Ive had solar for a year and now the utility company charges a demand fee... not cool.

vwaudiguy said:

I view electricity like I do gasoline... charge enough per gallon to pay all of the cost of production, transport, ect... the customer really doesn't need to be involved with your business by paying a pump fee and a fuel fee and a cost of doing business fee... if the price gets too high for some people, they will conserve... true those that drive gas guzzlers will be subsidizing those who have economy cars.. but again, the choice is the costumers as to what kind of car they buy. do the same with electricity. raise the rate to an amount that covers all cost of doing business as a power company. that way the customer can choose to conserve or pay. and again, the electricity guzzlers will possibly be subsidizing those that don't use much power. but they are the ones that use the most... and also have the choice to do something about it.. (solar)

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Isn’t the demand and power quality charge an efficient signal that is proportional to the amount of T&D infrastructure needed to handle surges of load?

As for the 12 month thing, the wires don’t get removed/refunded the other 9 months of the year

Per kWh is good for generation side signal

EDIT: also it is possible that a higher kWh charge will be more unfair to a non solar owner, since they pay it the whole year, while a winter demand based charge plus lower kWh would be more fair overall. Fair often means bad to some people

vwaudiguy said:

I view electricity like I do gasoline... charge enough per gallon to pay all of the cost of production, transport, ect... the customer really doesn't need to be involved with your business by paying a pump fee and a fuel fee and a cost of doing business fee... if the price gets too high for some people, they will conserve... true those that drive gas guzzlers will be subsidizing those who have economy cars.. but again, the choice is the costumers as to what kind of car they buy. do the same with electricity. raise the rate to an amount that covers all cost of doing business as a power company. that way the customer can choose to conserve or pay. and again, the electricity guzzlers will possibly be subsidizing those that don't use much power. but they are the ones that use the most... and also have the choice to do something about it.. (solar)

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What's the difference between kWh use and kw demand? If you want a lower bill, reduce your usage or reduce your demand, or both. They are giving you two options to save money. You just have to figure out a way to not use 21kw for 15 straight minutes

1201 said:

What's the difference between kWh use and kw demand? If you want a lower bill, reduce your usage or reduce your demand, or both. They are giving you two options to save money. You just have to figure out a way to not use 21kw for 15 straight minutes

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Another reason I like demand charges is that it puts a tax on people using stupid electric tankless heaters and forcing the neighborhood transformers to be massive as a result.

kWh won’t put any screws on them.

zanydroid said:

Another reason I like demand charges is that it puts a tax on people using stupid electric tankless heaters and forcing the neighborhood transformers to be massive as a result.

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Sometimes I don't understand us solar people. You've got people asking if an inverter can run their electric dryer, when there is plenty of sun outside for free to dry your clothes with- no inverter or batteries needed. Its like people don't even want to try-even a little- to cut back.
Oh by the way, drying clothes outside-there's 6kw of demand avoided.

1201 said:

Oh by the way, drying clothes outside-there's 6kw of demand avoided.

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They should start selling dryers with low demand mode. Cap at 2-3 kW on an 15 min basis and slow down the drying time at the start, when the clothes are waterlogged.

Personally I prefer throwing (wasting) money at the problem and getting an all in one HP unit. Sometimes I’m too lazy to hang up the clothes. Or forget to take it out.

zanydroid said:

They should start selling dryers with low demand mode. Cap at 2-3 kW on an 15 min basis and slow down the drying time at the start, when the clothes are waterlogged.

Personally I prefer throwing (wasting) money at the problem and getting an all in one HP unit. Sometimes I’m too lazy to hang up the clothes. Or forget to take it out.

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As someone on here said, I feel guilty about using my electric dryer when I know the sun is outside for the taking

Ampster said:

Yes that is how demand fees are priced, based on the largest kW load for any fifteen minutes period. It is like a fixed fee based on your largest load. Very common in industrial and commercial rate plans. I pay them on the house meter for an apartment building.

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Per day? Per Month? Per Billing Cycle? Per day I believe.

ksmithaz1 said:

Per day? Per Month? Per Billing Cycle? Per day I believe.

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Per billing cycle

1201 said:

As someone on here said, I feel guilty about using my electric dryer when I know the sun is outside for the taking

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You have to treat yourself sometimes. Self care is important.

(Or you can tell yourself you need to protect your precious clothes from the UV)

zanydroid said:

They should start selling dryers with low demand mode. Cap at 2-3 kW on an 15 min basis and slow down the drying time at the start, when the clothes are waterlogged.

Personally I prefer throwing (wasting) money at the problem and getting an all in one HP unit. Sometimes I’m too lazy to hang up the clothes. Or forget to take it out.

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Yeah I figured if it's going to cost me some of my hard earned money either way... I may as well get a cool new toy to go along with the savings. If a heat pump dryer is anything like my heat pump water heater... in heat pump only mode it only uses 400 watts... just takes forever to heat the water up... I can deal with slow drying close as long as I don't have to hang it up outside

1201 said:

Per billing cycle

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So $80 on your bill if you hit 20KW at $4/kw of demand. Not a huge amount for sure.

ksmithaz1 said:

So $80 on your bill if you hit 20KW at $4/kw of demand. Not a huge amount for sure.

