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Supercharger - Dublin, CA - Amador Plaza (LIVE, 14 V2 stalls)
- Thread starter Tyl
- Start date
siucity
Button Pusher
Thanks for the photos! I'm hoping it'll be ready sooner rather than later. It'll save me a stop at Manteca.
MarcG
Active Member
Rated. This is a 90D, which has about 6% more range than a 85D which is EPA rated at 270 miles.
MrBigSmiles
Member
AMPd
Well-Known Member
PG&E is known for taking their sweet time hooking up the electricity to the SC sites.
Which for the life of me I cannot understand, you'd think they would jump at the chance to sell all that electricity a SC consumes per month.
jeffro01
Active Member
Red tape, lots and lots of red tape. I'd bet PG&E would like to go faster but it likely required some major equipment upgrades to the service infrastructure in that area which take much longer than they should due to red tape...
Jeff
Khatsalano
Member
California utilities are actually obligated to serve any customer who wants service, including Tesla. I would like to think that all of our utilities are also customer-focused and provides top service, balanced against affordability. But as far as more electricity use implicitly generating more profits-- that's simply not the case in California.
We have regulated, decoupled utilities where the more power they sell, it's not the more money they make. Utilities are incentivized actually to operate efficiently and are authorized a return on the capital base. This is why you see the per capita use of electricity use in California actually is flat while the rest of the U.S. has gone up. This is also why, it's puzzling to a lot of people, why California utility companies are giving away things like LED light bulbs, $200 rebates for new Energy Star appliances, or free solar/home efficiency consultations. It's because California utilities actually make more money by being customer-centric and efficient, and don't get to make any more money for selling more power.
Can't argue about red tape ... it's a byproduct of large, mature companies for the most part. But red tape usually exists as checks and balances to protect against threats to other goals, like safety and reliability. It's also not an easy thing to connect to the grid. Think about it ... a 12-stalls SC for 6 pairs, at 120kW each. With transformer loses, this is basically hooking up about 1MW of load to the grid. It's not so easy to hook up the equivalent of 100-200 houses worth of spike-pattern, unpredictable load in a parking lot.
- K
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Nigel Tufnel
Member
Governmental agencies and many large companies tend to become bureaucratic, which causes them to move rather slowly. But, as a wise man once said: "The only thing that saves us from bureaucracies is their inherent inefficiency."
AMPd
Well-Known Member
PG&E gets more money if customers use more power. So revenue gets higher with use. Of course their cost is higher, but profit is also higher because they earn net profit per kwh. In addition, there are many tiered rate tariffs, which means that price per kwh goes up as the usage for a household goes up.
One thing I don't understand is this discrepancy. City of Santa Clara is the electricity provider to its residents. Their rate is $0.11/kwh. Santa Clara is surrounded by areas where PG&E is the provider. PG&E rate starts at $0.16/kwh and quickly jumps to $0.33/kwh for most households. Makes me think that PG&E is making much more money than they should. So to me California utilities don't seem at all customer-centric or efficient.
Khatsalano
Member
Blue_Model S, it's true, most utilities in the US are incentivized to sell more power for more profit. In California, however, this is not the case. Here, for your reading pleasure:
What is decoupling? In the electricity and gas sectors, “decoupling” (or “revenue decoupling”) is ageneric term for a rate adjustment mechanism that separates (decouples) an electric or gas utility’s fixedcost recovery from the amount of electricity or gas it sells. Under decoupling, utilities collect revenuesbased on the regulatory determined revenue requirement, most often on a per customer basis. On a periodicbasis revenues are “trued-up” to the predetermined revenue requirement using an automatic rate adjustment.The result is that the actual utility revenues should more closely track its projected revenuerequirements, and should not increase or decrease with changes in sales. Since utilities will be protectedif their sales decline because of efficiency, proponents of decoupling contend that they are more likely toinvest in this resource, or may be less likely to resist deployment of otherwise economically beneficialefficiency.2 Decoupling is also being explored in the water utility sector, though this paper focuses on theelectricity and natural gas sectors.
Source: http://www3.epa.gov/statelocalclimate/documents/pdf/supp_mat_decoupling_elec_gas_utilities.pdf
Why does decoupling matter since California utilities moved to this model in 1975? Check this out:
Source: California Leads the Nation in Energy Efficiency - Part 2: Myth-Busting the Naysayers | Sierra Martinez's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC
Anyways, this is really interesting and all, but let's see some new pictures of the Dublin SC already with the wraps off!
m6bigdog
Member
WOW!
PG&E is very customer centric mainly due to the efforts of the CA Public Utilities Commission.
There are several residential rate schedules to choose from, E-1(tiered), E-6(TOU), EV-A&B(BEV owners) and the big one Energy Generating "Net-Metering" (trading TOU cost) to meet customer energy usage profiles; that not only reduce energy cost without regard for actual usage but encourage efficient household energy usage.
They also provide cash incentives for energy efficient appliances, retrofit insulation, and the big one Solar PV installations.
