SF Bay area: PG&E do I need to get into a different rate plan?

Not all PG&E plans are time of use. You need to look at your existing bill and calculate how an additional 100 kWh will affect it.

Gas is sold in gallons and electricity is sold by the kWh. The rate per kWh increases as your consumption increases, unless you're on a time of use plan. If you own an all-electric, you definitely want time of use, but since your Prius only uses about 100 kWh per month, it's not so critical, although you'll probably save money.

To be more specific than that, we'd need your zip code and an idea of how much you pay a month for electricity, and ideally your consumption in kWh.

 

Just to add: no rate plan change is ever "required"; it might simply make economic sense.
There are also two separate issues: whether you have a separate meter, and what sort of rate plan you have.
To sign up for the EV rate plan, you need to install a separate meter. This makes essentially zero financial sense for the PiP.
You can also just change to a time-of-use plan for your entire house. Note that depending on your electricity consumption patterns, this might result in higher costs for you than if you keep your current plan if you use a lot of energy during peak hours.

 

if you go into your online account management, you can see whether a time of use rate plan will save you money or cost you more based on your past usage. that should be a good start.

 

which apparently you can't do right now because it's under maintenance

 

That's not your rate schedule. That's related to Understanding Baseline Quantities. Schedules for residential have names like E-1, E-6, E-9A, etc. Select a Rate Option has summary, but they can be way complicated, esp. if you switch to a TOU plan.

 

check out
Plug-In Electric Vehicles
i called the phone # on this page (not the usual PGE customer service) and the operator ran a usage analysis which showed i would save more on E-9A over E-1 ("A" doesn't require any hardware changes to smart meter). Still waiting for connect E-9A to take effect.

 

The E-9A rate is working fine for me. But they are planning to remove that rate soon in favor of a non-tiered TOU plan for EV owners, and I have no how idea how that would work out.

 

hi pge folks, after reading up on pge website, is it correct that for TOU plans, each period (Peak, Part Peak, and Off Peak) has its own Baseline (kwh) per day?

for example, if 11kwh is the summer baseline, and summer Peak is 2-9pm, then the Summer Peak baseline is 11kwh * 7 hours / 24 hours =3.2 hrs per day (actually weekday Mon-Fri). so, any amount over 3.2 hours is charged at next higher tier rates (either 2,3,4,5 depending on how much higher than 3.2?)

 

As I read the definition of the E9 rate plan, you distribute your total baseline over the three time rates (Peak, Part-Peak, Off-Peak) proportional to the number of kwh you used in each of the three rates, not the number hours the rates are in effect. So if you used 50 Peak kwh, 100 Part-Peak kwh, and 150 Off-Peak kwh, your Peak baseline would be (50/(50+100+150)) = 1/6 of your baseline, your Part-Peak baseline would be 1/3 of your baseline, and your Off-Peak baseline would be 1/2 of your total baseline.

This complicated stuff is one reason they are moving to a new TOU rate plan which is not tiered.

 

the PGE site doesn't show you the EV rate plans by default. here's PGE's special page for EVs which lists a special phone number to call about EV rate plans. i called the number and had them run an E6 vs. E9a analysis and the latter came out lower so i switched. note: for some reason E9a pricing data does not show up on the My Usage page (but works fine for E-1 and E-6)

PEV Calcluator

 

true, but as you saw PGE omits the E-9a on that page. that's why i had to call PGE directly to do it (make sure you specifically ask about EV rate plans )

 

I added solar before I bought my plugin and my electric bill went from $150 to $15 per month. At the same time I changed to time of use. I don't even notice charging my car.


iPad ? HD

 

We are in the same boat. My monthly electricity cost is about $60 on average. Prior to getting a PiP, I called 2 solar panel installers to give me a quote. One company over the telephone said, I would never make back the cost of the solar panels and wouldn't come out to quote me. They recommended a bare minimum of $100 a month electricity bill and even then, you just break even. The second company was a solar lease company and they came out and said the solar lease was some $100 a month to them and then $15 to the power company. Again, I'd lose money. Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to pay extra to be green, I bough t the PiP after all . But two times my electricity bill is too high of a cost. I'm better off buying LED light bulbs and energy efficient appliances.

Anyway, after some 11 days of charging the PiP, my first's month's electricity bill went up to $73. Adjust for colder weather and wave of the hand, it's a less than a buck a day. We'll see what next month brings when most of my PiP charging lands in Tier 3.