PG&E electricity rates have absolutely nothing to do with free markets. The only thing setting PG&E rates is corruption and incompetence, but mostly corruption.
I think that there's a lot wrong with the utility system in California (and the corruption actually incentivizes incompetence - the only way for executives to increase profits, make the stock go up, and get higher bonuses is to increase their costs, so PG&E is very good at inflating costs by doing stuff like burning down cities). But given that PG&E is as incompetent as they are, the logical market response is to make yourself as independent from them as possible.
When I lived in Texas I could choose my electricity provider and see what different rates they charge for electricity to choose a provider.
In California I can choose Edison for my electricity or have no electricity.
This is very hard to believe, what are you paying for electricity? California gas prices are also way above the national average at the moment. Here's a per-state comparison from last year, I'm sure it's a bit out of date but I doubt things have completed flipped in a single year: https://energyinnovation.org/2023/07/27/ev-fill-up-savings/
But maybe you don't actually care about fuel efficiency, then you have an argument that it's cheaper to fuel a Tesla Model 3 instead of a BMW M3.
I think it is still true in California that an average EV is cheaper to fuel than an average gas car, but if you have a very efficient hybrid then it's a bit cheaper than a pure EV.
I live in the Bay Area as well and I have an EV (2015 Fiat 500e), and am on the PG& Home Charging EV2-A plan. I charge my car between 12am and 3pm and pay $0.28/kwh, 29kwh/100 miles and I should be getting about 12.3miles/$.
I but about $700/year in gasoline. And pay about $600/year insurance. And drive about 6500 miles a year.
So insurance and gas are both about 10 cents a mile. I think depreciation and maintenance are higher at about 15 cents/mile. So 50 cents a mile. IRS says a business can write off 67 cents a mile.
Whoooooa ok that makes more sense why folks are complaining; I paid 13 cents/kWh last month, less than 1/3 of what you're talking about.
Note for others, paying $0.45/kWh is highly unusual for the US as a whole; see the US Gov published stats on average electricity prices by region which puts the average at ~$0.17/kWh: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
For this tank only I have been charging at home (and at work, and anywhere I can), because I want to see how much mileage I can get out of a tank with full PHEV driving. In this regard it hasn't disappointed; I'm at 1200 miles and just passed half a tank of gas. But once I have a baseline for how much of my driving can be done on electric, I'll probably switch to just charging at work (where it's free) and using gas for most other driving, because it's so much cheaper.
A typical EV would get more like 4 mi/kwh, but then, the equivalent ICE car would get more like 35 mpg. The delta's a little bit closer because of peculiarities of the CX-90's powertrain, but not a whole lot.
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rat...
How is that possible? Even at 20c/kWh it's still a good 4x cost difference I though
They’ve recently retired and restructured a bunch of rate plans, but almost all historical and current rates can be found on their website[0]. Somehow they still managed to keep things nice and complex.
Keep in mind that none of these reflect so called CCA pricing, which is another story in of itself. Same for the “baseline allowance” after which rates go up, although they’ve now seemed to have structured is a discount to somewhat simplify rate comparisons.
0: https://www.sdge.com/total-electric-rates
Edit: Got curious so looked at some statistics. Top lists of most expensive electricity rates all mention Alaska and Hawaii, ok fair enough, but even in the contiguous states California isn’t even mentioned somehow.
At the same time there are articles like[1] these[2] that claim SDG&E was the most expensive (at the time).
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not sure.
1: https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/fox-5-asks-sdge-why...
2: https://www.cbs8.com/article/money/amped/san-diego-has-the-h...
I would call my rate 18 cents but not sure if we are doing an apples to apples comparison.
In MA, I bought gas yesterday in our ICE car for $3.10/gal. Our electricity is $0.27/kWh. An ICE car getting 31 mpg is $0.10/mi for energy. Our EV getting just under 4mi/kWh is $0.07/mi for energy.
My crossover EV gets 2.5-3.5 mi/kWh. Call it 3. / $0.2/kWh = 15 mi/$
Avg fuel economy in US ~ 25mpg. At $3.50/gal that's 7 mi/$
So at 20c/kWh, your dollar goes roughly twice as far on electric. California has been seeing brutal rates, though -- 40c/kWh not uncommon.
Californians can play games with Time-of-Use rates (charge at night), get onto EV-specific rates, be on a CCA which tend to not have the try-to-not-burn-down-the-state adjustment fees, get solar +/- NEM2 vs NEM3, etc., so your numbers may vary. And different cars will have different MPG's of course. But all of that is to say, "more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas" is not necessarily wrong in California.
ZIP: 95950
https://www.gasbuddy.com/gaspricemap?lat=39.08984244471869&l...
