NV Energy's New 'Demand Charge' Is a Masterclass in Screwing Over Your Customers
Let’s get one thing straight. When a monopoly utility company starts talking about “fairness,” you should grab your wallet and run. NV Energy, in its infinite wisdom, has cooked up a new billing scheme that’s so brazenly anti-consumer it feels like a parody. They call it a “peak demand charge.” I call it a shakedown.
Here’s the deal, stripped of all the corporate jargon they hope you won’t understand. NV Energy wants to find the single 15-minute window each day where you use the most electricity. Not when the grid is buckling under the summer heat, mind you. Just your personal peak. Did you dare to run the air conditioner, the oven, and the dishwasher at the same time? Congratulations, you’ve just hit the jackpot. A penalty jackpot. They’ll measure that 15-minute burst in kilowatts and slap a special charge on it.
This is like a gym charging you your normal monthly fee, but then adding a surprise surcharge because you had the audacity to lift your heaviest weight of the day. It doesn't matter if the gym was empty or if you were the only one there. You used the equipment "intensely," so you owe them more. It's a fundamentally dishonest way to frame a price hike, punishing you not for how much you use, but for the way you use it.
They say it's about creating a "rate design alternative" reflective of Nevada's "uniqueness." Give me a break. Nevada isn’t that unique. In fact, no other investor-owned utility in the entire country is mandating this kind of charge on residential customers. So what’s so special about Nevada? Are our electrons different? Offcourse not. What's unique is that the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) actually fell for it.
The Not-So-Hidden War on Solar
This whole scheme isn't just a money grab. No, that's too simple—it's a targeted assassination of the rooftop solar industry in Nevada. And they’re not even being subtle about it.
NV Energy has been whining for years that solar customers aren't paying their "fair share," claiming they’re being subsidized by everyone else to the tune of $50 million a year. Their solution? This demand charge, which disproportionately hammers solar users. As one solar owner pointed out, his peak usage will now be calculated at night, when his panels are useless and he’s forced to draw from the grid. This is also, conveniently, when overall grid demand is at its lowest. How does that make any sense?
It gets worse. For new solar customers in Northern Nevada, they’re also changing how they credit you for the excess energy you generate. Instead of calculating it monthly, they’ll do it every 15 minutes. This guts the value of solar, pushing the break-even point for a system from eight or nine years to maybe 15. Who in their right mind would make that investment now? It’s a death sentence for residential solar growth, packaged with a pretty little bow of corporate doublespeak.
You can almost picture the scene at the PUC consumer session: fluorescent lights humming over a room filled with people clutching their power bills like evidence in a murder trial. You have folks like Vince Vilan and Michael Cook, who thought they were doing the right thing by investing in clean energy, now getting punished for it. Meanwhile, an NV Energy spokesperson gets up and says, with a straight face, "I totally understand the folks who feel like they can't trust NV Energy right now." You understand? That’s like an arsonist telling you he understands why you’re upset your house is on fire. This is the part that drives me crazy. The bureaucratic indifference. It reminds me of trying to cancel a cable subscription, where you're passed through an endless phone tree designed to make you give up and just keep paying. This isn't a bug; it's the feature. They expect you to get confused, get tired, and eventually just accept it.
A Legal Hail Mary
Thankfully, not everyone is rolling over. The state’s own Bureau of Consumer Protection (BCP) has stepped in, filing a petition that basically says the PUC’s decision is illegal. Flat-out illegal. Nevada law explicitly prohibits mandatory time-of-day rates unless a customer chooses it. The BCP points to the PUC’s own order, which admits the demand charge “‘varies based on the time during which the electricity is used.” It’s an open-and-shut case of a regulator ignoring the very laws it’s supposed to enforce.
Jon Wellinghoff, Nevada’s first consumer advocate and a former top federal energy regulator, says the BCP is "dead right legally." That’s a pretty damning assessment. So we have a utility pushing a rate structure that’s unheard of anywhere else in the country, that actively discourages clean energy, and that the state’s own consumer watchdog says is against the law. And the PUC approved it anyway, according to a report on how the NV Energy peak demand charge, tweak to net metering, violate state law, say experts • Nevada Current.
What happens now? There’s a hearing on November 18 for the PUC to reconsider. But don’t hold your breath. A former BCP manager, David Chairez, said he can’t recall the Commission ever significantly changing its mind after one of these petitions. He suspects they might just tweak the wording to make it harder to challenge in court—the next inevitable step.
So the fight moves from a public hearing to a legal slog. The public’s response has been, in the BCP’s words, "vehemently negative, confounding and filled with fear of rate-shock." But when has a utility monopoly ever cared about public fear when there are profits to be made? They’re betting that our anger will fade, that the legal fees will pile up, and that in the end, we’ll all just learn to live with it. And honestly...