My Electricity Bill
My electricity bill is very strange. It has several extra charges that I don’t really understand.
Also, because I have two electric cars, I have opted for a system that bills separately for ‘on-peak’ and ‘off-peak’ charges. I need to see if that is worth keeping.
I understand the concept of ‘on-peak’ and ‘off-peak’ charges, but the separation of ‘delivery charges’ and ‘supply charges’ is a bit strange since you can’t have one without the other. It turns out that this billing approach is due to (partial) deregulation of electricity markets (in the USA). Some states have a fully deregulated market. In these states electrical power production and the transmission and delivery of that power are separated. In theory consumers contract with one electricity company as a supplier and with another company to deliver the electricity (the company that owns the power lines etc.). In my case these are both the same company: New York State Gas and Electric, known as NYSEG (pronounced “nice egg”). NYSEG is the delivery company, and in my case is also the supplier. I 
could choose a different supplier… but I would still be billed via NYSEG. If I used a different supplier would I save money? I have no idea… It’s not that easy to figure out.
In any case my recent electricity bill looks like the one shown here (for December 2023). The second table provides ‘explanations’ regarding the various additional charges that appear on my bill.
Note however, that one extra charge is hidden. The “Make-Whole Charge” is $0.00223/kwh or about $4.50 of my December delivery charges.
Another oddity on this bill is the way in which the sales tax is calculated. One would assume that the 4% sales tax would be calculated on the sum of delivery and supply charges: Four percent of 143.54 + 113.96 = $257.50 or $10.30. But the bill shows $10.42. A twelve cent discrepancy! Hmmm. Worth looking into?
Solution: if I add the $2.93 ‘tax on the delivery charge’ to the total then the new total is 143.54 + 113.96 + 2.93 = 260.43, and the 4% tax on that is about $10.42 (the same as the tax shown on my bill). So apparently, we are paying a sales tax on the delivery charge tax. The tax on the tax is only about 12 cents per month. Nevertheless, NYSEG has about 900,000 electricity customers which at 12 cents each (on average?) totals about $100,000 … per month! (This tax on a tax approach is also applied to charges for natural gas).
What about charging electric cars?
In the following table I have looked into the cost of my electricity per kilowatt-hour (kwh), and then have converted it to equivalent gallons of gasoline (on the right side of the table) based on the EPA conversion of kwh/gallon of gasoline.
In the upper part I combined usage and delivery charges representing what I call basic charges. In the middle part of the table, I add in “other charges” that are shown as such on my bill. Toward the bottom of the table I added details about the sales tax.
Also, at the bottom right I used a different method of calculation based on the Tesla Model Y EPA/DOT fuel economy information.
Clearly, we don’t think much about electrical cost per kwh, but seeing this data in terms of gasoline equivalents is an eye opener. If I have done my calculations correctly… over five dollars a gallon on peak.
For comparison, the actual January 2024 price per gallon where I live is $3.20 per gallon. For a car that gets 40 miles/gallon that would be $0.08/mile. For a car that gets 50 miles/gallon that would be $0.064/mile. My calculated on-peak electrical rate for December is just $0.04/mile and off-peak about $0.024/mile. This is cheap because of the efficiency of the Tesla, not because of the cheap electrical rates. It is much more sensible to look at, and compare, these charges on a cost per mile basis.
It would appear that charging my cars at night certainly saves me money. At least I think it does. One problem is that peak and off-peak charges change every month, and it is hard to get that information. This is partly because the rates vary by month but the billing quite often overlaps two months so each bill may have different rates included. Nevertheless, below is a graphic of rates (not including all the extra charges and taxes) extracted from my bills. NYSEG states (somewhere) that at times off peak charges can be HIGHER than on peak charges… not sure that makes sense.
Note that the extra charges and taxes amount to 13.42% of the peak charges and 20.16% of off-peak charges for the months I examined. For this period, off-peak charges were between 42 and 61 percent of on peak charges. So it is important to look at the total charge per kwh rather than the stated “supply charge” and “delivery charge” .
Another complicating factor affecting this analysis is the clever arrangement from NYSEG whereby the on-peak rate is higher than the flat rate you would pay if you don’t opt for on/off peak billing. That is, if you opt for the on/off peak system your daytime (on-peak) charges will be higher than they would be with the flat rate. So the benefit depends on what proportion of your electricity you use at off peak times which, for NYSEG, includes 11:30pm-7am EST; 12:30am-8am EDT. But it is not that easy to figure out. Current (early February 2024) NYSEG information about these rates shows that this the on-peak rate is less than 1% higher than the flat rate.
In our case we don’t do a lot of driving – typically 20 miles per day at most. If I were commuting to and from work for, say, 50 miles per day then the benefit would be clearer. It would be nice to have some longer term information on the total charges for on-peak, off-peak and flat rate charges to do a proper analysis.
