Welcome to California. Santa Barbara specifically. We also have tiered plans where it’s cheaper for the first however many kWh*.
The EV special rates are the higher number from 4pm to 9pm and cheaper for the rest. The regular time of use plan is more complicated. I don’t run my appliances or charge my car from 4-9.
*0.32 for the first 384 kWh and then 0.42.
Georgia Power has an Overnight Advantage Super Off-peak Plan (quite the mouthful).
$0.02.2 cents per Kw from 11pm to 7am. There’s some other little rate adjustments but charging then amounts to spare change you found in the cushions.
Dang! I hope that is what my local power company comes up with. It’s already cheap at 9-11 cents to charge, but 2 cents is really practically free. $1.60 for over 200 miles of driving is amazing.
The miles expired, though, so I knew I wasn’t going to get to use them on a road trip. If I could have saved them for times I really needed to supercharge, they’d have been worth 3-5 times more. As it was, they were just replacing home charging.
That is impressive. I’m at about $0.12/kWh for off peak.
We get these electricity salespeople showing up at the door occasionally, and their sales pitch is that the time of use billing is a scam that is ripping us off. I laugh and say, no, 80%+ of my total usage is off-peak (86% in April), so unless they can beat $0.12/kWh, then I’m not switching.
Typically their plans are scams. My peak use is $0.20/kWh, and the special plans are usually $0.18/kWh at all times, or something.
Here’s the page. You get hit a lot more in the other periods. Son works remote with Asia as his area so he gets to do the laundry overnight (3 grandkids and sports add up fast).
Here in Florida, where the utility has really embraced solar power, we have a new program for home charging: FPL | Electric Vehicles.
In a nutshell, they will install an L2 charger, and you get the leased charger and unlimited, yep, unlimited, night, weekend, and off-peak charging for $31/mo.
The deal is seemingly only applicable to single family homes, so irrelevant to me for almost certainly the rest of my life. But an interesting idea nonetheless. I can’t say whether that price is a bargain or a ripoff; obviously like any fixed-cost all-you-can-eat program, the more you eat the better the deal is for you. I seem to have stabilized at about 8K miles per year on my ICE.
More details at my cite. Including about the utility’s own statewide charging network.
Which last item raises a question: Do you folks in other states see any move by your utility companies to roll out a charging network of their own, or at least branded as their own?
That would be a rip-off for me since I don’t think I’ve ever had a month I charge the car that much. Or course, we have cheap energy. That’s probably a great deal for @hajario who pays a premium for power.
Especially since I got a wall charger and 20" performance rims for my few referrals. The program was a lot more generous back in the day.
I think part of the appeal of the cited special is the “free” LVL 2 charger. Which is a $1500 value (roughly) where I live for parts and installation. So it’s not much of a deal if you already have paid for the level 2 charging infrastructure in your home, but might appeal otherwise.
Excellent plan. Be aware that having an adapter and having a Telsla account does not guarantee you’ll be able to charge at a given SC location. v1 and v2 not at all and even not all v3 and v4 locations ‘speak’ CCS. The Tesla app will point these out but you need to pay attention to the icons.
I just asked my friend who got my referral what he did. His plan was to choose the free month of FSD when he was going to go on a road trip. He hasn’t gone on one and just realized that the option expired after a year.
Back then there was also the option for a free performance boost upgrade which was definitely the best value unless you’re like me and drive like a complete wuss.
Yeah, I totally missed that portion. That makes it a better deal if you want to upgrade your service. Our garage was built with 240V service, but we could easily get by with 120V level 1 charging. Since we’ve owned our EV (15 months), I don’t think there has been a single time we needed faster charging that we were home (when we’ve needed faster charging, we’ve been travelling). Of course, if our energy provider moves to off-peak charging rates and limits the hours, then I could see that it might require a level 2 charger to get it done within their window. We are odd because the car is used for a 4 mile work commute (I ride my bike to work). We don’t do much day to day driving.
