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> In a way this is the market doing what it's supposed to. There's a shortage of electricity because of everyone doing electrification upgrades, so the price of electricity rises

PG&E electricity rates have absolutely nothing to do with free markets. The only thing setting PG&E rates is corruption and incompetence, but mostly corruption.

Customer choices in response to electric rates is absolutely free markets, though.

I think that there's a lot wrong with the utility system in California (and the corruption actually incentivizes incompetence - the only way for executives to increase profits, make the stock go up, and get higher bonuses is to increase their costs, so PG&E is very good at inflating costs by doing stuff like burning down cities). But given that PG&E is as incompetent as they are, the logical market response is to make yourself as independent from them as possible.

They are using their lobbying power to prevent this. They want their cut regardless of service. Income based minimum monthly payment of $92/mo and nem 3 changes.

Electricity in California is not a free market though.

When I lived in Texas I could choose my electricity provider and see what different rates they charge for electricity to choose a provider.

In California I can choose Edison for my electricity or have no electricity.

for there to be a market there needs to be competition.

> It's now more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas

This is very hard to believe, what are you paying for electricity? California gas prices are also way above the national average at the moment. Here's a per-state comparison from last year, I'm sure it's a bit out of date but I doubt things have completed flipped in a single year: https://energyinnovation.org/2023/07/27/ev-fill-up-savings/

I live in the Bay Area California and get electricity from PG&E. I use a minimal amount of electricity and I paid 43 cents/kWh last month. Gas from Costco is $4/gal right now. I have a plugin-hybrid which does 4miles/kwh and 45mpg or in terms of money: 9.3miles/$ on electricity and 11.25gas-miles/$ on gasoline.

But maybe you don't actually care about fuel efficiency, then you have an argument that it's cheaper to fuel a Tesla Model 3 instead of a BMW M3.

Thanks that's helpful, and just found an overview of current rates that matches what you're saying: https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...

I think it is still true in California that an average EV is cheaper to fuel than an average gas car, but if you have a very efficient hybrid then it's a bit cheaper than a pure EV.

"I paid 43 cents/kWh last month"

I live in the Bay Area as well and I have an EV (2015 Fiat 500e), and am on the PG& Home Charging EV2-A plan. I charge my car between 12am and 3pm and pay $0.28/kwh, 29kwh/100 miles and I should be getting about 12.3miles/$.

I think it's always instructive to break out all the costs of owning a car on a per mile basis.

I but about $700/year in gasoline. And pay about $600/year insurance. And drive about 6500 miles a year.

So insurance and gas are both about 10 cents a mile. I think depreciation and maintenance are higher at about 15 cents/mile. So 50 cents a mile. IRS says a business can write off 67 cents a mile.

That’s astonishingly cheap for petrol, wow. We’re paying at least four times in my country minimum…

Yes USA loves petroleum, that's for sure.

Wow, where is it 4x the price? Even in places like Norway, it's only double https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

> I paid 43 cents/kWh last month

Whoooooa ok that makes more sense why folks are complaining; I paid 13 cents/kWh last month, less than 1/3 of what you're talking about.

Note for others, paying $0.45/kWh is highly unusual for the US as a whole; see the US Gov published stats on average electricity prices by region which puts the average at ~$0.17/kWh: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

Yeah we're getting shafted. Starts at $0.487 and goes up to $0.618 per KWh.

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

I’m posting 0.35/kwh in New England

PG&E is 62 cents/kwh for peak rate above-baseline, I believe 52 cents/kwh for off-peak (which most EV charging would be). Gas prices where I'm at are around $4.20/gal. I ran the numbers for my Mazda CX-90 PHEV SUV, which gets about 1.7 mi/kwh on electric and about 23 mpg gas. It's about 30 cents/mile on electric and about 18 cents/mile on gas.

For this tank only I have been charging at home (and at work, and anywhere I can), because I want to see how much mileage I can get out of a tank with full PHEV driving. In this regard it hasn't disappointed; I'm at 1200 miles and just passed half a tank of gas. But once I have a baseline for how much of my driving can be done on electric, I'll probably switch to just charging at work (where it's free) and using gas for most other driving, because it's so much cheaper.

I see what you're saying, that makes sense for that vehicle. I think pure EVs tend to get about twice as many miles per kWh as your car, so for an average pure EV compared to an average pure ICE I think the EV is still cheaper to fill up, although it is pretty close with these prices.

It's not really the pure EV vs. hybrid factor, it's the weight. The CX-90 is a really big (5200 lbs) 8-seater. Hence why its gas mileage is only about 23. It's also very heavily terrain & road dependent, eg. for roads with lots of stop signs in the hills, I get 0.6 mi/kwh or 8 mpg, but for flat highway driving it's about 3.0 mi/kwh or 40 mpg.

A typical EV would get more like 4 mi/kwh, but then, the equivalent ICE car would get more like 35 mpg. The delta's a little bit closer because of peculiarities of the CX-90's powertrain, but not a whole lot.