My electricity is 0.35/kwh. So that’s also ~10mi/$, except I don’t have the added headache of worrying about range
Even if you have solar, and got in before NEM3.0, that's still not an incentive to electrify, when you're just selling the non-peak energy to the grid for the increasing rates that PG&E is charging/planning... (if that income-based minimum monthly bill thing happens, this maybe changes a bit)
Not sure about the current gas/electricity per mile costs as I'm still driving a 15 y/o gas car.
FYI, some legislators (including very left-leaning ones) are moving to repeal this pending change: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...
With that said, unless you are comparing the most efficient ICE against the least efficient EV's you should still see savings with an EV. If I charged our EV at the peak electricity rate (which I rarely do) it still costs about half as much as a fairly average ICE vehicle on a per mile basis. Compared against some of the most efficient ICE vehicles (hybrids like the Prius) I would still come out ahead, maybe by only 20% though. But again, that is comparing the worst case scenario where I only charge at peak rates. In practice we probably average around half of the peak rate from a mix of at home, at work and around town charging.
I will admit though that it is not a particularly good look for CA regulators to be pushing electrification so hard while also allowing huge rate increases. It ends up looking like a huge handout to the investor owned utilities. And the proposed rate changes that implement an income based fix charge are absolutely idiotic. With batteries coming down in price we could soon see the economics of going off grid become much more attractive, which would further exacerbate the situation (CA IOUs will need battery adopters to stay connected to the grid to help with intermittency)
We have dual fuel heating (heat pump, oil burner). It's prohibitively expensive to run the heat pump below 32F (0C), but the oil works great then, and is way cheaper. Just like the heat pump is cheaper at warmer temps. The heat pump won't work at all at 0F (-18C), so it's a non-starter to only use air based heat pumps for all of our needs. We've tried to get quotes for geothermal, but we'll just have to wait for the next big recession to do that.
As an engineer, I just have to shake my head at the unrealistic timelines being pushed by politicians. All that does is increase cost and drama.
Do you really think that's a coincidence? Not being snarky, just curious.
around my area we blew up two substations during a heatwave last summer. we constantly get brownouts at 4-6pm during the post-work peak load such that I'm almost not even comfortable running the freezer/etc anymore (brownouts are really hard on motors). and now you want to push all the gas heating (and this area gets cold!) onto the grid too?
a lot of this is that urban and suburban areas are subsidizing rural and ex-rural areas - more than half of my bill is already capacity-charges and delivery fees and not the actual cost of the electric, and we're still blowing up substations regularly due to strained and overloaded infrastructure. Where is the money going? Mostly to keeping miles and miles of power lines out to the middle of nowhere, I'd think.
That's a problem America is going to face in a lot of "ghost town" scenarios - when "the mine dries up" or "the train doesn't stop here anymore" and a place stops existing, the infrastructure costs to service the 20 people still living there don't. Repaving the roads every couple of years, plowing and salting them during the winter, etc aren't free and the reality is that in some areas there's really almost no economic activity anymore to justify the cost. We just have covenants and mandates that prevent ever undoing it. And that runs up the bills for everyone else.
We have 400k people in this county of 700mi^2, and that's suburban, not-particularly-dense either. Another county we have 40k people in 2700 mi^2. Should everyone in the former have to subsidize the lifestyle of the latter? We are talking about 2 orders of magnitude less density here, while it's not quite 1:1 there's no doubt they are incurring significantly higher infrastructure costs for their lifestyle and we are paying for it.
And since people won't pay for it, what we end up with is everyone's infrastructure falling into neglect, to pay for a handful of rural customers.
I wish. Instead they'll just do what they're doing in my home city, Seattle: ban gas furnaces and other forms of heating entirely while raising electric rates even further. The masses will cry that you have to be rich to live here, and they'll respond to that by raising taxes and spending the raised funds on consultants and bureaucrats studying electric utility inequities. I wish I was making this up.
Housing prices are up now, but early pandemic it was like just south of $600k for a 3k sqft house built in the late '90s in a nice neighborhood.
We were planning to fully electrify our house + transportation in the next few years. PG&E rate hikes and net metering policies put the damper on that. It's now more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas, so I'm charging my PHEV at work and using gas for the rest. We have solar + battery sized for the existing usage of our house (gas heating, cooking, and vehicles), because that's what PG&E would let us interconnect. Upgrading the size to support a heat pump or EV would make us lose NEM2, so we've just chosen to defer those upgrades until NEM3 is rolled back or NEM4 comes out or there's new technology or the Californian government falls.
In a way this is the market doing what it's supposed to. There's a shortage of electricity because of everyone doing electrification upgrades, so the price of electricity rises, which incentivizes people to defer further electrification upgrades until the grid can handle it. But if states actually want adoption, they need to solve the utility bottlenecks and increase generation capacity to support all the new usage.