Subject: Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?
FWIW, I have never lived in a place where we had off-peak rates. It was always just straight price per KWH.

Ah, but your utility certainly has “peak costs” and “off peak costs”. They just haven’t bothered to unbundle it so you could get a peek behind the curtain. Every utility has base-load, generation which doesn’t change easily: hydro from dams, or perhaps electrons from nuclear. But there are intermediate load sources like coal plants and peak load sources like gas turbines, and all that has to be balanced against demand, because too little and your home goes dark. Too much and they fry their transformers. It costs money to scale up - and start up - and bring down those intermediate and peak load generators, which is why they don’t run overnight or in other low demand times.

Perhaps they will adopt a system whereby you can manage your costs, or perhaps they won’t. No matter. You still are ahead with electrons over hydrocarbons. You’re just far more ahead with off-peak electrons, and it’s difficult to find significantly cheaper gas.

Assuming the neighborhood power lines can support the load. Which mostly won’t be the case.”

Ah, but the neighborhood power lines are operating at far less than half capacity overnight, so the utilities could deliver more power to more homes without changing the infrastructure a whit. They would do so, of course, by offering “off peak” rates to encourage people to do discretionary electrical activities overnight. Perhaps running the dishwasher or washing machine, although those are trivial. You know what’s not trivial? Charging up an EV. Problem? Meet solution: Off Peak rates, with no infrastructure changes.

But just like free charging at stores & theaters, that can only be the case when EVs are a tiny minority of cars.

Maybe. Of course putting an intermediate level charger in front of a theater costs about $1 per hour, a slow charger about 25¢ per hour. By way of comparison, swiping my credit card for a movie costs the theater…about 50¢. Now I’m not saying they will line up 50 chargers or more in their parking lots - but businesses have taken stranger tacks to attract customers than that. So don’t write off what looks odd today. I’m sure the first person paying a restaurant bill with a Diners’ Club Card looked odd to the rest of the patrons sitting there, too.