EV Rate Plan: Reading the Real Overnight Price

Georgia Power will sell you electricity at 2.2272 cents per kilowatt-hour between 11 at night and 7 in the morning. That is not marketing copy. It is the number printed on Schedule TOU-OA-15, the Time of Use – Overnight Advantage tariff, under the heading Energy Charges, effective with bills rendered for the billing month of June 2026. I read the sheet on 22 August 2026.

A 15 kWh night at that rate costs 33 cents.

It does not cost 33 cents. It costs about 95, and the difference is not hidden anywhere. It is published in four other documents on the same website, each named by title on the two pages of the tariff sheet itself. The energy charge is one term in a sum, and the sum has to be assembled by hand, because nobody assembles it for you.

Five documents make one price

TOU-OA-15 has three energy charges, not one: on-peak 30.3495¢, off-peak 10.3598¢, super off-peak 2.2272¢. Under them the sheet lists its own obligations. Environmental Compliance Cost Recovery. Demand Side Management Schedule. Fuel Cost Recovery. Municipal Franchise Fee. Those are not footnotes. Each is a live schedule with a number in it, and the bill is the sum of all five.

Pull them and the stack looks like this, for one super off-peak kilowatt-hour on a secondary distribution service, outside city limits:

Inside city limits the franchise fee is 3.0843 percent instead, and the answer is 6.4819¢. All rates as published on 22 August 2026; the first four carry June 2026 effective dates and MFF-11 carries January 2025.

Look at which line does the damage. Fuel cost recovery is 3.7441 cents, larger than the energy charge it sits on top of. That single rider is why a headline of two cents cannot survive contact with a bill. The percentage riders are almost decorative next to it: ECCR and DSM-R together add 0.32 cents, because they are percentages of a base that is tiny.

Note how that 3.7441 gets there, because it is the one mapping in the stack that crosses documents. TOU-FCR-7 has no super off-peak tier. It publishes two, and defines the second as "all hours not included above in the On-Peak period including all weekends and the calendar months of October through May." Its On-Peak is 2 to 7 p.m. on summer weekdays — the same window TOU-OA-15 uses. So an hour at 2 a.m. is Off-Peak for fuel purposes because the fuel schedule's own two periods leave nowhere else for it to go, not because either sheet says "super off-peak fuel is billed at the off-peak rate." Neither sheet says that. The partition does the work.

The order the five are applied in is my reading, not a published formula, and every total in this article depends on it. No sheet sets out a sequence. ECCR-15 and DSM-R-16 each say they increase "base bill calculations." MFF-11 says its rate applies to "total revenues of each bill." From those two phrases I have assembled it in one particular order — per-kWh energy charge first, then the two percentage riders on that base, then the per-kWh fuel rider, then the franchise fee on the whole thing — and nothing on the sheets confirms that is how Georgia Power's billing system does it. A different sequence moves the answer by tenths of a cent rather than whole cents, so the shape of the argument survives. The exact figures may not. Check yours against a real statement.

There is also a daily customer charge of $0.4603, or $13.81 across a 30-day month. It is unavoidable, and it is identical on Georgia Power's standard Schedule R-31. It changes your effective cost per kWh and it does not change the comparison between plans. Those are two different facts and they get confused constantly.

TOU-OA is not Georgia Power's only schedule with electric vehicles in view, and it is worth knowing why the other one is not an option. TOU-FCR-7's applicability list names Time of Use – Electric Vehicle Charging, and that schedule exists: TOU-EVC-5, also effective with June 2026 bills. Read its applicability line and it rules out a house — it covers "non-residential premises dedicated to electric vehicle charging served behind a dedicated meter," and it opens with a basic service charge of $154.48 a month. It is written for a commercial charging site. For a residential driver in Georgia the live choices are the ordinary residential schedule and the time-of-use ones.

The window holds still while the price underneath it moves

TOU-OA's super off-peak block is 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., Monday through Sunday, every calendar month. Eight hours, no seasonal shuffle. That is about as simple as a time-of-use window gets, and each of the schedules below complicates it in a different direction.

The rest of the same schedule shifts hard. On-peak exists only from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays in June through September. From October through May there is no on-peak period at all: every hour is either super off-peak or off-peak. The plan is really two plans wearing one name, and for eight months of the year the expensive tier is simply absent.

Now watch a different utility move the same pieces. Dominion Energy Virginia's Schedule 1EV — a closed pilot, so read it as a specimen and not as something to join — was filed 9 December 2025 and is effective for usage on and after 1 January 2026. It also fixes its super off-peak window and never moves it: 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., both seasons. Four hours. What moves is the price inside it. The generation charge for super off-peak kWh is 0.0155¢ from 16 April through 15 October and 1.6902¢ from 16 October through 15 April. Same clock, 109 times the rate, decided by a date on a calendar.

