I wrote this up today for some of my neighbors, but it got me curious how much other people pay for electricity who are not in California.
From my calculations below, we pay about 60 cents per kilowatthour. But it gets complicated (see details below).
Roughly how much do you pay per kilowatt hour in the winter?
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Bearing in mind there are mandatory PG&E "distribution" charges and separate "generation" charges (either PG&E or SVCE) on the bill (and assuming everyone chose Silicon Valley Clean Energy for generation because they're about a penny cheaper per KWH as I last recall)...
- Gretel gave me a scare recently saying PG&E did away with the weekend break on the multi-priced time-of-day pricing.
- I checked with PG&E and it has remained unchanged since they last changed it (duh) which was a couple of years ago though.
- They have multiple plans - which you guys have more access to since you have solar - and it matters if you nominally heat with gas or electricity too - so yours may differ. It also matters for their winter versus summer rates.
- But my choices, mainly were one of three basic plans: a. No time of day b. 4 to 9 daily c. 5 to 8 weekdays (except holidays)
I just realized I had forgotten to ask if they still do the "baseline" that they used to charge me, which is they give you about half a month of usage at one price, and then the next week (it's not based on time but on usage though) goes up some and then the last week is the most expensive electricity (in practice that's how it worked out for me).
Anyway... a few years ago, when the Silicon Valley Clean Energy went online, they automatically put everyone on the 4 to 9 peak (as I recall) but you can change the plan something like twice a year if you like.
I asked PG&E to calculate which was best when they first put everyone on Silicon Valley Clean Energy for generation a few years ago. At that time, they said the 5 to 8 was the better plan for me base on my usage.
Recently (this week) I called again to check (as prices change) and they repeated that 5 to 8 recommendation after running a calculation (which was based on previous use so it's already skewed because we try not to use the electricity at 5 to 8 weekdays (duh) due to the tiered pricing.
By way of double confirmation, looking at my bill, it says right on it that my gas-heated home is set to "Peak pricing 5-8pm weekdays", where your bill will say what plan you are on.
Personally, for reason that I don't have to think about it, I preferred the no-time-of-day that I had up until Silicon Valley Clean Energy went online, but the advantage of the 5-8pm weekdays for me is I don't have to think about it on weekends, and when I do have to think about it, it's two hours shorter than the 4-9pm all week (15 hours vs 35 hours).
Just for reference, looking at my latest bill for 30 days, PG&E says
7.90% of my energy was peak and 92.10% was offpeak, but that skew would always be the case as there are only 15 hours a week at offpeak but 147 hours offpeak during a non-holiday 168-hour week.
Nonetheless, I used 64.985400 kWh peak & 757.271400 kWh offpeak, which if we normalize that against the 822.2568 kWh total for 30 days (knowing that 15 hours are peak and 153 hours are offpeak, that means 8.92% of the week is peak & 91.07% is peak), is about 10kWh lower than you'd expect if my usage was perfectly linear (i.e., about 822kWh x 9%).
That means I'm using about 10% less energy during the peak hours than I am using during the offpeak hours - so PG&E's negative-incentive plan is working (especially since they know those hours are the worst normally).
My current (Winter, Gas Heat, no Solar) rates are the following: Offpeak $0.38957 per kWh Delivery, $ 0.14850 per kWh generation Peakuse $0.42818 per kWh Delivery, $ 0.18217 per kWh generation
Overall offpeak is 56 cents per kWh & peak is 61 cents per kWh (which I think is, by far, the highest in the continental USA).
Note that the difference between peak and offpeak is only about five cents per kilowatt hour, so after all this arithmetic, it doesn't really matter much it seems, whether you skimp on the peak hour use.
In summary, this is just to let people know there are rate plans that are shorter than the 4-9 automatically assigned to people by default, but the pricing per kilowatthour is probably higher (I would assume).
Also Winter pricing is lower (I believe) than Summer pricing. And of course, we experience about 30 full-day outages a year.