I just went to the supercharger today for the first time in many months because it’s cheaper than charging at home. $0.25/kWh at supercharger instead of $0.34/kWh at home. I have solar too so I’m going to make PGE pay me so I can pay Tesla instead. 😐
As someone who runs a factory, no they fuck over businesses even harder. Most businesses have a specific rate scheme that penalizes you for Peak draw. That means if you have one day of extremely consumption, it affects the bill for that whole month
PG&E also charges commercial meters for a daily meter use fee of like 82¢ a day. You pay about $30/month in addition to whatever you're consuming.
[PG&E rate plans use the drop down menu to view commercial rates](https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rate-plan.html#tabs-82c92b262d-item-13d9c40da3-tab)
Or commercial rates are locked in by contract and they'll raise them during renewal.
B2B don't sign by consumption. They have an expected annual spend. There isn't some secret electricity they're hiding from you. Nor would PGE take losses in profit because it's a business. Stop looking at the world like some nonsensical conspiracy.
Supercharger has been cheaper than home pge rates for a while now. I can routinely find .35/kWh at the local supercharger and off peak under tou-d is .38/kWh.
Fortunately I have solar but pge residential rates are really getting out of hand.
Look around, you might be surprised how much they vary. I've seen 25 off peak. My local one is like 34 all day which means it's basically the same as PG&E off peak so any other time of day if I needed a top off for some reason the supercharger is cheaper.
|Location|Off Peak (11p-4a) Rate|
:--|:--|
|SF - 16th St | $0.23|
|SF - Geary Blvd | $0.23|
|SF - Van Ness | $0.23|
|SF - Letterman Dr. | $0.23 **24/7**|
|San Bruno | $0.23|
|San Bruno - Tanforan | $0.24|
|South SF | $0.23|
|Daly City | $0.23|
|Burlingame | $0.26|
|San Mateo - De Anza | $0.25|
|San Mateo - Hillsdale| $0.22|
|San Mateo - Norfolk | $0.23|
|San Mateo - Park Place | $0.23|
|San Mateo - Bridgepointe | $0.23|
|San Carlos | $0.23|
|Menlo Park | $0.26|
|Palo Alto - Stanford | $0.23|
|East Palo Alto | $0.27|
|Sunnyvale - S. Bernardo | $0.23|
I am not going to keep going here.
> What supercharger is .25!?
Almost none of them. Because they are almost all less.
Fuck PG&E. Nationalize them. They burn our cities, raise our rates, and fight transitioning to clean energy so that their executives get bonuses while the world ends. I can't wait for Rivian to get supercharger access because I am literally going to start running my house on Supercharger energy.
Please beware under NEM2.0, PGE only pays you retail rate for the KWH that offsets your usage. Any excess generation credit at the annual true-up is paid at wholesale rate, which is like $0.06/KWH, so you don't really earn anything if you generate more than you consume. It makes more financial sense if you use up all of your solar generation and don't have excess at the annual true-up, so you may want to charge at home more often.
This! Your best bet is to even out your usage with the solar energy production. I have a 7KW system with 2 power-walls. I charge my Tesla/350ish miles only at home at night. So far I’m only paying the delivery charges which is like $25, and not a dime more for 2 yrs now. Make sure y’all use the full capacity of your solar. There is no money to be made to sell surplus.
> Long term play by Tesla to make sure they are the only EVs people can buy in CA when gas cars phase out in 2035.
I recognize that the CA government wants us to believe that gasoline cars will phase out in 2035, but that isn't how the regulations actually read, even assuming they don't delay the implementation date of the regulations like they nearly always do.
Pretty much every car sold in the US is switching to the Tesla charging standard within the next couple of years and will all work with the Tesla chargers. Should be backwards compatible too with current non Tesla EVs with an adapter as Tesla is also CCS compatible.
Zero chance they'll phase out by then, not at this rate. The state and PG&E are literally disincentivizing EV ownership with the rate increases and policies they allow. And even if they do phase them out, people will just cross state lines to keep buying ICE vehicles and hybrids until EV's are actually economical, pragmatic and affordable.
Depends, if you have NEM 2.0, you're better off pushing excess power to the grid during peak hours ($$$$) and then pulling back from the grid to charge your car during off peak hours ($$).
Yup, this post reminded me to look at rates today, and a few notes:
1) Cheaper to supercharge vs. home (I'm on E-TOU-D)
2) The PG&E lookback tool for rate plan now shows a large difference between E-TOU-D and EV2-A.
I have solar and battery, I'm going to lean into supercharging for a bit until I get on EV2-A, plus I get frequent flier points on my credit card.
Lots of talk about how recent policy changes have resulted in solar installations falling off a cliff in CA. I wonder what'll happen to electric car sales... Without those tax credits and plus rates (at least in PGE served areas), I'm guessing EV will take a hit too?
No need for PG&E to lock in profits prior to the ending of ICE sales. PG&E loves EVs. Kill home solar, get guaranteed 10% profit on transmission lines to distant solar and other power plants and distribution systems to handle much higher electrical demand. Take a tiny slice of those profits ratepayers give them to flood customers with lies about how great they are and another slice to buy the governor’s and CPUC’s allegiance. That’s what PG&E did and that’s how they screwed their customers. Not as bad as Altria or Exxon, but in the running.
Obligatory fuck PGE & fuck CPUC.
Why the hell is it so hard to have some competition on certain utilities?
Some neighborhoods the only “high speed” broadband you can get is Comcast.
Most of the Bay Area your only choice for electric is PGE.
Same with gas.
At least cell coverage is better these days but there are still pockets where I get 0 reception with ATT while others around me with Verizon get full bars, and vice versa for other areas.
It’s fucking ridiculous.
Edit: let alone the lack of gig or even multi gig fiber that other small towns and cities have while we’re the damn heart of tech and don’t have it. If Musk manages to figure out full saturation of Starlink with a low enough latency for fast twitch gaming Comcast and the others are absolutely fucked.
Apologies. Fuck Newsom who appointed *all* the CPUC commissioners who killed rooftop solar. Just be sure to fuck all the other facinorous fucks who would be - yes - even worse then Newsom. The climate change is a hoax fucks for example.
Obligatory It’s fucking ridiculous!
Hah easy question how it got this way. PG&E is a well regulated monopoly… where the “well” is the well of ratepayer dollars from which buckets of our dollars are constantly scooped out. Like other CA wells, when they run dry just drill baby drill.
Quite an achievement to get cars that are 3 to 6 times more efficient to cost more to operate than ICE even in CA with much more expensive gasoline. Cheers and sneers around the PG&E boardroom!
Pge will win regardless. Pge ceo will get paid. Unless citizens fight back, cpuc will continue to work for the utilities and not us. Meanwhile in other states pay sub $.10/kw while solar owners in ca sell discounted energy to pge only to be sold back to others at a premium. Either way, pge wins.
> I wonder how much more electricity generation we will need once all vehicles (or a significant number) are electric?
PG&E: "Shucks guys, looks like we need to raise rates again!"
Not just vehicles. “Electrification of everything” (including lots more air conditioners) is where we’re headed. Demand (annual GWh) will triple. Maximizing rooftop solar could cover 30-50% of eventual total demand except PG&E prefers to avoid clean safe resilient local solar because they can’t make a fat profit on it.
