In 2024 I bought a Ford F150 Lightning EV and hooked up my Ford charger to my garage that is about 100 feet from my residence. The building has been a garage since my grandmother purchased this farm in 1948. In the 1990s, my mother had the Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative install the separate meter to run the lights in the garage.
After I purchased my EV, I knew my electric bill would be higher. However, it was much higher than I was expecting. This past year, I started investigating why my bill was so high. My residence account was costing me about 12 to 14 cents (which is high) per kilowatt hour. My garage meter cost me 20 to 32 cents per kilowatt hour, depending on the month.
What I learned:
Power companies like SVEC have several line items on your bill. The bill breaks down with separate line items: Energy, PCA, Demand and Taxes.
Residential meters do not have the Demand charge.
“Energy” is the price you pay for electricity. “PCA” is the charge that SVEC says is a pass-through charge that they are charged from the electric middleman when they purchase power from other utilities – basically a wholesale cost to SVEC. SVEC says they do not add to the PCA charge. “Demand” is the charge that only applies to non-residential meters based on high usage. I’m not clear how that charge is calculated. “Taxes” – we all know where that goes.
About the author
- Bill Rogers is a resident of Augusta County.
My research was eye-popping. SVEC has two main tariff levels of meter service, Residential A-14 and Non-residential B-15. My garage is tariffed under B-15. B-15 is the same as any commercial, industrial or “general service” to SVEC. Under B-15, they have a Demand charge that is derived from a secret calculator that charges me the highest amount for 30 days based on the highest 15 minutes of usage in those 30 days.
My truck charges for about 8 hours 3 or 4 times a month. Since my truck uses 14,000 kilowatts for those hours, SVEC charges all my monthly Demand usage for 30 days at that high rate – every minute of usage. My overall kilowatt usage for any month is minimal compared to my residence. It’s about 20% of the total kilowatt usage of my main house but roughly 50% of the main house bill.
I contacted SVEC to ask why my residential garage was counted as a non-residence, and their answer was “it’s non-living space.” I filed an informal complaint with the State Corporation Commission, who reached out to SVEC to ask the same question. Someone from SVEC called me and said that SVEC charge was to make sure I had enough power to run my service at the highest recorded level every minute for the entire month. Basically, I was paying a premium with SVEC in case I wanted to charge my truck every minute of every day of the month.
Pretty ridiculous. This all seems like a scam to me.
Then in the same conversation the SVEC representative said that I could charge at non-peak times and not incur the charge. The problem with this is that SVEC does not have peak and non-peak hours.
I did a little more research and discovered that other power providers like Dominion Energy do have peak and non-peak hours. Dominion advertises that from 12 midnight to 5 a.m., they are in non-peak – better rates. Appalachian Electric Cooperative has non-peak hours specifically designed for charging EV vehicles from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., according to their website.
These rates are called Time-Of-Use (TOU) rates adopted by most utilities in the United States – just not SVEC.
Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative offers 50 percent off their electricity rates if you charge your EV between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Other power companies have similar initiatives to help consumers with their electricity rates.
If SVEC had non-peak hours, I could set my truck to only charge during those non-peak hours. What SVEC said was they could text me when they hit non-peak times, but could not tell me windows of time when that would occur. You can guess the problems with this solution, and formally they have since denied that they have peak and non-peak charges.
Here are three problems with their tiered tariffs.
- SVEC is classifying building meters on properties that are not your main residence as B-14, general non-residential meters. They informally call them “non-living space meters.” However, their tariff with the State Corporation Commission does not say “non-living space”, what it says is non-residential. Augusta County’s building code classifies my garage as residential. This is a money grab by SVEC for any building on your property that is not your main residence. This means, a horse barn out back, any accessory building, or any garage that is detached from the main residence that has a separate meter is charged a “commercial” rate. And if you run an EV charger, welder, compressor or other limited use high kilowatt device you will pay the high price for 30 days – even if you use it for 15 minutes.
- Other utilities have peak and non-peak charges, and they encourage the public to charge EVs and use other devices during non-peak hours. SVEC does not have peak and non-peak hours, so you are guessing when the non-peak time to charge would be even if they exist.
- Their tariff does not say anything about “non-living space” as a reason to charge me at a commercial Demand rate. Their tariff says “non-residential.” Clearly my garage is residential and confirmed by the Augusta County building code. SVEC makes up a new term “non-living space” as a justification to charge me more. This is an intentional money grab; it is not accidental.
My experience with SVEC has been terrible in the past five years. Their people are not versed in how they operate, and I believe they do not act like a co-op. They act as a monopoly, and not in the interest of their members. SVEC is consistently behind all other utilities in Virginia, adopting tariffs that benefit the public. They are not knowledgeable in General Electric Utility practices – basically they are dinosaurs.
My last complaint to them with the State Corporation Commission was about solar metering. They were behind the times and didn’t understand the Virginia Code. After the complaint they quietly changed how they billed solar.
I am in the process of filing a formal complaint with the State Corporation Commission. I intend to get them to change how they operate.
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