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Rude awakening on solar EV charging

scal_air said:
Heck, buy a used Silverado and get that bonus of steep EV depreciation to make it even cheaper. But I'd buy an used air for half the capacity and half the price and enjoy the benefit of driving something I like...😅
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I'd at least buy an EV that fits in the garage if its primary purpose is energy storage:)
 
Luckily Evergy has a 1 to 1 exchange for every KW I send the the grid I just get a credit for a KW. As long as I don't exceed 100KW banked with Evergy it carries over to the next period. If it is over 100KW then they credit my bill at rate that is essentially their cost less transmission. I have never had that situation. So during the day I over produce and then at night I pull from the grid. I did not want to pay for the batteries I basically use Evergy as the battery. We also do not loose power often. This works well for me as the lucid is parked at work during the day and at night I charge.
 
Saksak said:
Cost to charge my EV at night (the cheapest rates) for exactly the same amount of power sent to grid: $39.34 ($0.34 * 115.7 kWh). The utility company essentially bought my energy for $1 and sold it someone else for a minimum of $39 (utility companies are putting in place their own battery infrastructure).

I do have home batteries but that’s primarily for emergency power during power outages. I don’t want to be draining my home battery every night to charge my EV, especially since home batteries are much smaller than EV batteries.

This means the best strategy is to charge my EV with the excess solar power instead of sending it to the grid. However, I’m usually driving my car during the day, making this impossible.
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Excess power during the middle of a good solar day is in many ways worse than worthless, it actually costs utilities money. On a good day they are already curtailing large utility solar power (throwing away power), they fill their batteries, idle other sources and even then they often have more power from rooftop solar (which they can’t curtail) than they can handle, sometimes forcing them to export to neighboring states at great expense (see CAISO graphs from Tuesday, does not include rooftop solar). So you can at least console yourself that the utility isn’t making money at your expense…

Figuring out how to load shift is what’s required, and the financial incentives are designed to promote that heavily. My wife’s car’s home during the day, we set charging to correspond with the solar day and essentially only ever charge that directly. Like you I’m at work, but I can and do charge right up on the weekend (when we use my wife’s car) and then run it down slowly during the week. Perhaps with a small daily amount from your backup battery that might be a workable strategy?
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Saksak said:
I recently installed solar and I knew NEM 3.0 made solar less attractive for homeowners, but I didn’t know how bad it would be for EV owners.

Credits I earned by supplying excess solar to grid:
  • May 22: $0.46 supplying 31.0kWh
  • May 23: $0.37 supplying 48.4 kWh
  • May 24: $0.23 supplying 36.3 kWh
Cost to charge my EV at night (the cheapest rates) for exactly the same amount of power sent to grid: $39.34 ($0.34 * 115.7 kWh). The utility company essentially bought my energy for $1 and sold it someone else for a minimum of $39 (utility companies are putting in place their own battery infrastructure).

I do have home batteries but that’s primarily for emergency power during power outages. I don’t want to be draining my home battery every night to charge my EV, especially since home batteries are much smaller than EV batteries.

This means the best strategy is to charge my EV with the excess solar power instead of sending it to the grid. However, I’m usually driving my car during the day, making this impossible.

NEM 3.0 is pretty bad. We earn a quarter or two of credits per day and need to spend 40x that amount to draw the same amount of power. What incentive is there to send power to the grid?
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You should be using the battery during your peak hours. Charge your battery from solar before exporting excess to grid. This will eliminate the high cost of consumption during peak hours. You can program this on your solar app.
 
Google, probably every hyperscaler, is evaluating every way to ramp power generation for the data center demand ramp and one way they are evaluating is to provide free, installed mini split in areas to offset AC demands. Fast, makes people happy, frees up power for their use. It is obvious that energy shifting is what electric utilities need to become, but instead using their regulators to keep status quo. They should be crediting a massive amount, maybe free or nearly so, to integrate battery backup systems in residential and business settings that they control excess storage as needed. Cost for investors is the issue, same reason PGE has scaled back their undergrounding plan.
 
Dolphins4ever said:
Google, probably every hyperscaler, is evaluating every way to ramp power generation for the data center demand ramp and one way they are evaluating is to provide free, installed mini split in areas to offset AC demands. Fast, makes people happy, frees up power for their use. It is obvious that energy shifting is what electric utilities need to become, but instead using their regulators to keep status quo. They should be crediting a massive amount, maybe free or nearly so, to integrate battery backup systems in residential and business settings that they control excess storage as needed. Cost for investors is the issue, same reason PGE has scaled back their undergrounding plan.
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Their plan is to have you the consumer do it as evidenced by NEM 3. There's even been attempts to invalidate the previous contracts (NEM 1 & 2) that are supposed to last for 20 years. It's amazing the level of control the energy companies have over the agencies that are supposed to regulate them as well as politicians in the state of California. I would go further but I'm sure a political discussion would sidetrack this thread. The truth is that having the consumer purchase battery backups is an incredibly inefficient and expensive form of mass energy storage. The government/utilities should be the ones investigating different forms of mass storage but they have zero incentive to do so...
 
DeaneG said:
Another issue with NEM3 - there is almost zero payback for adding panels that produce more electricity than you need. And you need a pretty substantial home battery (nearly a full summer's day consumption) to make the best use of a smaller number of panels.

Bottom line for me: the CPUC is trying to discourage rooftop solar unless heavily backed by batteries. Fair enough, as both of these functions can be done much more cheaply at grid scale.
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This sounds a lot like EV tax credits. As such, I wouldn't call it "discouraging roof top solar" to end what were effectively subsidies for rooftop solar (that cost power companies, which means it cost other ratepayers). It's just no longer encouraging it with subsidy from other ratepayers.

Paying out net metering credits at full retail rates never made sense to me, especially when there's an excess of generation. That's just adding costs to other ratepayers to subsidize the credits. That was bound to get rolled back at some point (just like EV tax credits).
 
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BS8899 said:
I agree with you. China is taking the leadership position in EV innovation and manufacturing. Battery swapping is already there. Part of that is also driven by the fact that most Chinese residences don't have their own in-home charging capability.

It is sad to see that our current government policies are giant steps backward in terms of renewable energies, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear., etc.. We are living in the past!
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This is also a problem in locations which have a high percentage of renters. Will landlords add the necessary infrastructure to the house/apartment complex. I had thought the Chineese were giving up on the changable battery infrastructure. Is that not the case?
 
What NEM-3.0 does is incentivize the consumer to go 100% off-grid. Forget sending energy to the grid during peak demand, which is what I had originally planned. I need to store as much as I can for my own use to stay off the grid as much as possible. This doesn’t help the community at large.

I’m still generating excess solar which PG&E gets for free. I earned a whopping $2 worth of credits for 200 kWh sent to the grid in the last week ($68 to buy at the lowest rate). There is zero incentive to send energy to the grid, even during peak demand when PG&E could benefit.

I’m sure PG&E is building out energy storage which we’re subsidizing with our excess solar - they can rely on our solar panels to charge their batteries. If I could direct sell my excess solar to my neighbors at PG&E rates, the break even point for battery cost is around 2 years. Yeah, I know, transmission line costs come into play at scale for the utility companies, but those are sunk costs regardless of solar.

NEM-3 needs to be reworked to benefit both the utility and consumers: we provide the solar panels, utility companies provide the batteries. As structured, it benefits only the utility companies and ignores our contribution of solar panels.
 
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