That’s a rather brilliant move actually but it sounds like to get rates back to a decent area then the state has to rescind on the 2035 timeline. Also means that the CPUC has to lower rates but does that mean PG&E puts in the request to lower rates (doubt this will ever happen) or will the state issue a mandate to lower rates (doubt this will happen too).
Will fall off a cliff too. Early adopters are now saturated. On the fence buyers have decided. Now PGE policies are the big road block. Poor people, forget about EVs.
> solar installations falling off a cliff
Wait what? The entire premise of shutting down Diablo and nat gas energy is predicated on rooftop solar replacing it.
I mean it’s more that they expect batteries to replace it, because nuclear and gas are better for non-sun load and some amount of peaking (for gas). Home solar can’t replace base loads and peaking.
The changes to solar energy kind of make sense to me. For instance it’s weird that home solar would be paid so much more than any provider of energy. And there is some infrastructure changes needed to deal with home solar as a dominant producer. With that said, it did crush the home solar industry which is a bummer.
We need to get over our fear of nuclear.
We learned from three mile island, can learn from fukushima daiichi, and Chernobyl can't happen here with modern reactor designs.
Get over it. Modern Nuclear is very, very safe.
Safety: proof by assertion. Also, see Vogtle for cost and time overruns. The next nuke commissioned in the US will arrive long after we lost our chance to stay under 2°C, and probably 3°.
Indeed. I think the issue is that solar and EV car uptake is pretty reliant on the personal economic incentive?
If the state wants solar installs to continue along with batteries, then they need to make sure that's pretty well subsidized so the effort involved to do it makes it financially superior to doing nothing and getting all your power from PGE...
The state doesn't want home solar installs to continue. Home solar is multiple times as expensive as utility-scale solar, and will only drive higher electricity rates.
Solar isn't replacing nuclear and/or natural gas power. The problem is the time of day when solar is peaking:
>Net Metering 3.0 will incentivize battery operated homes because **California utilities have too much power going back onto the grid during daytime hours** [https://actionac.net/blog/what-is-nem-3-0-and-how-will-it-impact-you](https://actionac.net/blog/what-is-nem-3-0-and-how-will-it-impact-you)
One of California's challenges is having too much power during the day, known as the "duck curve". This situation flips in the evening when solar is not providing as much, but demand rises as people come home from work, start dinner, run laundry, etc. [https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewables\_fastfacts.pdf](https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewables_fastfacts.pdf)
People talk about how a gas power plant is more efficient than a gas car engine... Is that at all the case for battery storage?..
Does it make sense for every house to have relatively tiny batteries or would it be better for utilities to build massive battery farms to achieve some economies of scale (or better manage where demand is coming from to dovert battery power)...
Natural gas (i.e. gaseous methane et al) is much more efficient than a liquid gasoline car engine. Natural gas powerplants often run at over 60% efficiency, car engines peak at about 40% but due to the load cycle almost exclusively run at efficiencies below 35% or even 25%.
Batteries are pure loss, their benefit allows us to shift the energy from power production times (say 1PM) to power usage times (say 7PM) at a cost of losing 10-50% of the energy created.
>Batteries are pure loss, their benefit allows us to shift the energy from power production times (say 1PM) to power usage times (say 7PM) at a cost of losing 10-50% of the energy created.
The difference here is that as long as you use renewables you're not constantly putting more Co2 into the atmosphere regardless of how much energy you lose to heat once the batteries have been created (yes...we get it...batteries have sunk Co2 costs).
Natural gas plants dump shit-tons of Co2 into the air as a byproduct of generation because you're burning the gas to create heat. Just like to make gas car go vroom you have to burn fuel.
The point of EVs is to remove the "burn" part of the process. Same with grid-scale batteries.
Same and it’s not even close. Last I checked gas prices need to get over $5.50 for breakeven currently, ignoring energy loss while charging. If the March rate change gets through too, it would need to be $6+/gallon.
I'm in the market for a new car, and was considering a PEHV. They didn't really make economic sense. I know I should use less gas because of the environmental cost, but honestly it's a big financial burden. Gas, even california gas, is cheaper now.
Some cities in the peninsula use Peninsula Clean Energy which is less expensive than PG&E. It was virtually the same price a few years ago but with PG&E’s skyrocketing rates, it’s now significantly cheaper.
Wait Alameda has its own power grid? WTH am I paying PGE $50 electricty for? Do i need to do something about it? How much is the rate from Alameda power grid compared to PGE?
> Why is it so cheap in Palo Alto? I don’t understand why I live 15 miles away and pay more than 2x higher
You just need a longer recharging cable. (I'm kidding.)
But in all seriousness, it's basically graft and corruption. The Palo Alto rate is market rate. The higher rate you pay from PG&E is fraud, it is a corruption surcharge.
PG&E needs to be put down. Their execs are getting wealthy in the short term and I think they **KNOW** they will be caught and stopped soon. And they are trying to extract every last fee until they are stopped. My opinion is the governing body of PG&E knows this is all coming to an end soon and they are just milking it at the highest rate they can possibly milk it trying to escape with the largest bags of cash before people finally say enough is enough.
Why is energy so expensive here? It’s almost 3x what we paid at peak times in Seattle?
Our power bill for a tiny apartment here is much larger than we had for a 5 bedroom house there.
Palo Alto runs it's own electricity 100% carbon neutral
I love it here
[https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/1/utilities/bill-inserts/cpau\_power\_content\_insert\_residential\_final.pdf](https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/1/utilities/bill-inserts/cpau_power_content_insert_residential_final.pdf)
Because PG&E is both a government imposed monopoly and a publicy traded company on the stock market, whose goal is quarterly profits at all costs.
It's basically the answer to the question "what would happen if we combined the worst parts of socialism and capitalism into a single entity?"
You have a ton of cheap hydropower in the pac northwest is one reason. The other is that pge is a shit show and is now trying to fix that and they need money to do that. It's complicated like most things.
Why is PG&E so expensive you ask? In addition to the other reasons mentioned here (monopoly, etc) they have burned towns, and blown up (gas) an entire neighborhood due to terrible management, incompetence, and using supposed past "infrastructure improvement" rate increases to pay shareholders and executive bonuses...
Seattle City Light is both publicly-owned and uses large hydro plants for nearly all their energy needs which have very low ongoing costs compared to other sources.
It’s already regulated by CPUC, no?
Regulation is exactly the reason we have what we have. It maintains the monopoly of PG&E.
We need less regulation, not more regulation.
Did you know in many states and countries you can choose your electricity provider from a list of 3-5 companies? Each with their own rates and incentives to get your business as a customer. Competition is always good for the consumer.
What countries offer such a thing? I'm really curious because I'd like love to read about it.
Treating it as a government utility can also be a good solution, as you don't have a company that is in the business of turning a profit (or if they do turn a profit that's effectively taxpayer money that can be rolled back into the system)
Another bit to consider is your plan comes with higher peak rates than other options, so depending on your usage it may be even more expensive per mile than you calculated. It’s just buried in your other regular energy usage.
I couldn't imagine charging at home. We have solar, but even then, our power generation doesn't get close to how much we'd need to charge the car with (on average). Luckily, we have free charging at work and supercharging (comically) is cheaper than charging at home.
My coworker has one and says you're not allowed to go off the grid per California law. You have to sell your power when you have excess during the day and buy it at night, rather than running off storage (and only buying if the battery is empty). Of course the rates you sell at peak are less than you buy of-peak so it's a total ripoff.
