I was made aware of a program offered yesterday for new, existing owners of electric vehicles in Southern California Edison territories. This is an interesting rebate in that participating vehicles need not be purchased new. A particular vehicle and household can use the rebate once, but up to two more subsequent owners of that same EV are also eligible. (If the owner that applied for the rebate re-sells the car, the buyer, can apply for another rebate in the SCE territory for up to two more subsequent owners.) This applicability for used and currently owned vehicles is fundamentally different than the original California state program which was limited to brand new EVs only. Furthermore, providing for future resale to other SCE utility customers, shows a commitment to the future for this program.
So, what exactly does this rebate offer. In a nutshell, $450 a car (as of the writing of this article on May 23, 2017.) Considering that the program is for SCE customers, it means that your address and utility matters for this. This whole process should take most people less than fifteen minutes to complete, assuming they have ready access to the documents on hand and that their car registration is scanned or photographed for the evidence requested by the Center for Sustainable Energy (who I assume are the same administrators for this program.)
Where to start, well, the SCE “special” website that is gathering all applications for this website is https://www.scecleanfuel.com/. Understanding that you may have some additional questions, here are the FAQs – https://www.scecleanfuel.com/faqs.
So, what do you need to prepare for filing.
In my case, I had to create a login for scecleanfuel.com (this is different than your regular service account) and is a rather straight forward process that took longer to read all the disclosures than actually click and accept the terms.
Second, I had to find and obtain my service number (which is readily available on the PDF bill (or paper bill)) from SCE. Without the bill, it’s available on sce.com if you have a registered account on THAT system.
Example:
Next, you fill out the online form on scecleanfuel.com.
Here are the screens to fill out, in reality, it’s one long one.
In total after clicking submit, the next page (which I forgot to get a screenshot of) will require you to upload a scan of your registration. Luckily, I typically scan my registration for my records, so this is good.
Once you upload your registration, your application should show the status of the application and you wait.
Here is a screenshot of the page for our application for our two EVs.
We filed yesterday afternoon (May 22, 2017) and our applications were already in the mid-hundreds. About 22 hours later, my mom (assisted by my sister) filed hers and her application was in the one thousand applications… I’m not sure how many applications will be accepted for this, but I always feel that these are almost always first come, first serve, so get your paperwork ready and apply.
If we sell an EV and there are still funds in the program, subsequent purchasers (up to two more times) of an EV that is placed in service at SCE territory may be eligible for this rebate again. The amounts may change in subsequent years, but it’s a nice little benefit for being a customer of Southern California Edison.
On the confirmation email for this program:
Once we receive a copy of your permanent vehicle registration we will review your application for completeness and accuracy. This process may take up to 30 calendar days. Delays beyond normal processing times may occur. If your application is approved, we typically issue rebate checks within 90 days of application approval date. All status updates are communicated through your email. As we cannot guarantee our emails will not be blocked by your email server, we highly recommend periodically visiting scecleanfuel.com/login to check the status of your application.
So, now, we wait.
Update on the wait… Applications Approved (a few weeks later)
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