fooljoe said:
Boomer23 said:
One thought: TOU-D-A has a "baseline credit" of 10 cents/kWh. Since baseline is about 300 kWh per month (depending upon city you're located in), that credit would amount to about $30/month. I'm not positive about how SCE will apply and calculate that credit, but if it's as simple as it sounds, it could amount to a $30 monthly savings. That would offset up to $360 per year of other charges. I'm skeptical about why they'd offer this credit, and if it'll apply to all of us, but if it's true, perhaps it represents a "sweetener" to get us gently used to rate plans with fixed monthly minimums (now only 93 cents/mo).
Yeah, I was uncertain as to how to apply that baseline credit myself, but I assume the worst. As I recall, in the past there was a similar credit on tier 1 usage, that amounted to a line item on the bill that amounted to
you paying SCE some amount if you have negative consumption due to solar. I'm going to assume this is similar.
One takeaway I had from this was that as bad as the redefinition of "on peak" is, the biggest impact on my predicted bill comes from raising the super off peak rate from 9.5c to 11c. That extra 1.5c can make a BIG difference, especially if you have two EVs like me.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that if I could only shift ~2 kWh/day from on peak to super off peak then I could negate the predicted increase. I usually have at least that much left in the Leaf after a day's driving, and I usually get home a couple hours before on peak ends at 8pm. Plus I wouldn't mind a little extra battery degradation to help me lose that 9th bar. Let's get Leaf to grid working! Any ideas on how to accomplish it for cheap?
You got me thinking (read: worrying), about how SCE might finagle this weird baseline credit, and possibly do the double-negative thing and actually
charge us ten cents per kWh that we over-generate. I highly doubt that extreme outcome would get past the uproar from both the solar PV user base and the solar industry after the first month's bills arrive. But I did some further searching to see if anyone has gotten a clearer answer as to how it'll work.
This link
here will take you to a Tesla owner forum where they discussed this. If you scroll down to member DaveR75, you'll see a dialogue from an SCE rep on how it'll work. Granted, it's incomplete and it doesn't address solar users, but it does say that all users will get a monthly credit of $0.10 per kWh of
actual usage (meaning net usage drawn from SCE's grid) up to their baseline amount. But for months when the customer uses less power than the baseline, the credit would be reduced accordingly. (Baseline is different for each city, but for example, for me in Irvine, winter baseline is 285 kWh and summer baseline is 313 kWh for some representative months. The actual baseline is a daily number of kWh, so the total baseline for a month will depend partly on the number of days in the month.)
That means to me that if a solar user generates power equal to his power usage for any month, he wouldn't get any baseline credit for that month. And in other months, if his net usage is let's say half of his baseline amount, say 150 kWh, he'd only get his 10 cent credit for that much usage, i.e. $15 for that month. You'd only get the full baseline credit in any month that you net use at least your baseline allocation.
Now, please correct me if I'm wrong on this, if your PV system is large enough that you always have a net usage of zero kWh, and if you're on a TOU plan and charging over night, you're probably sitting on a monthly credit that gets zeroed out at the end of the net metering year anyway, so you don't care that you'd miss out on the baseline credit. But if you're like most people and you use slightly more power than you generate some months, each month of the year will be a different story. If you use a lot of air conditioning in August, you'll have a net bill for Peak power usage and possibly not much if any baseline credit to offset it.
So how to play this game? Looking at my own usage over the last year, I'd only get the full baseline credit in November, December and January. So if that turns out to be true, for those other nine months, I'll be missing out on using some cheap kWh. Since the credit is 10 cents and Super Off Peak usage is 11 cents, any car charging or other power usage during Super Off Peak up to the baseline amount would only cost me a penny per kWh. And SCE has expanded Super Off Peak to include the ten hours of 10 pm to 8 am, every day. So you could probably move some of your laundry and dish washing into those hours, and maybe you could drive your EV more and do more charging at a penny per kWh.
Will it work out this way? We shall see. One member of that Tesla forum, "ARCHER" at the bottom of the page, says that he's been on Plan A since January, (I'm not sure how he got on the plan that early) and it hasn't bitten him in any strange way, so maybe some of our fears won't come to pass.