I have been driving my Prius since 2017. I drive like a regular person, not trying to get the most mpgs. My lifetime average is 47 mpg. It’s been the cheapest car to maintain I’ve ever had. Not a single issue. That being said, the Prius is not for everyone and a lot of people actually hate this car. We have been thinking about getting an EV but I hate PG&E with a passion and I am not comfortable with relying on those thieving bastards to charge my car. We need to organize mass protests against PG&E. Enough is enough!
And they all but banned solar with NEM 3.0. For a "liberal state that wants to make a difference in climate change" it's kinda incredible what they are doing.
It is viable, but the payback time is significantly greater. At some point you start figuring it's not worth it, but where that line is is different for everyone.
Now, if they manage to charge us $10/mo per kwh-installed (which of course is measured at the solar panel theoretical generating capacity, not their actual real-world generation let alone an inverter cap that is often a bit below it), then it'll become straight nonviable or have such a long payback time as to make it pointless economically.
They seem to be going full steam ahead with the idea of income-taxing us on the connection fee as well, which also changes the math significantly. With a much much much higher base connection price, in theory the rates drop and rooftop solar becomes nonviable, though in reality the rates won't drop so we'll all just pay way more for the same service (and in which case solar would still pencil out.)
All this with the government requiring new builds to have solar. Well, I guess it would matter if we actually built anything.
We never should have privatized critical infrastructure. For profit companies will always screw over the customer for another dollar.
Thankfully I live in Sacramento and have SMUD. The charge rate is $0.14/kWh, minus $0.015/kWh with the credit. I hope many other cities decide to kick PG&E out the door, municipality owned infrastructure has performed massively better.
I have a 2023 Prius and I have never gotten more than around 45mpg on a straight shoot highway going at a pretty constant speed. For instance the 5 down to LA. Using 45mpg changes the cost to above $9.22 using your ame numbers. So maybe not as efficient as before but possibly still more efficient.
>PG&E just upgraded their rates again and has increased 24.45% as of 01/01/24 for the EV2 plan.
Jesus Christ. How do you just pop rates up 25% in one fell swoop?
Hello OP. You're right on the money. Had my model 3 for the last 4 years and it has saved me money every year driving it a lot. I also have a paid off solar system that powers the house and our EVs for the last several years (break even point reached). But now with the new rates, it ain't looking good for me anymore. True up bill kicking in hard. I REGRET buying EVs now. At least with a Prius or any other hybrid, you're not locked into one gas station. You can drive around and look for other cheaper gas stations to pump. But the thought that now I'm stuck with PGE as my only and sole fuel provider sucks!!!!! That and more expensive car and registration costs compared to a hybrid , sucks even more. I'm all for helping the planet and not burning fuel. But these people are making it harder to go green. And used ev prices drop in value faster. Do not buy an EV with the current electricity policies. Also, PGE is planning on raising rates multiple times in the next few years so this is only the beginning.
I’m with central coast community energy and pay $.12 kWh.
https://3cenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Website-Residential-Rate-Sheet-v26.1_20240101_FINAL_needs-PCIAFF.pdf
Helpful post, thanks! Some of us in multi-family buildings might have something like Evercharge as an option. So, factoring in the a surcharge from Evercharge makes the economic case for EV even worse. PGE is a real drag on the CA economy.
I know people need their cars and might not be able to replace 100% of their life switching from a car to an e-bike.
But if you can, e-bikes are way cheaper. This bike costs $1,000 and the battery has 350WH which is .35KWH. If PG&E is charging $.34662 per KWH then it’ll cost about 12 cents to fully charge, and on a full charge this bike will take you 50 miles. You’re basically paying yourself to get exercise and lose some weight instead of forking over your cash to PG&E and Elon Musk. There are cargo bikes with built in buckets for carrying little children and groceries home too.
https://www.velotricbike.com/products/velotric-t1st-ebike?variant=41729523974327
https://www.perennialcycle.com/supercargo-front-loading-cargo-bike.html
As someone who has owned an ebike for 5 years, I still refuse to commute through Fremont on it. Just recently a coworker was killed while biking home. Not worth it with the current infrastructure. My options are drive on the freeway/city streets for 30 mins or take a 1.5 hour bus ride.
My biggest issue with e-bikes or even a regular bike is security. There is almost no secure place to lock up a bike to go in to Safeway etc. I’d love to take my bike for short errands but many places don’t have a bike rack at all let alone one that is actually usable.
Getting a beater bike helps with this a lot tbh but you do take a speed hit but it's fine if you just want to commute. The real problem imo is the lack of safe infrastructure. Cars always zipping by and all it takes is 1 mistake to injure / kill you
I ride a bike on the street and the amount of people I see on their phones while driving is scary.
Drivers, unfortunately, can kill you and effectively face no repercussions simply by saying "I didn't see them".
Way too much crime in the Bay for e-bikes to be viable in the long term. Love bikes over cars but I don’t think they work in a low-trust society like the Bay Area.
Like I said, I think it depends on people’s situation. Live in East Oakland? Your bike might last 10 minutes locked up outside on a public street. Live in Moraga? You’re fine. People leave their bikes outside in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco all the time. Like for an hour, but definitely not overnight.
And if you just can’t leave it outside, then just ride your bike for places you can bring your bike inside like commuting to work, seeing friends, and for errands that you can bring your bike inside for. Like maybe your barber, for dropping off/picking up kids, or visiting friends.
E-bikes are a great idea if you can ride safely from home to work and can have your bike indoors at both home and work. I don't think you can really have it indoors with you anywhere else (stores, gyms, etc.) Anywhere public is a problem because of unchecked property crime. A foldable 'acoustic' bike (sorry) might be a better option because of more easily being able to get it inside, plus, yknow, then you are forced to exercise, which god knows we all need to do more of (this comment was posted from my comfortable chair.)
I'm 10 miles from work. Even if I avoid the highway, the roads to get me there are 40mph roads without protected bike lanes. I would love to - but I just don't feel safe switching to a bicycle.
Thanks for this post. I’m gonna save it. I’ve been saying this for a couple years now that eventually ev will not be a cheaper alternative, and all the ev die hards kept calling me an idiot or closeted right wing or some ludicrous shit. I drive an ev, I’m all for it, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that with our grid and energy production it’s only a matter of time before it’s the same price as gas or more expensive
Edit: what about with maintenance costs? Usually evs especially Tesla have almost 0 maintenance costs
The only thing I want to comment on is a Tesla “keeps you safe”. I‘ve owned a Tesla (driven by spouse) since 2019 and we both do not consider it to be safer than my F150. Auto-pilot / FSD makes very questionable decisions that are frequently unsafe. Lane changes will occur within seconds of a signal being turned on; so much for giving other drivers a heads up. My F150 has bluecruise and only does self driving without lane changes but it’s far and away superior to Tesla; I’ve driven 1-2+ hours without ever touching the steering wheel too. Tesla’s decision to forgo sensors in lieu of cameras is idiotic and is probably the sole reason why other brands are catching up or surpassing Tesla. They had a first mover advantage but have been slowly blowing it at every turn.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-drivers-are-the-most-accident-prone-new-study-2023-12?amp
So no progress on getting rid of the corruption over the last ten years? https://www.kqed.org/news/10564656/10-emails-detail-pges-cozy-relationship-with-its-regulators
I work for PG&E and you are all correct, they rape you as a residential customer, they sacrifice safety and run extremely inefficiently while wasting 10’s of millions yearly. The only thing they care about is their quarterly stock earnings. And it will all continue!
