Michael Giberson
Competitive retail power company NRG plans to offer an “all you can eat” electric vehicle recharging plan in Houston early next year, expanding the offer to the Dallas area a little later. Likely too few electric vehicles will show up in Houston in the next year or so to make much of a dent in the retail power market, but in general electric vehicles should tend to recharge off-peak, improving the retailers power factor, and possibly tending to reduce average power costs a little. I assume they’ve done the analysis and understand what they are doing.
Perhaps it is a tool to attract high-income consumers to NRG’s retail power unit – Reliant Energy – for home electric service? Seems a little crazy to me, but that is one of the great things about the competitive Texas retail power system: retailers can do crazy things, and no public utility commission has to approve, and no captive ratepayer can be stuck with the bill. Competition works in mysterious ways.