Power!

This morning, the doorbell rang and two handsome men from LADWP were standing there, wanting to hook up the electric power to our level 2 charger! Now the fun part is, they said the meter itself had not even been ordered yet and it would be 5 to 7 days until that came in. But the plan is to hook up the wires to the overhead line and put bars across the terminals of the meter box. This will effectively give me free juice to the charger until they put the meter in.

Tonight when we got home, the charger was ready to go as soon as I flipped the breakers on. I had to go onto LADWPs web site to determine the rate times to go by so I could set my charge times in the car. Here's the deal:

From 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM M-F is a Mid Peak range.
From 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM M-F is the High Peak time.
From 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM M-F is another Mid Peak range.

All other times are "Base", or the lowest rate. On top of the base rate, there is a discount for EV use.

Currently my Tier 1 rate is 0.07020 per kWh, while Tier 2 is 0.08520. So far I stay out of Tier 3. (Until August!)

Time-Of-Use rate during the Base period is 0.04655 per kWh from June to Sept and 0.05045 from Oct to May. On top of that, EV charging gets a discount of -0.02500 per kWh. That means my EV Base rate is 0.02155 from June to Sept and .028900 from Oct to May.

BUT... There are things called "Energy Cost Adjustment" and "Electric Subsidy Adjustment" that raise that rate substantially higher. Still, it's much lower than the regular Tier 1 rate, which is also subject to those "Adjustments". Until I see an electric bill over a span of a couple of months, I won't really know for sure, but it will probably be about $0.75 a day to charge up.

I have not had a way to measure yet but folks on the gm-volt.com web site say it takes about 12 kWh to charge a fully depleted battery.

UPDATE: I logged into my ChargePoint account this morning (7/8/11) and I used 9.808 kWh last night to charge.