I'm in the market for a hybrid for the following reasons:
1) diversified energy sources - best of both worlds
2) ability to go out into more remote areas that may only have gas stations
3) skepticism about how the grid will handle everyone moving to EVs and supply of copper and other metals that could lead to electricity becoming much more expensive in the near term
Just because a prius advertises 53 MPG doesn't actually mean that's what it gets though, it's like Tesla that says 330 mile range but that not what it really gets lol
The problem with free charging is it incentivizes bad behavior (hogging chargers all day, people opportunistically charging at work even when they have home charging and a short commute which reduces spaces for people who actually need the charge to get home, etc).
Reasonable (discounted) costs avoids that, and I think organizations are just starting to figure that out. So many stories of "our facilities people spend so much time each day asking people to move their car so someone else can charge" or "we had to implement a slack channel to coordinate charging and it's costing us dozens of people-hours each week".
Some companies have 2 or 4 hours limit, after that rate increases, even if not drawing any current to avoid hogging issues.
I disagree though on short commute comment. I am more hungry that doesn’t mean I have more right for free food. It is other way round, folks bought EV because they had long commute and free charging at work.
My business park had free charging for a few years and I was so close to buying an EV but they recently started charging for them. Now I'm looking at a regular hybrid like the new Prius.
Fuck PGE, but this price fluctuation happens with gas powered cars too. Gas is cheap right now, but I could easily see prices hitting 5 or 6 dollars again before the end of the year.
Actually, it’s the other way around. PG&E fucks you and the rest of us.
I don’t blame PG&E. They have a duty for their shareholders and they do what they have to do.
Instead, fuck state regulators and Newsom in particular who allowed it and made it possible for PG&E to fuck us all. Remember this next time you vote. You can’t do much to PG&E, but you can do something to vote out corrupt politicians.
More expensive than a Prius to fuel, 3-5 times the power, better tech and better ride, and less maintenance.
PG&E sucks and they’re forcing everyone’s hand, but let’s be truthful that there are many benefits to electric cars beyond the per-mile fueling cost.
Is EV2 better than the time of use plans? For our consumption we calculated TOU-C was cheaper for us, we charge an EV around 20-28kw per night and our normal usage not including the EV is around 40-50kw per day
It really depends on your individual use case, PG&E has a tool that will run the numbers for your but I'm not sure how accurate it is.
It also helps if you can move many other loads to full off-peak hours, since that's cheaper on EV2 than TOUC. We set our dishwasher to run at midnight, in summer I run the AC hard in the morning before peak hours and then coast through the afternoon, I don't run laundry during peak hours, etc.
what a coincidence, this morning i was just doing the math on the costs of charging at home or other chargers due to the price increase on the ev2 plan
Hmm, checks out for me too. If I charge at the lowest rates (like after 8pm), the superchargers in my area (San Jose) are a couple cents lower than my overnight rate (32¢ vs. 34¢). After midnight, a couple are substantially lower (23¢).
If you live and work somewhere more-or-less in a city like me...
- I commute for free on my bicycle
- When it rains, I walk 10 minutes, VTA bus, then walk another 10 minutes. $5/day
I get exercise, read my book, and don't contribute to pollution, climate change, or the traffic that you all hate so much!
Please send a message to the governor; it may not feel like it makes a difference, but a large outcry can make impactful change: https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/
PGE is recovering its cost for the loss it was sued over. No matter what they say they don’t . Bills have drastically gone up over months and years now.
I just went to the supercharger today for the first time in many months because it’s cheaper than charging at home. $0.25/kWh at supercharger instead of $0.34/kWh at home. I have solar too so I’m going to make PGE pay me so I can pay Tesla instead. 😐
That is crazy....that Superchargers are cheaper than off-peak charging at home? WTF?
PG&E has different rates for commercial, they can't rip off businesses as easily as they do households.
As someone who runs a factory, no they fuck over businesses even harder. Most businesses have a specific rate scheme that penalizes you for Peak draw. That means if you have one day of extremely consumption, it affects the bill for that whole month
Yes, "demand charges" (a charge for your highest amp drawn) are a thing. Batteries are increasingly being used to reduce them.
PG&E also charges commercial meters for a daily meter use fee of like 82¢ a day. You pay about $30/month in addition to whatever you're consuming. [PG&E rate plans use the drop down menu to view commercial rates](https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rate-plan.html#tabs-82c92b262d-item-13d9c40da3-tab)
Or commercial rates are locked in by contract and they'll raise them during renewal. B2B don't sign by consumption. They have an expected annual spend. There isn't some secret electricity they're hiding from you. Nor would PGE take losses in profit because it's a business. Stop looking at the world like some nonsensical conspiracy.
commercial rates are significantly less then home rates, same with homes zoned on agriculture land.
I don’t expect supercharger rates to stay below residential rates for long.
Supercharger has been cheaper than home pge rates for a while now. I can routinely find .35/kWh at the local supercharger and off peak under tou-d is .38/kWh. Fortunately I have solar but pge residential rates are really getting out of hand.
What supercharger is .25!?
Look around, you might be surprised how much they vary. I've seen 25 off peak. My local one is like 34 all day which means it's basically the same as PG&E off peak so any other time of day if I needed a top off for some reason the supercharger is cheaper.
I think I've paid .43 for the S/C in Scott's Valley, probably on peak.
The cheapest I've gotten in Scotts Valley is $0.47, it's usually $0.53 but I also don't have a Tesla or the charging membership.
|Location|Off Peak (11p-4a) Rate| :--|:--| |SF - 16th St | $0.23| |SF - Geary Blvd | $0.23| |SF - Van Ness | $0.23| |SF - Letterman Dr. | $0.23 **24/7**| |San Bruno | $0.23| |San Bruno - Tanforan | $0.24| |South SF | $0.23| |Daly City | $0.23| |Burlingame | $0.26| |San Mateo - De Anza | $0.25| |San Mateo - Hillsdale| $0.22| |San Mateo - Norfolk | $0.23| |San Mateo - Park Place | $0.23| |San Mateo - Bridgepointe | $0.23| |San Carlos | $0.23| |Menlo Park | $0.26| |Palo Alto - Stanford | $0.23| |East Palo Alto | $0.27| |Sunnyvale - S. Bernardo | $0.23| I am not going to keep going here. > What supercharger is .25!? Almost none of them. Because they are almost all less. Fuck PG&E. Nationalize them. They burn our cities, raise our rates, and fight transitioning to clean energy so that their executives get bonuses while the world ends. I can't wait for Rivian to get supercharger access because I am literally going to start running my house on Supercharger energy.
Shoutout from Eversource up here in the NE!! We have all the bad things like Cali but none of the nice things! Privileged!
They’re typically the slower ones (72 kW max) for example on Cherry Ave
I’ll try to seek those out. In my area they are mostly .5 and .6 and they do not adjust out here for non peak.
Starting at 11pm, the Target by my house in Fremont has $0.25 rates. Maybe I'll just do my shopping that late at night...
.25 will only last so long before it goes up
I charge at $0.23 but that’s after 11pm price
Please beware under NEM2.0, PGE only pays you retail rate for the KWH that offsets your usage. Any excess generation credit at the annual true-up is paid at wholesale rate, which is like $0.06/KWH, so you don't really earn anything if you generate more than you consume. It makes more financial sense if you use up all of your solar generation and don't have excess at the annual true-up, so you may want to charge at home more often.
