While researching Georgia Power’s rates and shopping for a solar generator, I found out Georgia Power has a program called Overnight Advantage that you can sign up for which charges different amounts depending on what time of day you use power, with really low rates overnight (2.2 cents per kwh nominally as opposed to the standard rate of 8.1 cents). Then you pay higher than normal rates of 10.2 cents during waking hours 7 AM to 11 PM and then really high rates of 29.8 cents at peak 2-7 PM Monday thru Friday. This program might be good if you charge your electric car overnight. Electric cars have batteries of 50 kwh or more so you want the best discount on that that you can get. 2.2 cents makes it sound like you can fill up your car for a little over a dollar, but with fees and taxes, it would actually cost you about $4 to fill up your car. Still, really cheap, and even on a regular plan it would be only $8. However it could also work if you have a large home battery that you lets you run your house with stored power. I doubt that would work out for a 2 kwh battery, especially not in summer when AC use drives my power consumption up to 20 kwh per day. Home batteries are really expensive, like $6,000 to cover my 10 kwh daily usage and would need another one in Summer for air conditioning. I only use $800 of power a year.
However, it does kind of bring up the idea of bi-directional charging for electric cars, where you use your car as a home battery, charging it at night and then letting it power your entire house during the day. And taking it further, if you filled up your car overnight with 50 kwh at 2 cents per kwh, you could use 20 kwh from the car to run your house very cheaply all day and then sell another 20 kwh back to the utilty at the peak at a much higher price than you paid (Georgia Power does not do this, but they should). If Georgia Power is going to charge you 29.8 cents for peak power, wouldn’t they be willing to buy peak power from you for 15 cents? You could still make a good profit on what you sell back to them. If this could work on a large scale, the world would be a better place because we would burn less fuel and need fewer power plants. Using batteries, not even solar power, though obviously it works even better with solar. However, in places like California where about a third of the electricity is solar already, the disparity in peak and off peak prices isn’t as much because during the daytime they are generating a lot of solar, though it is still a demand peak so rates are maybe twice the off peak rates.
