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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

I can't take this author seriously. There is no way that Tesla is paying $1/kw. That is way past the retail rate, and I bet that they are paying much less than the retail rate in many of their markets.

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Not only does Tesla negotiate their electrical rate, they use PowerPacks at several supercharger sites to shave peak load to reduce and/or eliminate demand charges.

They would if they were pulling straight from the grid. Go to your power company and ask how much it would cost to surge a mega watt of power at peak times. Those kinds of surges are really expensive to handle. Of course Tesla uses storage and solar to smooth their demand so that they can pay normal rates.

$1/kwh is a joke price. Peaking natural gas plants run at 20 cents/kwh on the high end. You can go buy a honda gas generator from home depot and run it for 1-2k hours and pay less than that per kwh.

I get your point, and you are probably right somewhere in the country. Having said that, we have industrial plants around here with similar issues, and I'm confident that the rates that they pay are vastly lower than even the $0.07/kwh that Tesla is talking about.

$1/kwh is an extreme outlier and essentially pointless to talk about. There are lots of other options at that price point.

Yeah, that's definitely bullshit, esp considering residential power in the PNW is $0.07/kWh.

Residential power is often cheaper than commercial (at least, small scale) in practice. One reason is that commercial folks pay surcharges for power factor.

For example, in San Jose, CA, the average residential is ~$0.156/kwh

Commercial is $0.1408/kwh [1].

If you operate at a 90% power factor, and are surcharged the other 10%, ...

[1] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/california/san-jose/

But yeah, at Tesla's scale, it should not be $1/kw.

I could believe that to be the all-in cost for a supercharger or something weird like that.

Because they should be paying close to the industrial rate, if not lower.

Nope. Electricity for residential use costs more than electricity for commercial use, which costs more than electricity for industrial use. A fast-charging truck stop is most similar to industrial use, since it involves a lot of power at a single location, and probably also can give the utility at least a few minutes warning before ramping up to full power. From the Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

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