You should look into a PGE EV time of use rate plan if you can charge your car between 12am and 3pm - that should drop your rate for charge down to about 34 cents per kWh (though on my last bill mine was 28 cents per kWh).

https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/find-your-best-rat...

it isn't just california either, deficient and neglected infrastructure is basically a national-scale problem.

around my area we blew up two substations during a heatwave last summer. we constantly get brownouts at 4-6pm during the post-work peak load such that I'm almost not even comfortable running the freezer/etc anymore (brownouts are really hard on motors). and now you want to push all the gas heating (and this area gets cold!) onto the grid too?

a lot of this is that urban and suburban areas are subsidizing rural and ex-rural areas - more than half of my bill is already capacity-charges and delivery fees and not the actual cost of the electric, and we're still blowing up substations regularly due to strained and overloaded infrastructure. Where is the money going? Mostly to keeping miles and miles of power lines out to the middle of nowhere, I'd think.

That's a problem America is going to face in a lot of "ghost town" scenarios - when "the mine dries up" or "the train doesn't stop here anymore" and a place stops existing, the infrastructure costs to service the 20 people still living there don't. Repaving the roads every couple of years, plowing and salting them during the winter, etc aren't free and the reality is that in some areas there's really almost no economic activity anymore to justify the cost. We just have covenants and mandates that prevent ever undoing it. And that runs up the bills for everyone else.

We have 400k people in this county of 700mi^2, and that's suburban, not-particularly-dense either. Another county we have 40k people in 2700 mi^2. Should everyone in the former have to subsidize the lifestyle of the latter? We are talking about 2 orders of magnitude less density here, while it's not quite 1:1 there's no doubt they are incurring significantly higher infrastructure costs for their lifestyle and we are paying for it.

And since people won't pay for it, what we end up with is everyone's infrastructure falling into neglect, to pay for a handful of rural customers.

> It's now more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas

How is that possible? Even at 20c/kWh it's still a good 4x cost difference I though

PGE goes up to 66c/kwh during peak now and in San Diego I think is >70c/kwh. Off peak base is 34c/kwh for PG&E. Gas is $4.5-$5/gal so break even I think ends up being near 50mpg ish for a 300wh/mi EV.

I'm not in CA, so genuinely curious. When you quote 66 cents/kwh is that the marginal rate for an addition kwh or is that averaging in fixed costs? I pay about $20/mo just to have an active service line to my house, even if I were to shut off the breaker and not use any power. But my marginal rate is about 18 cents/kwh.

I would call my rate 18 cents but not sure if we are doing an apples to apples comparison.

Marginal rate. SDGE is insanely expensive.

I find my (NorCal) PG&E bill extremely (and deliberately?) inscrutable, but for the most recent statement, the Off-peak net price was $0.427/kWh and $0.466/kWh on-peak.

Napkin math:

My crossover EV gets 2.5-3.5 mi/kWh. Call it 3. / $0.2/kWh = 15 mi/$

Avg fuel economy in US ~ 25mpg. At $3.50/gal that's 7 mi/$

So at 20c/kWh, your dollar goes roughly twice as far on electric. California has been seeing brutal rates, though -- 40c/kWh not uncommon.

Californians can play games with Time-of-Use rates (charge at night), get onto EV-specific rates, be on a CCA which tend to not have the try-to-not-burn-down-the-state adjustment fees, get solar +/- NEM2 vs NEM3, etc., so your numbers may vary. And different cars will have different MPG's of course. But all of that is to say, "more expensive to fuel a vehicle with electricity than gas" is not necessarily wrong in California.

Where in California can you get gas for $3.50/gal?

Yuba City, CA. According to GasBuddy

ZIP: 95950

https://www.gasbuddy.com/gaspricemap?lat=39.08984244471869&l...

Gas in California is $4.50+ at the moment.

3.78 at Mathilda and Maude in Sunnyvale

A car of similar size to Tesla 3 gets close to 30mpg. At $3/gallon in mass currently, 10mi/$.

My electricity is 0.35/kwh. So that’s also ~10mi/$, except I don’t have the added headache of worrying about range

PG&E charges more like $.50 and it will soon be $.60-&.70. The regulator is corrupted and the infrastructure is failing because PG&E spent money that was supposed to be for infrastructure maintenance on share buyback programs. As a result the infrastructure failed and killed a ton of people, so now the utility is in even more debt because of the restitution owed.

20c/kWh? Not in California... Try 35c/50c peak or worse.

Even if you have solar, and got in before NEM3.0, that's still not an incentive to electrify, when you're just selling the non-peak energy to the grid for the increasing rates that PG&E is charging/planning... (if that income-based minimum monthly bill thing happens, this maybe changes a bit)

Not sure about the current gas/electricity per mile costs as I'm still driving a 15 y/o gas car.

