it was a concept that I did not initially understand, until your spreadsheet made it clearer. I hope others can benefit from this sharing of information. It is truly the great thing about being part of a forum like this.

In a larger sense Solar could be a disruptive factor for public utilities and they are now lobbying for changes that might eliminate some of the above benefits. We need to watch that issue closely, because what is disruptive for public utilities could be positive for society as a whole. On the other hand we do need public utilities to store our solar production during the day and deliver it back to us efficiently when we need it at other times of the day.
 
Back
Top