Interesting. I didn’t see anything about a one time fee. Maybe that’s when you used to have to buy a card to reload? Seems you can pay by swiping your phone now. I guess I’ll do a little more research on that.
Thanks for the info! I’ll have to figure out what kind of plan is most worthwhile for us. We use very little electricity most of the year except during a few months in the summer, so I’m guessing I’ll just keep my current tiered plan.
$700 on an electricity bill sounds ridiculous! Even if i drove 2K miles per month and charged at the highest tier, that still wouldn’t make sense. I’m curious how much your usual electricity bill is? Do you have a heated pool or something?
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I live in SoCal and I charge my e-golf for free at work (64 mile round trip commute daily). There is no free gas pump in my office parking garage.
Also, when I do charge at home my tier 1 rate (from LADWP) is $0.14xxxx per KWh and 3 cents more on tier 2. Way cheaper than premium.
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I am not sure if I am reading this right, but it sounds like he is paying over $1200 a month for electricity. I have only seeing this high of bills in only two cases, one of them was legal 
“as of today I got my weekly notice from sce that im over $705 of my monthly $500 budget electricity bill.”
I’m all in if I can lease that car for less than $99/month with $0 down. And don’t worry, I’ll cover the cost of electricity for the car even though SCE has a pretty bad deal for EV’s.
LoL. I’m not worried 
I’m in So. Cal and because of our circumstances we leased an i3 earlier this year. We lucked onto a pilot program with SCE that lets our wifi enabled Chargepoint EVSE act as the sub-meter without requiring the expense of a separately installed meter. What that means is that I can keep my house on the regular SCE rate plan while the car and only the car goes on a time of use (TOU) plan. With the charger set to only charge during the cheap times (9PM to Noon) we are saving at least $100 a month on gas costs vs. our old Honda Accord while having no impact on what we are paying for the household power.
Hopefully they will continue this program and extend it because it solves a lot of problems with charging your EV.
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Tirpiltz,I assume that you are then getting the SCE-EV rate of around 13.6 cents per kwh for off-peak charging.
That makes the EV charging cost much less than before. I calculate that your cost per mile is then at around 5 cents per mile using 13.6 cents per kwh and the Alternate Fuels data center rate of 34 kWh to travel 100 miles.
By my calculations, to save $100 month in fueling charges, I would need to drive 3333 miles a month in my Encore which costs around 8 cents per mile for fuel. However I only drive about half of that (20k/12 months ==> 1666) and those on a 10k lease only a quarter of that.
Also for what it’s worth , My gasoline taxes (per mile) are over 1 cent per mile (soon going to ~2 cents) which you don’t yet pay. If I take the gas taxes out of the calculation then your savings are half or a third compared to what it was before.
Haven’t read the whole article, but even if they need same amount of energy as ICE, will it be the same source of energy ?
Will it be burned oil / coal or sun / wind ?
I do think that electric vehicles is our future and I don’t think that the current power distribution infrastructure is capable to handle increasing demand for electricity. It will either need to be updated / replaced or we will need to have solar roof on our houses. Either way our money will be spent, but in the second choice I will not have an electric bill.
P.S. Don’t think that people who own / control it ( oil, power plans, refineries, distribution infrastructure, etc ) will give up their income streams easy.
Nothing is free. Ever. Your employer is providing you with a perk, like free beer on Fridays or whatever. But just like that beer is never “free” neither is your “free” electricity. Every $1 your employer provides in bennies, is a $1 your employer takes out of salary.
Maybe on a personal level you are getting it for free, since whether or not you own an EV your salary won’t change. But in the aggregate, that money comes from somewhere. That’s the point of the article to begin with.
I’m on TOU-EV-1 which is $0.09 a kWh off peak. When you figure in the taxes and other fees my last bill worked out to be $0.15 a kWh hour. Yes, other costs are 40% of the bill. All the charging was done off peak.
The car is going about 1,500 miles a month. Our old Accord would get about 30 MPG max so assuming it got that (actually not likely in stop-go traffic but whatever) we’d have bought 50 gallons of gas at around $3.00 a gallon or $150 a month. My cost to charge the car last month was $60.17. Also the car is a REX so it probably used a gallon or so of gas during that time for longer trips, call it $4 because it needs premium vs. regular in the Honda.
So I’m looking at $64 a month vs. $150 or $86 a month in savings. Note I’m not tracking the milage exactly just ball-parking it. It is cheaper than gas which makes me happy but the real reason we have the car is to use the carpool lanes so and even if we were saving nothing on the energy cost we would have leased the car. Time is money.
I think for many people when you take into account the higher initial cost of the electric car they aren’t really saving much money. The same math applies to many hybrids- you have to drive a metric butt-load of miles to save enough gas to cover the price difference. But there is more to a car than just how much it costs to operate. You buy the car that fits your needs and appeals to you. Horses for courses as they say.
PS- we have solar on our house but it is used to offset my energy use at home during the day because I work at home. Basically none of our solar production really goes to fuel the car. What the solar does for me is keep me in Tier 1 on my household bill. We went into Tier 2 in July for the first time in year because it was so hot for much of that period and we cranked the AC beyond normal uses. But before we would have been in Tier 3 or 4 for that period and paid a ton more.
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There’s a lot of interesting notions in this thread. I’d like to share my anecdotal experience which suggests to me that for some EVs are a good deal.
I own three of the very most efficient cars ever manufactured and all three just happen to be BEVs:
- Hyundai Ioniq Electric (136 MPGe which is 25 KWh/100 mi)
- Chevy Bolt EV (119 MPGe which is 28 KWh/100 mi)
- Honda Fit EV (118 MPGe which is 29 KWh/100 mi)
My daughter drives the Ioniq to college and back every day (110 miles roundtrip) about 2500 miles per month and it certainly helps that the Ioniq is the MOST efficient car sold in America.
