> If you regularly charge at home, like most people do, you can get extremely low rates at night during off-peak hours. It only costs ~$0.12/kWh for us in SF.

In Palo Alto, this requires also accepting much higher rates during the rest of the day. When I looked into it, I was told that it would raise my daytime rates up as high as 45¢/kWh during the day (nearly double my current rate). Since I work from home and need to use AC/heat, this was not an attractive trade off.

Is it possible to have a second meter installed on a different tariff?

Yes, you can have it installed, and then must use rate EV-B. There is $100 charge + whatever your electrician charges.

The daily meter charge comes out to ~$1.50 a month right now.

In the UK the 2nd gen smart meters will let you automatically switch tariffs every hour, or something like that.

That’s if you own a home in SF with a charger. I doubt most who have the funds for that are worried about the price of electric vs gas.

Same for people that live in Southern California. Charging at home is great!

I thought they were intended to be the exception rather than the norm, but it sounds like many people use them almost exclusively, driving their Tesla to a Supercharger every few days to charge it, instead of just plugging it in every night and charging at home.

I can understand it not being cost effective to subsidise the full fuel cost for a significant proportion of vehicles.

Source?

I'm curious, do you typically pay actual "hourly rate x hourly consumption" in a regular US household? Where I live (Europe), even though we have new fancy "smart electricity meters" with resolution of a few seconds, all the deals available from power companies offering electricity are based on "monthly average rate x monthly consumption".

Where I live (Poland) it's possible to opt for cheaper electricity at night (10PM - 6AM), and over the weekends (Friday 10PM - Monday 6AM), in exchange for premium pricing during peak hours.

Example prices (probably a bit outdated, but to illustrate the difference): Flat rate metering: 0.55PLN / kWh, split metering: 0.71PLN / kWh peak, 0.26PLN / kWh night & weekends.

In California, the three largest utilities do charge hourly rate * hourly consumption. There are "Peak" "Partial Peak" and "Off Peak" periods defined by summer/winter and weekday/weekend. Paper bills as well as utility websites will show how much electricity (kWh) are used during each period. Websites will also show hour by hour usage.

How widely implemented is it? I lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, lived in half a dozen places (moving between Glendale Water and Power and LADWP). A few years ago, when shopping for houses all over the LA area I would peek to see if they had smart meters, too. I've only seen a few and never lived anywhere that had them.

There may have been seasonal price changes with dumb meters, but they couldn't have done weekday/weekend without them.

Smart water meters seemed to have decent distribution. Perhaps because of the droughts?

I believe most of Edison moved over to smart meters, and they're the biggest provider in SoCal. LADWP is rolling it out at a snail's pace.

That's good to know. Edison always showed up when looking for programs like solar or a smart thermostat, LADWP never did. I just never lived anywhere serviced by Edison. Looking at their service map, it looks like Edison covers everywhere around LA/Glendale and covers a very large area all the way to the Nevada and Arizona border.

I wonder if there's a better cost/benefit for rolling it out to a sparsely populated (or dense pockets with large areas in between)? Where LADWP may favor new construction or something?

Edison pretty much charges 2-3x more for peak usage, 30% more for "off-peak", and 20% less for sleeping hours compared to LADWP depending on tier. So they made a bunch more money since people don't just suddenly shift all their electricity usage to after midnight. I remember there being a lot of outage when they rolled out smart metering since most people had pretty drastic increases to their electric bill.

I still have this page bookmarked from when we were shopping for a Tesla. It explains it pretty well:

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...

No electric car here, but most of the places I've lived have had dumb meters that get checked manually each month. However, growing up in Florida, there was a rebate program where the power company could shut off one of our circuits whenever they wanted so they could manage load. I'm pretty sure it was wired to our pool pump and maybe a few other things (like our water heater?) So I imagine power management varies by each area's need. I've heard about day/night costs, and that seems like a smarter way to balance the grid, but I haven't seen that widely implemented in the US yet.

I've had "smart" water meters in a couple states. I doubt water has the same day/night load concerns electricity does, but they only varied price between summer and winter. I assume this was to discourage watering lawns.

Where I live (Europe) I can use Tibber which has an api that shows future hourly pricing. This way I can tell the car to charge the cheapest

I live in Japan with a smart meter and we have the option for a rate split by weekdays/holidays and day/night, with different rates for each of the 4 combinations. The rates don't change hourly, just these buckets. http://www.kyuden.co.jp/var/rev0/0156/8971/graph_denkadenigh...

I live in Sweden and hourly billing is available here for everybody with a smart meter afaik.

the European market is, at most, at the quarter hourly resolution, so having a finer resolution would be pointless for the pricing

But don't you get extremely high rates during the day (something like $0.48/kWh) for daytime use in the summer with that plan?

Yes, from 2-9 PM on weekdays during "Summer" May through October, the rate is $0.47151 for PG&E (on the EV tariff). Shifting behavior to only charge EV, run dryer, dishwasher outside of those hours is fairly easy.

Due primarily to surplus solar power, later this year, the "peak" period changes to 4-9 PM and "Summer" changes to July-Oct.

Yes, correct. If you have high energy usage during the day (like family at home all day) it may not be the best plan. Though I do seem to remember their other tiered plan had similar high rates once you break into the high usage tier for the month. PG&E has a calculator online that'll look at your usage and recommend the right plan automatically.

Yeah, I checked them when I lived in PGE territory. Savings on EV are not quite as trivial to realize in real life as they are on a marketing site.

Yes, but only during peak hours, 4-9pm.

Indeed, but isn't that when you might want to actually use it, which is why it is peak?

On an aggregate basis, maybe, but on an individual kevel, not necessarily.

A house might have things that uses more power but doesnt have to be running at peak hours. Examples i can think of are pool pumps and ev charging. Pool pumps need to stay on for 3-5 hours but doesnt matter really when exactly. Same for ev chargers. These "devices" use more in the day than everything else combined.

The peak period is when the highest demand is placed on the grid. In CA, this is typically summer evenings.

This sort of tariff would be ideal if you also have solar and/or a storage battery, as you can avoid paying the peak rate and take maximum advantage of the off-peak one.

In densely populated countries not everyone has the space for their own driveway. In fact most people don't. Its one of the big problems of electric cars: where to charge the damn things.

Wherever there is parking, there ought to be charging.

It’s just a chicken-and-egg problem if your parking is controlled by a council or building management, etc.

Need enough EVs to justify spending money on installing plugs. Need enough chargers for people to buy EVs...

But we’ll get there.

Always weird to see what other people pay for electricity. It's $.08/kwh here in bc until you use too much and it steps up to $.12/kwh.

BC has high abundance of hydro plants.

It's 9c-11c in WA state but it's because we have an abundance of hydroelectric power in our area of the country.