BY DAVID NORTH
White Rock
First, it turns out the Department of Utilities accounting system is tight enough that the July 1 time of use rates will be accurate down to the minute. That means you can set your timers to turn things off at 5pm (when rates nearly double) and back on at 11pm (lowest rate — 11 cents per kilowatt hour) to minimize your costs.
DPU hopes this change will be revenue neutral but there will be winners and losers, partly due to the simple timer trick. For example, the time of use rate is ideal for electric car owners, who will be getting more than a 40% discount on home charging overnight. However, the obvious losers are folks who installed heat pumps (somewhat encouraged to do so by DPU) and would like to be comfy on a cold evening.
But here’s a tip to ease the pain: put your heat (or air conditioning) on a timer to start going full blast at, say, 3pm and shut off at 5pm. That way you’ll come home to a toasty (or chilly) home and can put off using more power until later, and maybe even make it to 11pm.
The timing looks suspiciously like an adjustment to getting a bunch of solar electric input (which should eventually happen when our contract with Foxtail Flats goes active). But the given purpose of these rate changes is to avoid stressing the system with overuse during the high demand period of the day, basically because our old, barely maintained system won’t be able to handle the load.
It will be interesting to see if the new artificial spikes running up to 5pm and starting at 11pm will bring on even worse problems.
And this could be even more relevant if people take the advice to add batteries to their system so they can offset the load into the less expensive rate periods. That would be more or less like adding a new fleet of electric cars to the mix since the logical time to start recharging those batteries is, you guessed it, 11pm. On the dot!
Probably you’ve heard that most of the electricity coming to the county goes to the lab, and that turns out to be true: between 78-80% by DPU’s figures. So will they be using a similar system? Who knows? The lab purchases their own chunk of the power and use it however they wish. They do share the main transmission lines with the county, but the infrastructure on the lab itself is independent. And probably in better shape, though that might be a national security secret.
The bottom line is, this is only about our internal transmission system, except in the event of a county-and-lab outage, which is another subject entirely.
There is also the question of pumping water, which though significant, does not particularly stress the system. It’s about 9% of our electric load in high summer going to a low of about 3% in winter. Because that doesn’t have to happen on any particular schedule, it can run when county usage is low. There will be a bit more use when the Ski Hill comes online, but that is similarly flexible and they will be paying a surcharge due to the fairly astonishing height the water has to be pumped (an additional 1800 feet). So water does significantly affect our demand, but doesn’t increase the system stress if properly managed.
This brings us to the weirdest part of the rate change, the Demand Charge: $1 per kilowatt during highest hour of usage per customer within each billing cycle, no matter when that takes place. The underlying idea is to nudge residential users toward not running lots of stuff at the same time, which will theoretically lead to fewer spikes in county-wide usage. Or maybe something else, since really there doesn’t appear to be any rationale presented by DPU.
But because residential usage spikes show no significant pattern from one household to the next, or even from one billing period to the next, these tiny spikes are lost in the noise. I was unable to find any work or survey that indicates these rates are useful in residential applications, but several that contradict the use of such rates*. In fact, with multiple household members and without a sophisticated domestic tracking system, most families really have no idea they are hitting their peak when it happens, and have little control. It does, however, potentially charge more from people with larger electrical panels, which has been encouraged in the past.
Mostly what such rates appear to do is confuse and annoy residential customers.
Which brings us to our last point, revenue neutrality. Though it’s obvious these changes will favor some customers at the cost of others, the Demand Rate may be just a component of the algorithm DPU came up with to achieve overall county-wide revenue neutrality.
It won’t happen. It’s not a criticism to say the DPU cannot effectively tune such a dramatic change to land right on target. Nobody could. If it does happen, it’s just luck. So we can expect some tuning over time, especially as transmission contracts change and new systems come on line.
But a couple of things are increasingly clear. First, installing solar is a good idea. DPU loves to point out that industrial solar can be set up far more cheaply than on your house, but fail to point out that after the transmission costs and DPU’s markup, you end up paying about the same. Today. But tomorrow your solar will be the same price and inevitably the DPU rate will go up.
Also, as sodium-ion batteries become available for household storage, it’s going to get cheap, so keep an eye on that. DPU has occasionally stated this might be a good idea for customers wanting to shift their usage away from peak hours, but there’s a catch: while it allows the county system some buffering when things are largely normal, in a sustained heat or cold spell it can expose the accumulated weakness allowed by those batteries as they run out of juice.
Consider: DPU has set up a rate structure where your smartest move is to eventually install solar and enough battery capacity so that you never give any power back to the county (at wholesale rates) but can get through the high rate period without using any county power. And that would make the problem mentioned above even worse.
There’s a bit of darwinism involved, too. The people who learn to game the system (timers, avoiding max load, batteries, etc) will make out better than those who just chug along as before. There’s also a touch of socialism, too: rich folks probably won’t bother adjusting their behavior for what is comparatively pocket change, but the rest of us probably will over time.
Look at it like a game and have fun with your new rates!
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/
* https://www.raponline.org/wp-c
* https://pubs.naruc.org/pub.cfm