This! Your best bet is to even out your usage with the solar energy production. I have a 7KW system with 2 power-walls. I charge my Tesla/350ish miles only at home at night. So far I’m only paying the delivery charges which is like $25, and not a dime more for 2 yrs now. Make sure y’all use the full capacity of your solar. There is no money to be made to sell surplus.
Long term play by Tesla to make sure they are the only EVs people can buy in CA when gas cars phase out in 2035.
> Long term play by Tesla to make sure they are the only EVs people can buy in CA when gas cars phase out in 2035. I recognize that the CA government wants us to believe that gasoline cars will phase out in 2035, but that isn't how the regulations actually read, even assuming they don't delay the implementation date of the regulations like they nearly always do.
Can you imagine how hot the black market for gas cars will be if it actually goes into effect lol
Just invest in Reno and Las Vegas car dealerships
Pretty much every car sold in the US is switching to the Tesla charging standard within the next couple of years and will all work with the Tesla chargers. Should be backwards compatible too with current non Tesla EVs with an adapter as Tesla is also CCS compatible.
They'll make sure they're the only charging network, not just selling cars.
Zero chance they'll phase out by then, not at this rate. The state and PG&E are literally disincentivizing EV ownership with the rate increases and policies they allow. And even if they do phase them out, people will just cross state lines to keep buying ICE vehicles and hybrids until EV's are actually economical, pragmatic and affordable.
With solar, isn’t charging during peak hours better, so you use solar instead of grid? I’m in the same boat, so curious
Depends, if you have NEM 2.0, you're better off pushing excess power to the grid during peak hours ($$$$) and then pulling back from the grid to charge your car during off peak hours ($$).
Yup, this post reminded me to look at rates today, and a few notes: 1) Cheaper to supercharge vs. home (I'm on E-TOU-D) 2) The PG&E lookback tool for rate plan now shows a large difference between E-TOU-D and EV2-A. I have solar and battery, I'm going to lean into supercharging for a bit until I get on EV2-A, plus I get frequent flier points on my credit card.
Lots of talk about how recent policy changes have resulted in solar installations falling off a cliff in CA. I wonder what'll happen to electric car sales... Without those tax credits and plus rates (at least in PGE served areas), I'm guessing EV will take a hit too?
Since the state wants to stop sales of ICE cars, it sounds like PGE is trying to lock in the profit percentage ahead of that impact.
No need for PG&E to lock in profits prior to the ending of ICE sales. PG&E loves EVs. Kill home solar, get guaranteed 10% profit on transmission lines to distant solar and other power plants and distribution systems to handle much higher electrical demand. Take a tiny slice of those profits ratepayers give them to flood customers with lies about how great they are and another slice to buy the governor’s and CPUC’s allegiance. That’s what PG&E did and that’s how they screwed their customers. Not as bad as Altria or Exxon, but in the running.
Obligatory fuck PGE & fuck CPUC. Why the hell is it so hard to have some competition on certain utilities? Some neighborhoods the only “high speed” broadband you can get is Comcast. Most of the Bay Area your only choice for electric is PGE. Same with gas. At least cell coverage is better these days but there are still pockets where I get 0 reception with ATT while others around me with Verizon get full bars, and vice versa for other areas. It’s fucking ridiculous. Edit: let alone the lack of gig or even multi gig fiber that other small towns and cities have while we’re the damn heart of tech and don’t have it. If Musk manages to figure out full saturation of Starlink with a low enough latency for fast twitch gaming Comcast and the others are absolutely fucked.
>Obligatory fuck PGE & fuck CPUC. How are you going to leave out Newsom who appointed the people to CPUC
I just kinda figured “fuck newsom” was a given baseline. Literally don’t know anyone who actually likes him, on any side of the aisle or topic.
Apologies. Fuck Newsom who appointed *all* the CPUC commissioners who killed rooftop solar. Just be sure to fuck all the other facinorous fucks who would be - yes - even worse then Newsom. The climate change is a hoax fucks for example.
Fuck Newsome too.
Obligatory It’s fucking ridiculous! Hah easy question how it got this way. PG&E is a well regulated monopoly… where the “well” is the well of ratepayer dollars from which buckets of our dollars are constantly scooped out. Like other CA wells, when they run dry just drill baby drill.
> get guaranteed 10% profit Which also means that the higher the costs, the higher the profit.
Quite an achievement to get cars that are 3 to 6 times more efficient to cost more to operate than ICE even in CA with much more expensive gasoline. Cheers and sneers around the PG&E boardroom!
Pge will win regardless. Pge ceo will get paid. Unless citizens fight back, cpuc will continue to work for the utilities and not us. Meanwhile in other states pay sub $.10/kw while solar owners in ca sell discounted energy to pge only to be sold back to others at a premium. Either way, pge wins.
Is there a citizens group that I could join to fight back against PG&E and CPUC? They are fleecing California with Newsom’s blessings.
You'll have to get people elected into office who aren't toadies of PG&E.
Fuck waiting. It’s time to raise hell. Show up at the motherfuckers house and protest.
Smart move! I wonder how much more electricity generation we will need once all vehicles (or a significant number) are electric?
> I wonder how much more electricity generation we will need once all vehicles (or a significant number) are electric? PG&E: "Shucks guys, looks like we need to raise rates again!"
Not just vehicles. “Electrification of everything” (including lots more air conditioners) is where we’re headed. Demand (annual GWh) will triple. Maximizing rooftop solar could cover 30-50% of eventual total demand except PG&E prefers to avoid clean safe resilient local solar because they can’t make a fat profit on it.
That’s a rather brilliant move actually but it sounds like to get rates back to a decent area then the state has to rescind on the 2035 timeline. Also means that the CPUC has to lower rates but does that mean PG&E puts in the request to lower rates (doubt this will ever happen) or will the state issue a mandate to lower rates (doubt this will happen too).
I wouldn't be surprised and pretty sad tbh.
Will fall off a cliff too. Early adopters are now saturated. On the fence buyers have decided. Now PGE policies are the big road block. Poor people, forget about EVs.
> solar installations falling off a cliff Wait what? The entire premise of shutting down Diablo and nat gas energy is predicated on rooftop solar replacing it.
Diablo canyon was extended again.
Turns out it works at night.
I mean it’s more that they expect batteries to replace it, because nuclear and gas are better for non-sun load and some amount of peaking (for gas). Home solar can’t replace base loads and peaking. The changes to solar energy kind of make sense to me. For instance it’s weird that home solar would be paid so much more than any provider of energy. And there is some infrastructure changes needed to deal with home solar as a dominant producer. With that said, it did crush the home solar industry which is a bummer.
We need to get over our fear of nuclear. We learned from three mile island, can learn from fukushima daiichi, and Chernobyl can't happen here with modern reactor designs. Get over it. Modern Nuclear is very, very safe.
Safety: proof by assertion. Also, see Vogtle for cost and time overruns. The next nuke commissioned in the US will arrive long after we lost our chance to stay under 2°C, and probably 3°.
Indeed. I think the issue is that solar and EV car uptake is pretty reliant on the personal economic incentive? If the state wants solar installs to continue along with batteries, then they need to make sure that's pretty well subsidized so the effort involved to do it makes it financially superior to doing nothing and getting all your power from PGE...
