Featured Kiss your GAS goodbye?

What do you mean by "fees and so forth?" If you mean you are including taxes and other fees that go up and down depending on how much electricity you use, yes you should add those on to your calculations. IMO you shouldn't add one time/base fees that don't change regardless of how much electricity you use. In other words, I'm still going to pay those fees whether I have a plug in or not, so why would I add them to my plug in cost?

 

In short, yes, I agree. But for more detail, here in Austin, they break it down, perhaps semi-pointlessly, into the “Energy Charge” (the actual electricity itself), a “Power-supply adjustment,” (not really sure what that is), “Regulatory Charge,” and then several assorted lesser charges. The electricity itself is only 2.8c/KWh, but the total per KWh works out to 10-12c/KWh.

 

Gotcha, ya that makes it tough to figure out then. Here we have a base charges and fees, then our energy + tax.

 

i just divide the total bill by kWh used. doesn't really matter what the rest of the bill looks like, or if the electrons are free.

 

It’s easy to mistakenly see the 2.8c/KWh number and think that’s it.

Looking forward to when we upgrade our house in a couple years or so, to include PV (solar), most likely grid-tied. At that point, the cost per mile will become all-but-zero! Have to size-up the system very carefully though.


iPad ? Pro

 

why can't you put in the max size, don't they buy back excess?

 

That’s not unreasonable, assuming that the non-per-KWh fees are pretty small. In our case, there’s a $10/month fee just to have electric service at all, plus (essentially) $1/week for the “Plug-In EVerywhere” all-you-can-charge-around-town buffet, as I jokingly call it. So, for us, that wouldn’t be a good approximation.

In our case, also, it takes a little dredging through the bill to separate the electric part of our combined utility bill from the garbage-collection, sewage, water, etc. Austin Energy, for better or for worse, is a City-owned utility, although I gather it’s largely revenue-neutral (it pays for itself).


iPad ? Pro

 

so you don't consider the fourteen dollars a month part of the cost of your electricity?

 

There are some utilities that pay you wholesale for what you supply to the grid, and then charge you retail for what you use from the grid. Thankfully, Austin Energy is not that way. In fact, I seem to recall that they actually pay you at middle-tier prices, even if your consumption is lower-tier prices, which it almost certainly will be. In other words, for most houses, they actually pay you more per KWh than you pay them per KWh.

That, however, is based mostly just upon what one particular colleague was seeing on their particular power bill; I’m not 100% sure what all the rules are here in Austin.

However, if you supply to them more than you use, *on a continuous basis*, your electric bill is free, but I gather they’ll never write you a check. So my understanding is that your best bet is to size a PV system for pretty much 100% of your *average, continuous* usage, no more and no less. That, again, based upon what that colleague told me, and of course is potentially only relevant to Austin, although other utilities might have similar pricing schemes (don’t know).

I gather that not understanding those rules and the limits of your system can easily make your PV situation ... less profitable than expected.

 

So, as Markabelle was saying, the $10 per month “just to play the game” is independent of whether I have a (PH)EV or not, so yes, it’s part of the cost of my electric bill, but I don’t consider it part of my EV-cost per mile, since I’d pay those $10 even if I weren’t charging up a car.

Now the ~$1/week for the “all you can charge buffet” (haha), yes, that’s part of the cost of charging my P.Prime. However, that’s not per-KWh, and it’s the proverbial “steal of a deal,” since that same amount of electricity charged from home would cost me on the order of $8.00/week.

 

got it, thanks! i wish were as civilized.

 

Since “Team ChargePoint” started this conversation, I’ll add that the charging stations around Austin in this “Plug-In EVerywhere” program are in fact ChargePoint stations.

 

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