SanDust said:
I'd think that if your solar system was producing more than you were using, knowing what we know now, you would be better off going on DR-SES for the house and using a separate meter for the EV. The proposed payout rate is $.08 for production in excess of use and I'm assuming you get credited at a higher rate for peak production.
If needed, you can of course use your home outlets to charge. In your case you'll have an extra Clipper Creek charger, so you could have one 240V charger on the house meter and the second 240V meter on the EV meter. Easy to pick using one or the other. I sort of set it up this way. I connected a separate standard household outlet using #8 wire with the idea that if prices for the chargers come down I can just change to 240V at the panel and add a second charging station which will be metered on the house. If you want to sell your old Clipper Creek charger let me know! LOL
Ecotality is definitely going to take the(ir) Clipper Creek back when they bring the Blink, we won't have a spare.
Once they eliminated the low-spread (.13 super off peak) experimental rate, you're correct that we would probably have been OK to go with the second meter, and for the duration of the Project, pay our car bill and then recover that money back with an AB920 reimbursement. It's possible that DR-SES would pay off for us by allowing positive usage for zero cost...but...(contrary to what I think you are suggesting), AB-920 applies only to real excess production, not Time of Use credits. Our original hope, which I'm still clinging too despite unanticipated charging inefficiency and things like the prospect of the Blink vampire load, was to truly zero out our raw total (house + car) usage, rendering both AB920 and DR-SES moot. We are still on DR (no TOU) right now. If we start to fall behind on production vs. usage, our next step would probably be (to look at) going to DR-SES, so TOU credits would allow us to consume more than we use and still have a zero (well, .17 a day minimum charge) bill. Again, in that scenario, no repayment from AB920 - they don't pay based on calculated TOU credits, only on raw overproduction.
For someone who wasn't overproducing to begin with, just offsetting a chunk of their house consumption, the second meter is the way to go for sure. For someone overproducing, but only, say, enough to cover half of their car usage, 2 meters could be a wash, but not because of DR-SES TOU credits on the house - the house credit to be used to then pay for car charging is only ever going to be that .08 cents (or worse - they were shooting for .06 or less).
As an aside, since we had solar in place for 6 months before getting the car, we built up a 1000kWh credit, which I believe we'll be able to carry forward at our true-up date, giving us some time to gather data and really figure out if it would help in the long run for us to go to DR-SES.