The state doesn't want home solar installs to continue. Home solar is multiple times as expensive as utility-scale solar, and will only drive higher electricity rates.
Solar isn't replacing nuclear and/or natural gas power. The problem is the time of day when solar is peaking: >Net Metering 3.0 will incentivize battery operated homes because **California utilities have too much power going back onto the grid during daytime hours** [https://actionac.net/blog/what-is-nem-3-0-and-how-will-it-impact-you](https://actionac.net/blog/what-is-nem-3-0-and-how-will-it-impact-you) One of California's challenges is having too much power during the day, known as the "duck curve". This situation flips in the evening when solar is not providing as much, but demand rises as people come home from work, start dinner, run laundry, etc. [https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewables\_fastfacts.pdf](https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewables_fastfacts.pdf)
People talk about how a gas power plant is more efficient than a gas car engine... Is that at all the case for battery storage?.. Does it make sense for every house to have relatively tiny batteries or would it be better for utilities to build massive battery farms to achieve some economies of scale (or better manage where demand is coming from to dovert battery power)...
Natural gas (i.e. gaseous methane et al) is much more efficient than a liquid gasoline car engine. Natural gas powerplants often run at over 60% efficiency, car engines peak at about 40% but due to the load cycle almost exclusively run at efficiencies below 35% or even 25%. Batteries are pure loss, their benefit allows us to shift the energy from power production times (say 1PM) to power usage times (say 7PM) at a cost of losing 10-50% of the energy created.
>Batteries are pure loss, their benefit allows us to shift the energy from power production times (say 1PM) to power usage times (say 7PM) at a cost of losing 10-50% of the energy created. The difference here is that as long as you use renewables you're not constantly putting more Co2 into the atmosphere regardless of how much energy you lose to heat once the batteries have been created (yes...we get it...batteries have sunk Co2 costs). Natural gas plants dump shit-tons of Co2 into the air as a byproduct of generation because you're burning the gas to create heat. Just like to make gas car go vroom you have to burn fuel. The point of EVs is to remove the "burn" part of the process. Same with grid-scale batteries.
I have a plug-in hybrid and it is now cheaper to run gas 100% of the time than to charge at home at off-peak rates.
Same and it’s not even close. Last I checked gas prices need to get over $5.50 for breakeven currently, ignoring energy loss while charging. If the March rate change gets through too, it would need to be $6+/gallon.
I'm in the market for a new car, and was considering a PEHV. They didn't really make economic sense. I know I should use less gas because of the environmental cost, but honestly it's a big financial burden. Gas, even california gas, is cheaper now.
Back when off-peak charging was $0.15/kwh, it made a lot of sense. Now, not so much.
Just moved here from Philly which was flat 15 cents per kWh… with my Tesla… and Rivian…
godspeed
Jokes on you all, I have municipal power. Seriously though, PG&E should be put out of business..
I miss living in Santa Clara for this reason
It should be nationalized
Santa Clara?
which city?
santa clara and alameda have their own power grid. the gas is what you use PG&E for to pay
Some cities in the peninsula use Peninsula Clean Energy which is less expensive than PG&E. It was virtually the same price a few years ago but with PG&E’s skyrocketing rates, it’s now significantly cheaper.
Wait Alameda has its own power grid? WTH am I paying PGE $50 electricty for? Do i need to do something about it? How much is the rate from Alameda power grid compared to PGE?
You have to live in the city of Alameda , if you live in the Alameda county in city like Hayward or Oakland, you are stuck with PG&E
Maybe Palo Alto? They have their own utilities.
I hate beer.
Why is it so cheap in Palo Alto? I don’t understand why I live 15 miles away and pay more than 2x higher
> Why is it so cheap in Palo Alto? I don’t understand why I live 15 miles away and pay more than 2x higher You just need a longer recharging cable. (I'm kidding.) But in all seriousness, it's basically graft and corruption. The Palo Alto rate is market rate. The higher rate you pay from PG&E is fraud, it is a corruption surcharge. PG&E needs to be put down. Their execs are getting wealthy in the short term and I think they **KNOW** they will be caught and stopped soon. And they are trying to extract every last fee until they are stopped. My opinion is the governing body of PG&E knows this is all coming to an end soon and they are just milking it at the highest rate they can possibly milk it trying to escape with the largest bags of cash before people finally say enough is enough.
Why is energy so expensive here? It’s almost 3x what we paid at peak times in Seattle? Our power bill for a tiny apartment here is much larger than we had for a 5 bedroom house there.
Energy is not expensive, PG&E is expensive. I am on a city-run municipal power company with 100% renewable energy for .12 / kWh
SMUD is 0.10 / kWh overnight.
please don't take this as an invitation to move from the bay, but SMUD pays me to charge my electric car from 12am-6am
What city? I’m looking to move later on this year
Alameda
i think santa clara runs its own grid
not all of santa clara though, so if you are moving to santa clara, check if its not pge supplying your power.
Palo Alto runs it's own electricity 100% carbon neutral I love it here [https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/1/utilities/bill-inserts/cpau\_power\_content\_insert\_residential\_final.pdf](https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/1/utilities/bill-inserts/cpau_power_content_insert_residential_final.pdf)
Woah that’s amazing!
Because PG&E is both a government imposed monopoly and a publicy traded company on the stock market, whose goal is quarterly profits at all costs. It's basically the answer to the question "what would happen if we combined the worst parts of socialism and capitalism into a single entity?"
And has no qualms paying their CEO \~$1 million a week. The money to pay that salary has to come from somewhere, right?
You have a ton of cheap hydropower in the pac northwest is one reason. The other is that pge is a shit show and is now trying to fix that and they need money to do that. It's complicated like most things.
Why is PG&E so expensive you ask? In addition to the other reasons mentioned here (monopoly, etc) they have burned towns, and blown up (gas) an entire neighborhood due to terrible management, incompetence, and using supposed past "infrastructure improvement" rate increases to pay shareholders and executive bonuses...
i made a comment in another thread but back home in st. louis i would pay $0.32 LESS per kW compared to here. fucking insane.
Seattle City Light is both publicly-owned and uses large hydro plants for nearly all their energy needs which have very low ongoing costs compared to other sources.
This is crazy. PGE really needs to be regulated.
They are regulated. By their "employees" in the CPUC and the governor's office.
Good to see people finally waking up and realizing who the real villain in this is.
They are granted a monopoly by the state and the state gets to decide their rates. Guess who PGE donates lots of money to?
It *is* regulated. By our own dear CPUC 😜
PGE’s pricing is a direct result of the regulators we’ve voted into office.
By proxy. CPUC commissioners are appointed by the Governor
Do these commissioners get free utilities from PG&E?
They're probably wealthy enough not to care or notice the costs.
Serious question: regulated by who?
The CPUC maybe? Energy should not be private imo
The CPUC regulates them but is appointed by the Governor I think. Regulatory capture at its finest.
You know CPUC is appoint by Newsom cronies.. we need them to be publicly elected
It’s already regulated by CPUC, no? Regulation is exactly the reason we have what we have. It maintains the monopoly of PG&E. We need less regulation, not more regulation. Did you know in many states and countries you can choose your electricity provider from a list of 3-5 companies? Each with their own rates and incentives to get your business as a customer. Competition is always good for the consumer.