I received $1300 cash for the Solar PV system I installed on my house (investment cost $20k after rebates and tax credits).
With the PV system I get Net-Metering where I generate more kWh's than I use during the daylight hours and PG&E gives me the $ credit at the Peak rate and I use most of the kWh's during the much cheaper Partial/Off-Peak rates in the early morning & evening hours.
What this means is, I can actually use more kWh's than the PV system generates and the extra kWh I use during Partial/Off-Peak periods (Charge the Tesla, etc.) is drawn from the Peak kWh generation credits.
If I assume a 30 year useful life for my PV system, then my kWh cost is fixed at under $.04/kWh (44kWh/day) for the 30 yrs., as long as my usage doesn't far exceed the Net-Metering credits. I can always add more panels if necessary.
What does this mean?
For the last 3 years, I have only paid the $4/mo. grid connection fee for my electricity (increasing to $10/mo.) received True-Up payments of over $200 each year and I have used 48 MWh's of electricity to including adding the MS charging (15 kWh/day) during the last 4 months.
If this is not customer centric I don't know what is!!
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jeffro01
Active Member
Um... Do you work for PG&E? It's very odd to see someone talk to highly of them...
Jeff
I am getting the same feeling about the very pro PG&E posts.
I hope someone addresses this:
One thing I don't understand is this discrepancy. City of Santa Clara is the electricity provider to its residents. Their rate is $0.11/kwh. Santa Clara is surrounded by areas where PG&E is the provider. PG&E rate starts at $0.16/kwh and quickly jumps to $0.33/kwh for most households. Makes me think that PG&E is making much more money than they should. So to me California utilities don't seem at all customer-centric or efficient.
m6bigdog
Member
I am getting the same feeling about the very pro PG&E posts.
I hope someone addresses this:One thing I don't understand is this discrepancy. City of Santa Clara is the electricity provider to its residents. Their rate is $0.11/kwh. Santa Clara is surrounded by areas where PG&E is the provider. PG&E rate starts at $0.16/kwh and quickly jumps to $0.33/kwh for most households. Makes me think that PG&E is making much more money than they should. So to me California utilities don't seem at all customer-centric or efficient.
I have been called a lot of things, but never a PG&E employee. No! I've have never worked for a utility, ever!!
However, I did work as a salesman for a residential Solar panel installer (direct water heating, Pool, Spa, Hot water) back in the 1980's and that is where I learned how to analyze residential energy usage and utility billing.
As for my knowledge of PG&E, 1. I have been using them for 50 years and 2. I have spent a fair amount of time studying the PG&E web site, rate schedules, etc. so I can take advantage of what they have to offer - as it is fairly complex. That has paid off big time!!!
PG&E has a load of options for the commercial and residential customer base and one of them has allowed Santa Clara to be a utility provider and do the customer billing and offer a $0.11 kWh rate. If that is a flat rate kWh it is cheap if it is Tiered or TOU not so much? I looked at the Santa Clara rate (Silicon Valley Power) and their rates are indeed cheap with the first 300kWh at $0.09787 and 2nd tier $0.11251 and they offer TOU also at $0.8581 1st tier off-peak and $0.12727 2nd tier Peak. At those rates it would be hard to justify and get a payback on a PV Solar system.
I assume the city council decided to take on the billing so they could negotiate rates with PG&E or a pass-through and do the utility billing for the city.
PG&E options for the residential customer are complex and if used correctly can reduce your utility cost.
PG&E has a $0.09992 kWh Off-Peak rate in the EV TOU rate schedule (BEV owners) and this rate schedule has no tiers, but the Peak TOU rate is $.42871 kWh!!
E-1 is a Tiered rate schedule.
E-6 is TOU and Tiered rate schedule.
EV is a TOU rate schedule (no Baseline or Tiers.
Basics of Electrical Rate Plans: http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/saveenergymoney/plans/index.page.
Rate Schedules: http://www.pge.com/tariffs/ERS.SHTML#ERS
My suggestions:
1. sign up for a PG&E My Account so you can use the tools and info available. If you don't have a SmartMeter get one installed so you can analyze the hourly usage and/or use the TOU rates.
2. download a copy of the E-1, E-6 rate schedule and if you have an BEV (I assume you do) then include the EV rate schedules.
3. know your Baseline Territory letter and code, from you bill. This will tell you your Summer and Winter baseline daily electric quantity, included on the rate schedules.
4. analyze the pattern and flexibility of electrical usage during the morning, day, evening and night. No one home all day and/or charge EV over night, etc.
5. analyze how the Tier quantities and TOU (Peak/Partial Peak/Off-Peak) hours for the various Tier and Time of Use rates affects the cost of electricity used.
In the PG&E My Account there should be a rate schedule comparison tool you can use.
The rate comparison tool is not available for me (energy generator) so I made a rate comparison spreadsheet in Excel. I can compare the hourly TOU power generated and usage against the cost/credits between the E-6 and EV-A rate schedules with daily/running/accumulative totals for the month.
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