Our Bolt and Fit get run every day, but only about 20 to 30 miles each.
We live in SoCal and suffer SCE. For us switching to the Time of Use plan (TOU-D-B-C) was a no brainer.
Between 10pm and 8am the rate is just 9 cents per KWh for unlimited usage.
Yes, the rate skyrockets to 33 cents per KWh for any usage between the hours of 2pm and 8pm, but this is ONLY for weekdays. On the weekend the price is low all day.
All electricity used outside of the two zones listed above is charged at the rate of 17 cents per KWh.
I work from home and when the kids go to school and my wife goes to work, I turn all the power hogs off. I work from my home office with a small fan on and the window open. Works perfectly even on 110 F days. I don’t allow the air conditioners on during the weekday peak. We charge our cars after 10pm during the week.
So let’s take a look at the cost to charge each of our cars for 100 miles of range:
- Hyundai Ioniq Electric costs 25 x $0.09 = $2.25
- Chevy Bolt EV costs 28 x $0.09 = $2.52
- Honda Fit EV costs 29 x $0.09 = $2.61
Are there any ICE cars that can travel 100 miles for two dollars in fuel?
It gets better. By far most of our EV mileage is consumed by my daughter’s commute to college. But her college has a bank of FREE charging stations in the campus parking lot and most days she can “fill-up” at an open station.
When all is said and done, our actual SCE bill each month is $200 or less and this is to run our entire home and power our three BEVs. And by the way, our house is entirely electric. We do not have gas.
However, it gets more interesting. SCE encourages EV ownership by offering a one-time rebate of $450 for each EV you own. They send it to you as a bank check after you apply. In our case, this was a total of $1350. Note that this is extra and not included in our $200 SCE bills.
It gets better still. Hyundai has a leasing program in California known as the Ioniq Electric Unlimited+ Subscription. As a benefit of that program they issue a charging credit each month (based on the miles driven the previous month and reported by their Blue Link system). The credit reduces the lease payment for the current month. They use a figure of 18 cents per KWh and say this is the average cost of electricity in California. They do not care (or even know) what you actually paid for the electricity (even if it was free). At any rate, our average charging credit is $105 per month.
I agree that the government will EVENTUALLY extract their pound of flesh to make up for their loss in fuel/road taxes and that the cars would be much less appealing without the $7500 federal tax credit, the $2500 California Rebate, and the $3000 San Joaquin Rebate, but these things ARE available now and I’ll happily take advantage of them in light of the extreme amount of taxation Californians suffer. I do like clean air and these cars emit no toxins while running. That being said I do not believe that CO2 is a pollutant, rather it is PLANT FOOD and an extremely weak greenhouse gas, one we should welcome. So yeah I’m happy to take advantage of our government’s misguided programs.
The time it takes to charge a BEV seems to be a sticking point for some. You hear people say, “I can go to a gas station and fill-up in five minutes. Why would I want to wait hours to charge a car?” In reality what happens is that you pull into your driveway or your garage and you plug in your car and you go on with your evening. It literally takes five seconds to plug the car in. The car charges at the time it is programmed to do so and you don’t give it another thought. The next day you leave with a full charge. How many homes have a gas pump available? Once you are used to this it is a very nice luxury. We never visit gas stations anymore. We never have to fill up in the snow or bad weather anymore. We no longer waste 4 and half hours of our lives each year at gas stations (5 minutes x 52 visits).
Another sticking point seems to be range and yeah, that can be a problem. However, our Ioniq has a range of 125 miles, which is perfect for my daughter’s commute to college. And our Chevy Bolt has a range of 238 real miles. On a number of occasions, I have driven the Bolt 300 miles successfully on one charge. We have taken it on several road trips including to Arizona and had zero issues with range (actually, we had zero issues of any kind).
I realize that everyone’s situation and circumstances are different, but for us our electric cars make sense.
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My employer does not provide the chargers (which are $6/hr after 3 free hrs) the building my office is located in does. They do provide my monthly parking, but it’s the same for me as it is for everyone else who has parking in the 40 story building I work in.
My employer has not reduced my pay dollar for dollar or at all versus those with a gas powered car.
This is wrong on two counts.
Most ChargePoint stations charge a flat rate per KWh with NO connection fee. It is EVGo that follows that misguided practice.
Many public charging stations are free of charge to use.
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If you are a SCE customer, this page will do a comparison of your electricity costs under different TOU plans based on your previous usage:
Xyrph: As I understand it, SCE charges 9 cents per kwh for delivery and 4.5 cents per kwh for generation for a total of 13.5 cents (or so). Plus you’ll pay your share of the other “junk” fees. In my opinion, your points are valid but your numbers are too low.
SCE rate for 10 PM - 8 AM for TOU-D-A and TOU-D-B is 13 cents.
TOU-EV-1 from 9 PM - noon is 14 cents.
True but I receive 30% off everything as a low-income customer. Also, the California Rebate for the EV is $4500 instead of $2500 in my case.
I think you need to get the Model 3 and then you can speak authoritatively about BEVs 
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@masterblaster will tell you there is no such thing as saving time. Your time saved comes at the expense of other commuters who cannot use the carpool lane - therefore the overall time saved is zero. Of course, the carpool lane does not come out of thin air - it is paid for by your tax dollars. So @masterblaster would say that all you did was get charged a tax for the privilege of using the car pool lane. Also, since the car pool lane is less used by than regular lanes, it actually would have created less pollution if everyone could have used the extra lane.
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