It’s sorta better than that.
If you already have the big plug and sufficient amperage in the garage, but don’t yet own a L2 charger, they’ll bring the L2, permit it, and install it for zero cost. And you get that plus the electricity for $31/mo.
If you don’t already have the big plug and sufficient amperage in the garage, it gets even better.
In addition to all the above, they’ll do whatever upgrades are necessary, even a new full house panel and increased amperage from the pole if yours is full. That’s $38/mo. Or $7/mo over the simple “plug in the L2”.
I’ve heard estimates of $5K to fully upgrade a single family home service starting from the utility pole. At 7 bucks a month it’ll take a very long time for the utility to reach breakeven. A very long time.
Well, crap, I wish they offered that here. We have a quote for just shy of $10k to do a level 2 charger in the house AND replace our antiquated panel (apparently original to our 1982 home). It’s one of the reasons we got the PHEV rather than a BEV first - the PHEV is fine on level 1 charging for over 90% of our uses, but we really wanted level 2 otherwise.
Oh well.
Onslow county NC, Jacksonville-Quantico has free chargers, not fast, 9.2 kw, but watch a movie or go shopping while plugged in, you would pick up a bunch of miles.
There’s a few Shell Recharge stations around Franklin County, Winchester VA, slow, but free.
That sounds about right. We waited until we lost one phase of power to update our panel, and added 60amp level 2 charging at the same time. 60amps is way overkill, but when bundled with the rest of the work the electricians upgraded us from 30 to 60 for no additional cost.
Lesson being, if everything about your panel is good and safe, just undersized, then put it off. If you when there is a nightmare hiding behind the cover, then budget to get it done sooner than later.
This confuses me. My car came with an EVSE that has a 120V plug and a 240V plug (you fit the appropriate plug into the box end of the cable). Our garage happened to have a NEMA-6 outlet which showed the correct voltage scheme, so I simply rewired in the NEMA-14 outlet that my EVSE needed for level 2, per the owner’s manual. There was never a need to install a home charger, and many people who lack the 240V outlet could just have one put in by an electrician and use the EVSE that came with the car (though it would still cost several dollars to have the outlet put in, but probably not as many). Using the EVSE is a little less convenient than a dedicated charger, but charging at home is less than a third what I have paid at the DCFCs I have used.
I’m confused by not knowing what EVSE or DCFC means. Somehow you need a charger in your garage. AFAIK, EV cars do not universally come with L2 chargers as included accessories. So you need to buy one. What am I missing / misunderstanding?
None of this matters directly to me; I don’t have an EV and if I ever get one, the building where I live already has lots of high speed chargers of some sort for my use.
I hoped to inform and generate some random conversation.
I wasn’t sure what EVSE was either.
I had to buy the L2 charger for our car (it only came with the adapter to use the J1772 chargers which we’ve never needed). It was $500 for the mobile charger and ALLL the possible connectors we need so we can take it with us and plug it into any 120 or 240 outlet we might encounter. We’ve used three connectors so far.
I believe most EVs come with an EVSE, which consists of a plug that goes into the car, a cable of some length (mine is about 25’) attached to a box that delivers the juice to the car and a fitting for attaching either the 120 or the 240 plug that goes into the outlet. At least that is what I got. EVs do all come with a charger, inside the car, which is there in part to convert the A/C from the motor to the DC the battery wants, in order to support regenerative braking (without which EVs would be pretty sucky).
Level 1 charging on 120V (using the EVSE) is glacially slow but adequate for many owners who are not putting hundreds of miles a day on their cars (if you can plug your car in for 12 hours at home after work, that should get you some 60 miles on a typical car). “DCFC” is the fast charging that you get at some charging stations that can put hundreds of miles on the car less than an hour. It sends DC directly to the battery, bypassing the internal charger unit and has a special type of cable that circulates coolant inside.