Two things follow from that sheet. A four-hour window at 7.7 kW is about 30 kWh, enough for most nights and not for all of them, so window width is a real constraint you can test against the kWh your commute actually needs. And the 0.0155¢ figure is the clearest possible demonstration that a published per-kWh rate can be the price of nothing at all. It is a generation component. Schedule 1EV adds a distribution charge of 0.0178¢ on super off-peak kWh, a transmission charge of 0.970¢ on all kWh, a basic customer charge of $7.58 a month, and then "all applicable riders in the Exhibit of Applicable Riders, including non-bypassable charges." Generation, distribution and transmission alone come to 1.0033¢, so the advertised number is about one and a half percent of the delivered price before a single rider is added, and a smaller share after.

Neither Dominion schedule can be joined today. Schedule 1EV states that service under it "shall terminate effective November 30, 2018," caps the pilot at 750 participants, and adds that no new customer may take service after that date; existing participants were allowed to stay, which is why the sheet is still refiled with current rates every year. Its companion Schedule EV — the one for a charger on its own meter, which the sheet permits as "a sub-meter behind the Schedule 1 meter" — carries the identical closure date and the same 750-participant cap. I am reading both as specimens, not options: they show one way of quoting a price, separately metered, unbundled, at the component level. Schedule EV's own basic customer charge is $3.14 a month. Spread over 450 kWh that is 0.70¢/kWh before a single electron moves, which is the tax on a second meter that separate-meter comparisons tend to leave out.

California publishes the total, and it is three and a half times higher

PG&E's Electric Schedule EV2, billed as EV2-A, does the opposite thing. Sheet 2 carries a table headed TOTAL BUNDLED RATES, and the off-peak figure in it is $0.22558 per kWh, summer and winter alike. That is the delivered price. No assembly required.

Sheet 3 then unbundles it, and reading that once is worth the time, because it shows what a bundled total contains. Fifteen line items: generation, distribution, transmission, transmission rate adjustments, reliability services, public purpose programs, nuclear decommissioning at negative 0.002 cents, competition transition charges, energy cost recovery, a wildfire fund charge, a new system generation charge at zero, a wildfire hardening charge, a recovery bond charge, a recovery bond credit that cancels it exactly, and a bundled power charge indifference adjustment of negative $0.01011. Add the winter column and you get $0.22558. Add the summer column and you get $0.22558 again, because generation rises by precisely what distribution falls. Sheet 2 is dated 1 June 2026 under Advice 7921-E and Decision D.26-04-036; sheets 1, 3 and 4 are dated 1 March 2026 under Advice 7846-E. Read 22 August 2026.

So a Californian on EV2-A pays 22.558¢ for the kilowatt-hour that costs a Georgian 6.36¢ on TOU-OA. Neither figure is representative of anything. There are thousands of distribution utilities in the United States and these are two of them, with two different regulators, two different fuel mixes and two different sets of costs being recovered.

What EV2-A gives back is time. Off-peak runs midnight to 3 p.m. every day including weekends and holidays, fifteen hours a day, which is a completely different planning problem from an eight-hour or four-hour block. Peak is 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. at $0.53809 in summer and $0.41099 in winter, and partial-peak covers 3 to 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. to midnight. The trap is the evening. Plug in at six, let the car start immediately, and 15 kWh costs $8.07 in July instead of $3.38. On that schedule the timer is the tariff.

PG&E also charges a Base Services Charge per customer per day, graduated by income tier at $0.19713, $0.39688 or $0.79343. The top tier is $23.80 across a 30-day month. The same three figures appear on Schedule E-1, PG&E's standard residential rate, so this charge rarely decides whether to switch, and so does the same California Climate Credit of $36.18 per household, paid in the August and September bill cycles.

The charge that bills one hour and ignores the other 719

Georgia Power's Schedule TOU-RD-12, Time of Use – Residential Demand, advertises off-peak energy at 1.5569¢ per kWh. Stack the same riders and it lands at 5.5886¢, cheaper than TOU-OA's super off-peak and available in far more hours, since off-peak on TOU-RD means everything outside 2 to 7 p.m. on summer weekdays.

Then there is a third line on the sheet:

Demand Charge: Maximum kW ... $12.44 per kW

and, further down, the definition that matters: "Maximum kW shall be the highest 60-minute kW measurement during the current month." Not the highest during on-peak hours. The highest, full stop, 2 a.m. included.