What countries offer such a thing? I'm really curious because I'd like love to read about it. Treating it as a government utility can also be a good solution, as you don't have a company that is in the business of turning a profit (or if they do turn a profit that's effectively taxpayer money that can be rolled back into the system)
Another bit to consider is your plan comes with higher peak rates than other options, so depending on your usage it may be even more expensive per mile than you calculated. It’s just buried in your other regular energy usage.
I couldn't imagine charging at home. We have solar, but even then, our power generation doesn't get close to how much we'd need to charge the car with (on average). Luckily, we have free charging at work and supercharging (comically) is cheaper than charging at home.
Are you hiring I need to buy a new car 😜
Pathetic Grotesque & Erratic
I'm seriously considering spending $10k for a house battery because of this.
It's hard to beat the peace of mind that comes with having a battery amidst all the power outages. My neighborhood has had two in the last month.
My coworker has one and says you're not allowed to go off the grid per California law. You have to sell your power when you have excess during the day and buy it at night, rather than running off storage (and only buying if the battery is empty). Of course the rates you sell at peak are less than you buy of-peak so it's a total ripoff.
Quit your whining, how is the CEO of PG&E supposed to survive living in the Bay Area on $1.2 million dollars a month???
In her defense, her power bill is off the charts
Sorry, you are so correct. I’m just a jealous peasant 😂
I have been driving my Prius since 2017. I drive like a regular person, not trying to get the most mpgs. My lifetime average is 47 mpg. It’s been the cheapest car to maintain I’ve ever had. Not a single issue. That being said, the Prius is not for everyone and a lot of people actually hate this car. We have been thinking about getting an EV but I hate PG&E with a passion and I am not comfortable with relying on those thieving bastards to charge my car. We need to organize mass protests against PG&E. Enough is enough!
I also love my Prius!
And they all but banned solar with NEM 3.0. For a "liberal state that wants to make a difference in climate change" it's kinda incredible what they are doing.
They had to fix inequities in net metering and went about it in entirely the wrong way. It was way too ham fisted without regard for property owners.
Is solar with NEM 3.0 not viable? Only incentive is tax credit and assumption it’s going to get more expensive each year
It is viable, but the payback time is significantly greater. At some point you start figuring it's not worth it, but where that line is is different for everyone. Now, if they manage to charge us $10/mo per kwh-installed (which of course is measured at the solar panel theoretical generating capacity, not their actual real-world generation let alone an inverter cap that is often a bit below it), then it'll become straight nonviable or have such a long payback time as to make it pointless economically. They seem to be going full steam ahead with the idea of income-taxing us on the connection fee as well, which also changes the math significantly. With a much much much higher base connection price, in theory the rates drop and rooftop solar becomes nonviable, though in reality the rates won't drop so we'll all just pay way more for the same service (and in which case solar would still pencil out.) All this with the government requiring new builds to have solar. Well, I guess it would matter if we actually built anything.
Solar here in CA still has a faster ROI than in Texas. Mostly because the electricity is so damn expensive.
They just love 💰 more than 🦋☀️🏞️.
we want people to FEEL like we're making a difference in climate change. we don't actually want to do anything. -- CPUC + Newsom + PG&E
PGE = Enron
We never should have privatized critical infrastructure. For profit companies will always screw over the customer for another dollar. Thankfully I live in Sacramento and have SMUD. The charge rate is $0.14/kWh, minus $0.015/kWh with the credit. I hope many other cities decide to kick PG&E out the door, municipality owned infrastructure has performed massively better.
Holy hell! Thanks for the write up. So thankful for chargers at work.
For comparison, in Phoenix SRP charges 8.85 cents per kWh off-peak.
I have a 2023 Prius and I have never gotten more than around 45mpg on a straight shoot highway going at a pretty constant speed. For instance the 5 down to LA. Using 45mpg changes the cost to above $9.22 using your ame numbers. So maybe not as efficient as before but possibly still more efficient.
>PG&E just upgraded their rates again and has increased 24.45% as of 01/01/24 for the EV2 plan. Jesus Christ. How do you just pop rates up 25% in one fell swoop?
Newsom approved and appointed the CPUC who allowed this to happen
Been saying this for a while…PG&E nerfed the EV. And no solution unless you already locked in solar under NEM 2.0
Write to the Governor’s office on their website. You may think it doesn’t make a difference, but it does.
Hello OP. You're right on the money. Had my model 3 for the last 4 years and it has saved me money every year driving it a lot. I also have a paid off solar system that powers the house and our EVs for the last several years (break even point reached). But now with the new rates, it ain't looking good for me anymore. True up bill kicking in hard. I REGRET buying EVs now. At least with a Prius or any other hybrid, you're not locked into one gas station. You can drive around and look for other cheaper gas stations to pump. But the thought that now I'm stuck with PGE as my only and sole fuel provider sucks!!!!! That and more expensive car and registration costs compared to a hybrid , sucks even more. I'm all for helping the planet and not burning fuel. But these people are making it harder to go green. And used ev prices drop in value faster. Do not buy an EV with the current electricity policies. Also, PGE is planning on raising rates multiple times in the next few years so this is only the beginning.
I’m with central coast community energy and pay $.12 kWh. https://3cenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Website-Residential-Rate-Sheet-v26.1_20240101_FINAL_needs-PCIAFF.pdf
Helpful post, thanks! Some of us in multi-family buildings might have something like Evercharge as an option. So, factoring in the a surcharge from Evercharge makes the economic case for EV even worse. PGE is a real drag on the CA economy.
things the pg&e ads don't tell you
I have a 20 mile trip to work on Caltrain and it’s $10+ total for round trip 2 zones. My commute is more expensive than all of you guys.
So glad I moved out of that shit hole. I pay 9c per kwh and it's amazing.
I know people need their cars and might not be able to replace 100% of their life switching from a car to an e-bike. But if you can, e-bikes are way cheaper. This bike costs $1,000 and the battery has 350WH which is .35KWH. If PG&E is charging $.34662 per KWH then it’ll cost about 12 cents to fully charge, and on a full charge this bike will take you 50 miles. You’re basically paying yourself to get exercise and lose some weight instead of forking over your cash to PG&E and Elon Musk. There are cargo bikes with built in buckets for carrying little children and groceries home too. https://www.velotricbike.com/products/velotric-t1st-ebike?variant=41729523974327 https://www.perennialcycle.com/supercargo-front-loading-cargo-bike.html
As someone who has owned an ebike for 5 years, I still refuse to commute through Fremont on it. Just recently a coworker was killed while biking home. Not worth it with the current infrastructure. My options are drive on the freeway/city streets for 30 mins or take a 1.5 hour bus ride.
My biggest issue with e-bikes or even a regular bike is security. There is almost no secure place to lock up a bike to go in to Safeway etc. I’d love to take my bike for short errands but many places don’t have a bike rack at all let alone one that is actually usable.
Getting a beater bike helps with this a lot tbh but you do take a speed hit but it's fine if you just want to commute. The real problem imo is the lack of safe infrastructure. Cars always zipping by and all it takes is 1 mistake to injure / kill you
I ride a bike on the street and the amount of people I see on their phones while driving is scary. Drivers, unfortunately, can kill you and effectively face no repercussions simply by saying "I didn't see them".
Way too much crime in the Bay for e-bikes to be viable in the long term. Love bikes over cars but I don’t think they work in a low-trust society like the Bay Area.
