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Comment by mdasen

5 hours ago

That's an unusually low electric rate for the US - way below the lowest state average which is Idaho at 12.4 cents. It's certainly possible that you are getting 7.5 cents including delivery, but I've had friends say that they're "getting 13 cents per kWh" here in Massachusetts, but that's just the supply rate and the delivery is another ~18 cents.

There are parts of states like Grant County Washington that have cheap hydro power, but it's very rare for power to be that cheap in the US. Even if this applies to you, it won't apply to the vast majority of people on here who will have electric rates 2-4x higher.

Average electric rates by region:

    New England            28.1 cents
    Mid Atlantic           25.1 cents
    East North Central     20.8 cents
    West North Central     14.8 cents
    South Atlantic         16.1 cents
    East South Central     15.5 cents
    Mountain               14.6 cents
    Pacific Contiguous     26.1 cents
    Pacific Noncontiguous  42.1 cents

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

15 comments

mdasen

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murderfs  2 hours ago

> Pacific Contiguous 26.1 cents

This is a bit misleading, because it's combining the 50 cents/kWh from California with 15ish cents/kWh in Oregon and Washington. Seattle City Light, for example, charges 13.38 cents/kWh on flat rate pricing, and far less with time-of-use billing (8 cents/kWh on off-peak).

zdragnar  32 minutes ago

I'm actually getting 11 cents in winter, 13 in summer, but my utility company is a co-op. Average for my state is I think 19 cents.

I think you can get down to around 8 if you are signed up for an interruptible load, or a dedicated off peak load, depending on the company, but yeah, standard rates aren't that low.

radium3d  2 hours ago

If you run off solar with battery backup, you can achieve lower than those rates! Look at Time of Use rates. The super off peak rates instantly become the max price point once you pair TOU with Solar + battery.

rootusrootus  3 hours ago

A lot of people quoting low rates are also just referring to their off-peak rate. This is pretty common in EV discussions. It's not exactly a fair argument there, either, because the flip side of having an off-peak rate is that the on-peak rate is usually quite a lot higher. So the true effective rate is a bit higher, somewhere in the middle depending on usage pattern.

  • SoftTalker  13 minutes ago

    Is demand-based billing common now? Where I am I still pay a fixed rate per kWh and though demand-based is available it would not be advantageous for my usage patterns at least last time I checked.

  • searealist  3 hours ago

    It's easy to have your EV only charge off-peak, though. It's just a setting.

    • rootusrootus  2 hours ago

      My point is that the tradeoff to get off-peak pricing is that on-peak is way, way more expensive. So you can charge the EV off-peak to maximize the savings, but everything else you do during on-peak time costs way more.

      Using myself as an example:

      I adjust my A/C to run outside of 5pm-9pm (peak) if at all possible, we try to avoid pointless high-draw usage during that same window, and both of our EVs hold off charging until after 9pm.

      My rate from 5pm-9pm is 0.43/kWh. My rate after 9pm is 0.09/kWh. The flat rate alternative, if I did not want to worry about time of day, would be 0.21/kWh. These prices are all-in, including transmission and distribution/whatever.

      It would be dishonest to say that my EVs only cost me 0.09/kWh to operate, which on it's face is a claim to paying over 50% less. In reality, time of day pricing typically saves me somewhere between 10% and 15% in an average month compared with flat rate.

      3 replies →

AgentMatt  5 hours ago

They are most likely not based in the US, but converting to USD to make comparison easier.