A 32-amp wall box at 240 volts draws 7.68 kW. If nothing in your house has ever pulled that much in a single hour, the charger sets your monthly maximum by itself, and 7.68 × $12.44 = $95.54, which grosses up to roughly $110 with the riders. Spread over 450 kWh of charging that is 24.5 cents per kWh on top of the 5.6. The cheapest energy rate on this page becomes the most expensive delivered price on it.

More often the house already peaks somewhere. If your existing monthly maximum is 6 kW and the charger pushes a 2 a.m. reading to 8.7 kW, the incremental demand is 2.7 kW, about $39 grossed up, about 8.6¢/kWh. Still real. Still invisible in any comparison built only from energy rates. A demand charge is also the clearest case in which buying a smaller charger has a direct financial return, which inverts the usual answer to whether a bigger unit is worth it: on a demand tariff, 24 amps costs less every month than 48 for reasons that have nothing to do with how fast the car fills.

Your oven is now on the EV plan too

Every rate above except Dominion's separate-meter schedule is a whole-home plan. Move onto it and the air conditioner moves with you.

Here is a June bill for a Georgia household using 1,100 kWh, ignoring the car, computed both ways with the rider stack applied in full. One substitution matters: R-31 is not on the time-of-use fuel schedule, so its fuel rider is FCR-27 at 3.8069¢ per kWh for June through September, not TOU-FCR-7's 3.7441¢. R-31's summer energy charges are tiered — 8.7738¢ for the first 650 kWh, 14.5738¢ for the next 350, 15.0828¢ above 1,000 — and both schedules carry the same $0.4603 daily service charge. Everything here is the June 2026 revision, read 22 August 2026.

The on-peak window is about 110 of the roughly 720 hours in a summer billing month, near 15 percent, so a perfectly flat household lands around there. Air conditioning is not flat. It works hardest in exactly those five hours.

Now add the car: 450 kWh a month, all of it after 11 p.m. On R-31 that lands in the summer tier above 1,000 kWh and costs $95.79, an all-in 21.29¢/kWh. On TOU-OA it costs $28.64, an all-in 6.36¢/kWh. The car saves $67.15.

Subtract one from the other. The plan is worth $50.40 a month to a household with 18 percent of its load on-peak, $17.92 to one at 30 percent, and nothing at all at 36.6 percent, where the whole-home penalty has eaten the entire saving on the car. Most Georgia households will not reach that share. Someone home all day in August with a heat pump running might. The variable that decides it is the house, not the vehicle, and that is the part every EV rate calculator I have opened leaves out.

Two caveats on that table. It assumes 20 percent of household kWh already falls in the super off-peak window, and it uses a 30-day month. Change either and the numbers move. The structure does not.

Running the same arithmetic on your own tariff

You cannot run this from an article. You can run it from your own tariff, and it takes about an hour.

1. Find the schedule, not the marketing page. Search your utility's site for "tariff" or "rate schedule" and get the PDF with a schedule number on it. Note the number, the revision and the effective date, then write today's date beside them.
2. Copy every rider the schedule names. Look for headings like Fuel Cost Recovery, Environmental Compliance, Franchise Fee, Rider, or Adjustment. Each is a separate document with its own current rate.
3. Build the running total for your charging hours, and write down the order you applied things in, because you are choosing it. The order used above is: base energy charge, then percentage riders on that base, then per-kWh riders, then any fee that the sheet applies to the total bill. The schedules imply that sequence; none of them states it. If a rider says "base bill" it goes on the base, and if it says "total" it goes last, and past that you are guessing until you can check the result against a real statement.
4. Do it again for the plan you are on now, in the hours you actually use electricity. This is the step people skip, and skipping it is what produces the "I switched and my bill went up" post. Comparing a new plan's overnight rate against your current all-in average compares a component to a total, and the component always wins.
5. Pull twelve months of interval data from your utility account and sort your existing kWh into the new plan's periods. Most utilities with smart meters export hourly usage as CSV. Multiply each bucket by its all-in rate from step 3, then total it.
6. Add the car separately. Monthly EV kWh times the all-in super off-peak rate, against the same kWh at your current marginal rate, which on a tiered schedule is the top tier you reach and not the average.

Then subtract, household penalty first and car saving second. If the answer is positive by less than a few dollars, read the Term of Contract clause before you act, because a twelve-month minimum turns a thin win into a year of a thin win. If your schedule carries a demand charge, add its grossed-up monthly cost to the new-plan side before you compare anything at all.

One thing this arithmetic will not settle is whether home is even where the kilowatt-hours should come from in a given week. That comparison runs against what a public session actually charges per kWh, and on a demand tariff the answer occasionally surprises people.

Rates here were read on 22 August 2026 from the tariff PDFs linked above. Every one of them carries a revision number and an effective date, and every one of them will be superseded. Check the schedule, not the article.