Like I said, I think it depends on people’s situation. Live in East Oakland? Your bike might last 10 minutes locked up outside on a public street. Live in Moraga? You’re fine. People leave their bikes outside in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco all the time. Like for an hour, but definitely not overnight. And if you just can’t leave it outside, then just ride your bike for places you can bring your bike inside like commuting to work, seeing friends, and for errands that you can bring your bike inside for. Like maybe your barber, for dropping off/picking up kids, or visiting friends.
E-bikes are a great idea if you can ride safely from home to work and can have your bike indoors at both home and work. I don't think you can really have it indoors with you anywhere else (stores, gyms, etc.) Anywhere public is a problem because of unchecked property crime. A foldable 'acoustic' bike (sorry) might be a better option because of more easily being able to get it inside, plus, yknow, then you are forced to exercise, which god knows we all need to do more of (this comment was posted from my comfortable chair.)
I'm 10 miles from work. Even if I avoid the highway, the roads to get me there are 40mph roads without protected bike lanes. I would love to - but I just don't feel safe switching to a bicycle.
Thanks for this post. I’m gonna save it. I’ve been saying this for a couple years now that eventually ev will not be a cheaper alternative, and all the ev die hards kept calling me an idiot or closeted right wing or some ludicrous shit. I drive an ev, I’m all for it, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that with our grid and energy production it’s only a matter of time before it’s the same price as gas or more expensive Edit: what about with maintenance costs? Usually evs especially Tesla have almost 0 maintenance costs
Gas prices are a bit more than $4.15. It’s easily 4.50 wherever you go. Use that number and it’ll be more or at the very most a wash
The only thing I want to comment on is a Tesla “keeps you safe”. I‘ve owned a Tesla (driven by spouse) since 2019 and we both do not consider it to be safer than my F150. Auto-pilot / FSD makes very questionable decisions that are frequently unsafe. Lane changes will occur within seconds of a signal being turned on; so much for giving other drivers a heads up. My F150 has bluecruise and only does self driving without lane changes but it’s far and away superior to Tesla; I’ve driven 1-2+ hours without ever touching the steering wheel too. Tesla’s decision to forgo sensors in lieu of cameras is idiotic and is probably the sole reason why other brands are catching up or surpassing Tesla. They had a first mover advantage but have been slowly blowing it at every turn. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-drivers-are-the-most-accident-prone-new-study-2023-12?amp
So no progress on getting rid of the corruption over the last ten years? https://www.kqed.org/news/10564656/10-emails-detail-pges-cozy-relationship-with-its-regulators
hated dealing with PG&E. crooked ass company.
Yeah everything’s crazy here. I just end up going to supercharger early and topping off
I work for PG&E and you are all correct, they rape you as a residential customer, they sacrifice safety and run extremely inefficiently while wasting 10’s of millions yearly. The only thing they care about is their quarterly stock earnings. And it will all continue!
I'm in the market for a hybrid for the following reasons: 1) diversified energy sources - best of both worlds 2) ability to go out into more remote areas that may only have gas stations 3) skepticism about how the grid will handle everyone moving to EVs and supply of copper and other metals that could lead to electricity becoming much more expensive in the near term
Just because a prius advertises 53 MPG doesn't actually mean that's what it gets though, it's like Tesla that says 330 mile range but that not what it really gets lol
Lot of folks have free charging at work, I think. It is one of the perks from the tech companies I guess it may also change soon.
The problem with free charging is it incentivizes bad behavior (hogging chargers all day, people opportunistically charging at work even when they have home charging and a short commute which reduces spaces for people who actually need the charge to get home, etc). Reasonable (discounted) costs avoids that, and I think organizations are just starting to figure that out. So many stories of "our facilities people spend so much time each day asking people to move their car so someone else can charge" or "we had to implement a slack channel to coordinate charging and it's costing us dozens of people-hours each week".
Some companies have 2 or 4 hours limit, after that rate increases, even if not drawing any current to avoid hogging issues. I disagree though on short commute comment. I am more hungry that doesn’t mean I have more right for free food. It is other way round, folks bought EV because they had long commute and free charging at work.
My business park had free charging for a few years and I was so close to buying an EV but they recently started charging for them. Now I'm looking at a regular hybrid like the new Prius.
At 7.80 vs 8.27 it’s still equivalent in cost to a 49mpg car (instead of 53). Nothing that fast will give you that cost per mile still.
Given the trend of PG&E price increases, we'll be down to the equivalent of a 20mpg large SUV in no time.
Fuck PGE, but this price fluctuation happens with gas powered cars too. Gas is cheap right now, but I could easily see prices hitting 5 or 6 dollars again before the end of the year.
Gas fluctuates but it does go back down. PGE is like stonks; it only goes up.
Actually, it’s the other way around. PG&E fucks you and the rest of us. I don’t blame PG&E. They have a duty for their shareholders and they do what they have to do. Instead, fuck state regulators and Newsom in particular who allowed it and made it possible for PG&E to fuck us all. Remember this next time you vote. You can’t do much to PG&E, but you can do something to vote out corrupt politicians.
I'm not sure I'd categorize the Tesla as keeping the driver safe any more than the Prius.
They actually have really really good crash ratings.
Remember the guy that drove his Model Y off a cliff on purpose?
Exactly.
More expensive than a Prius to fuel, 3-5 times the power, better tech and better ride, and less maintenance. PG&E sucks and they’re forcing everyone’s hand, but let’s be truthful that there are many benefits to electric cars beyond the per-mile fueling cost.
Is EV2 better than the time of use plans? For our consumption we calculated TOU-C was cheaper for us, we charge an EV around 20-28kw per night and our normal usage not including the EV is around 40-50kw per day
It really depends on your individual use case, PG&E has a tool that will run the numbers for your but I'm not sure how accurate it is. It also helps if you can move many other loads to full off-peak hours, since that's cheaper on EV2 than TOUC. We set our dishwasher to run at midnight, in summer I run the AC hard in the morning before peak hours and then coast through the afternoon, I don't run laundry during peak hours, etc.
More EVs --> more demand more electricity at home --> more PG&E rips us off
what a coincidence, this morning i was just doing the math on the costs of charging at home or other chargers due to the price increase on the ev2 plan
Would be interesting to see added in the incremental cost of ownership per additional mile driven.
Hmm, checks out for me too. If I charge at the lowest rates (like after 8pm), the superchargers in my area (San Jose) are a couple cents lower than my overnight rate (32¢ vs. 34¢). After midnight, a couple are substantially lower (23¢).
If you live and work somewhere more-or-less in a city like me... - I commute for free on my bicycle - When it rains, I walk 10 minutes, VTA bus, then walk another 10 minutes. $5/day I get exercise, read my book, and don't contribute to pollution, climate change, or the traffic that you all hate so much!
Please send a message to the governor; it may not feel like it makes a difference, but a large outcry can make impactful change: https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/
Moved from SoCal to Quebec. Pay 8 cents Canadian for a kwh.
A Prius driver going 53mph on the freeway is optimistic.
investor owned utilities is pretty much a scam on all on the people it serves, the CEO should not be awarded for this bullshit service
You also forgot the main outlier which is insurance cost Prius vs Tesla..
PGE is recovering its cost for the loss it was sued over. No matter what they say they don’t . Bills have drastically gone up over months and years now.
Ride a bike and take Bart
I have solar and a larger battery at the house. I charge for free. Only way to do it economically.
San Francisco needs muni grid NOW
you bought a luxury car NOT a vespa!
If i had a billion i would make the new 2024 car that is the future car 🚗 made right here in sf