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Not a huge amount but if I had to pay that I would look for ways to reduce it greatly via scheduling and battery inverter

vwaudiguy said:

Yeah I figured if it's going to cost me some of my hard earned money either way... I may as well get a cool new toy to go along with the savings. If a heat pump dryer is anything like my heat pump water heater... in heat pump only mode it only uses 400 watts... just takes forever to heat the water up... I can deal with slow drying close as long as I don't have to hang it up outside

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I'm deciding whether to pull the trigger on the LG WM6998HBA, it's a 120V combo with 5cu ft washer drum, same size as a standard 5cuft washer/dryer. New since late December. You can pop it in at 11PM and let it percolate overnight -- washing then drying. It has one of those really quiet LG drive systems too. (LG seems to have really cracked the code on laundry). It doesn't need any support infra on top of a standard Washer. Same power, water, drain requirements. Ventless. Will fit same footprint as a 5 cu ft, as long as there is headroom clearance to remove a top mount filter tray.

After a recent 1 day power outage that came at an awkward time relative to when I needed to do laundry, I got some extra impetus to look into it again (I also prepared a new laundry area with new electrical a few months back and have been itching to fill it).

So I guess the question is, how much $$$ does trimming 5kW in demand charge come to per month?

(You will hit 5kW in 15min on most dryers unless you are careful with how much you load in, or someone has programmed a thermostat cycle that is smart enough to be frugal about demand charges)

ksmithaz1 said:

So $80 on your bill if you hit 20KW at $4/kw of demand. Not a huge amount for sure.

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Per month? $960/year?
Enough to get my attention.
If you could permanently avoid it for less than $9600 investment, come out ahead.
(But we can't count on rates & terms not to change.)

Demand is the Achilles heel of the grid. The very nice thing about Arizona and solar is peak demand on the grid coincides very closely with solar production, as we need juice when the sun is baking the house. Unfortunately if you live in the frozen tundra, and have electric heat, your peak usage shifts to the cold winter nights when their ain't no sun.

Some things you might look into:
Brideidea makes an EV charging box, designed to go inline with a HWH or other appliance to run them both on the same circuit, giving priority to the non-EV device. I have one connected to my clothes dryer (primary) and HWH (secondary) to keep them from bringing demand up. When I scale up my panel another 50A I will probably get rid of it, but I actually don't notice.

If you kick on 15KW of heat strips, there is not a whole lot you can do without a buttload of batteries. With close to 4000 square foot of ranch housing, you are decidedly sub-optimal for efficiency by design as well. I was informed in another thread some heat pumps these days work way below zero, dunno how much cold you are dealing with, but I'd look into it for sure. Some of the power companies offer discounts/have gear that they hook into your HVAC/High load circuits that offer a discount if they can shut it off. There are home control products that can do the same, but they can get a little pricey.

Frankly ~4000 square foot is a lot of house. Not going to be cheap to run it no matter what you do. Probably not an easy way to shutdown portions of the house during high demand either.

Hedges said:

Per month? $960/year?
Enough to get my attention.
If you could permanently avoid it for less than $9600 investment, come out ahead.
(But we can't rates & terms not to change.)

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Yea, but it's not EVERY month, only a couple of peak months when it's really cold and the heat strips are blaring. So maybe $250/year?

ksmithaz1 said:

Yea, but it's not EVERY month, only a couple of peak months when it's really cold and the heat strips are blaring. So maybe $250/year?

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I think it would depend on the POCO. If you use 10kW in winter they still need to size the T&D appropriately, and maintain it year round. I guess they can use slightly smaller wires and transformers for winter only load since it's colder.

Hedges said:

Per month? $960/year?
Enough to get my attention.
If you could permanently avoid it for less than $9600 investment, come out ahead.
(But we can't rates & terms not to change.)

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And . . . You are going to pay *something* So $80 - (whatever you can get demand down to) is your delta, which makes it even less.

This is interesting news to me. I hadn't heard of utilities implementing demand based charges on residential customers. I wonder why this was chosen instead of time-of-use rates. The stated goal of both systems is to minimize the amount of generation capacity that has to be installed for peak demand and only gets used a small percentage of the time.

I've worked at an industrial facility for many years and we have demand charges that kick in when our demand goes above 2500 kw for more than 15 minutes, and the demand charge is applied for the next 12 months. We have natural gas engines to co-generate and shave the peaks and automatic load shedding that kicks in when those engines go down. The cost of maintenance for the co-gen engines would make them uneconomical were it not for the huge impact of the demand charges, so I get where the demand charge system makes sense to alter the behavior of industrial users.

However, the industrial user has automated systems and alarms to notify them to alter activities to avoid the demand charge. The average residential user does not have these systems, doesn't geek out on monitoring their electrical usage, and won't know that their behavior has impacted their cost until the bill comes. But the average residential customer can grasp that electricity is cheaper at night, so they start their dryer after 10pm. So it seems to me that a utility that opts for residential demand charges instead of time-of-use charges is more interested in increasing revenue than they are in reducing peak demand.