> (if that income-based minimum monthly bill thing happens, this maybe changes a bit)

FYI, some legislators (including very left-leaning ones) are moving to repeal this pending change: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...

At 20c/kWh, that's ~5c/mi. For there to be a 4x cost difference, a gas car getting 30 mpg would have to be paying $6/gal for gas.

In MA, I bought gas yesterday in our ICE car for $3.10/gal. Our electricity is $0.27/kWh. An ICE car getting 31 mpg is $0.10/mi for energy. Our EV getting just under 4mi/kWh is $0.07/mi for energy.

I have a not-terribly-efficient PHEV (2014 CMAX), and depending on where we are in our tiered monthly usage it may be more expensive to use electricity. We still do, since the cost difference isn't huge and it's nice to ride with less emissions/noise. But it is maddening that PG&E charges so much that this is even possible (in CA, where gasoline prices are also sky-high!).

Can’t speak for PG&E, but I know from experience that it’s cousin SDG&E (the most expensive in the country I believe) will charge more than 60¢/kWh in the summer during certain times of the day and I’ve even had it be over 80¢ at certain times if memory serves me right.

They’ve recently retired and restructured a bunch of rate plans, but almost all historical and current rates can be found on their website[0]. Somehow they still managed to keep things nice and complex.

Keep in mind that none of these reflect so called CCA pricing, which is another story in of itself. Same for the “baseline allowance” after which rates go up, although they’ve now seemed to have structured is a discount to somewhat simplify rate comparisons.

0: https://www.sdge.com/total-electric-rates

Edit: Got curious so looked at some statistics. Top lists of most expensive electricity rates all mention Alaska and Hawaii, ok fair enough, but even in the contiguous states California isn’t even mentioned somehow.

At the same time there are articles like[1] these[2] that claim SDG&E was the most expensive (at the time).

So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not sure.

1: https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/fox-5-asks-sdge-why...

2: https://www.cbs8.com/article/money/amped/san-diego-has-the-h...

Just looking at my street, which is not old infrastructure, they would have to replace all the electric lines, all the transformers, and all the panels in all of the houses if everyone here decided to have EVs. If everyone went to 100% electric heat, it would be even worse.

We have dual fuel heating (heat pump, oil burner). It's prohibitively expensive to run the heat pump below 32F (0C), but the oil works great then, and is way cheaper. Just like the heat pump is cheaper at warmer temps. The heat pump won't work at all at 0F (-18C), so it's a non-starter to only use air based heat pumps for all of our needs. We've tried to get quotes for geothermal, but we'll just have to wait for the next big recession to do that.

As an engineer, I just have to shake my head at the unrealistic timelines being pushed by politicians. All that does is increase cost and drama.

>>As an engineer, I just have to shake my head at the unrealistic timelines being pushed by politicians. All that does is increase cost and drama.

Do you really think that's a coincidence? Not being snarky, just curious.

The PG&E rate increases have a lot more to do with wildfires than it does with supply and demand. Look at SMUD rates, super affordable. I will agree though that it has been super frustrating for these rate increases to be hitting right around when electrification is picking up steam.

With that said, unless you are comparing the most efficient ICE against the least efficient EV's you should still see savings with an EV. If I charged our EV at the peak electricity rate (which I rarely do) it still costs about half as much as a fairly average ICE vehicle on a per mile basis. Compared against some of the most efficient ICE vehicles (hybrids like the Prius) I would still come out ahead, maybe by only 20% though. But again, that is comparing the worst case scenario where I only charge at peak rates. In practice we probably average around half of the peak rate from a mix of at home, at work and around town charging.

I will admit though that it is not a particularly good look for CA regulators to be pushing electrification so hard while also allowing huge rate increases. It ends up looking like a huge handout to the investor owned utilities. And the proposed rate changes that implement an income based fix charge are absolutely idiotic. With batteries coming down in price we could soon see the economics of going off grid become much more attractive, which would further exacerbate the situation (CA IOUs will need battery adopters to stay connected to the grid to help with intermittency)

This is one of my big annoyances as well. Whatever happened to the idea of electricity that was too cheap to measure?

We had a collective meltdown at the idea of nuclear power. I'm currently paying 1.7 cents per kWh in Chicago.

> These states really need to get their electric rates down if they want to accelerate adoption of electrification technologies.

I wish. Instead they'll just do what they're doing in my home city, Seattle: ban gas furnaces and other forms of heating entirely while raising electric rates even further. The masses will cry that you have to be rich to live here, and they'll respond to that by raising taxes and spending the raised funds on consultants and bureaucrats studying electric utility inequities. I wish I was making this up.

Come down to Tacoma. I got > $1k in rebates from the gas company replacing my 20yo furnace + water heater with a HE gas furnace and a gas tankless water heater.

Housing prices are up now, but early pandemic it was like just south of $600k for a 3k sqft house built in the late '90s in a nice neighborhood.