Orange County is geographically small, but three different power companies serve it at three very different prices. That provides an uncommon opportunity to isolate what electricity rates do to EV adoption. I analyzed every vehicle registration in the county, controlling for nine non-price factors, from income and housing to politics and commutes. Where electricity is cheap, EVs run ahead of expectations. Where it's expensive, they fall behind.
Anaheim is the only city in Orange County that runs its own electric utility, and its rates turn home charging into the county’s cheapest “gas” by far. At the pump price as of publication ($5.60 in mid-August 2026, per AAA), charging at each utility’s average residential rate works out to about $1.40 a gallon in Anaheim, $2.45 across Edison’s territory, and $3.25 in SDG&E’s south OC:
| Who powers your home | Average residential rate | In gas terms | EV adoption vs prediction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaheim Public Utilities | ~20¢/kWh | ≈ $1.40/gal | +15% |
| Southern California Edison (most of OC) | 34.5¢/kWh | ≈ $2.45/gal | the yardstick |
| SDG&E (south OC) | 45.7¢/kWh | ≈ $3.25/gal | −10% |
Average residential rates: CPUC Public Advocates Office (SCE and SDG&E, 2026); Anaheim from its published schedules, including its standing rate adjustments. Gas equivalents assume a typical EV (3.5 mi/kWh) against a typical outgoing 25-mpg car at $5.60 a gallon (AAA OC average, August 2026).
An objection worth taking seriously: most home charging happens overnight, and every utility here sells an opt-in EV plan that discounts those hours. SDG&E’s overnight window is as cheap as any in the county. If a dedicated owner can plan-shop their way to cheap charging anywhere, why would the average rate move adoption?
Two reasons. First, the discount plans mostly reach people who already own the car: you buy the EV, then you go find the rate. The average rate is the electricity price a household lives with during the years it’s deciding, and the evidence says that’s the number people actually respond to. The landmark demonstration was run on Orange County’s own SCE–SDG&E border (Ito, American Economic Review, 2014), and UC Davis economists later showed EV adoption specifically tracks territory-level average prices statewide (NBER 29842). Second, Anaheim’s cheap rate takes no plan-shopping and almost no scheduling: it’s in effect nearly all week, while SDG&E’s deepest discount applies only in set windows. In Anaheim, the everyday rate and the cheap rate are essentially the same thing.
Anaheim’s overall EV share sits bottom-five in the county, and that’s the demographics talking. Against the Edison-territory norm, Anaheim has a lower average income, fewer college graduates, and more apartments: all factors that predict fewer EVs before the price of power even comes into play. The model adjusts for all of it. The 15% means Anaheim beats the expectation set by its own demographics, not the county average.
The likeliest alternative explanations are all represented in the model: if Anaheim’s edge were really about politics, charger availability, or commuting patterns rather than cheap electricity, controlling for those things would shrink it. It doesn’t. Anaheim lands 15% to 19% above prediction in every version of the model, and it isn’t a couple of neighborhoods carrying the city: six of Anaheim’s seven zip codes beat their predictions. A zip code’s politics, it turns out, adds almost nothing once income, education, and housing are counted, and public-charger density adds nothing at all.
The twin test survives too, and it’s worth being precise about what it shows. Yorba Linda skews a bit more single-family and owner-occupied than Anaheim Hills, so the model actually expects slightly more from it, and Yorba Linda delivers almost exactly that: 11.4% actual against 11.5% expected. Anaheim Hills, expected to land at 10.6%, registers 12.7% instead, beating its own prediction by about 20%. Two neighboring communities, one model; only the side with cheap electricity runs ahead of it.
The result that softens under this pressure is south OC’s. Politics and chargers don’t dent it. Commutes do. Commuting patterns appear to be a genuine predictor of EV adoption countywide, and south OC’s commute profile stands out from the rest of the county. Once the model accounts for that, it expects less from San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano, the two zips with most of the territory’s vehicles. Their shortfall mostly disappears because the bar dropped, not because more EVs appeared. Dana Point and Capistrano Beach, meanwhile, run below their predictions by double digits in every version of the model. Measured zip by zip, south OC runs 7 to 15% below prediction no matter what. That’s why I present Anaheim’s +15% as the firm number and south OC’s −10% as secondary.
The Anaheim over-performance also isn’t a hills-and-homeowners story: the renter-heavy flatland zips beat their predictions too. That fits the advice below better than it might seem, because renter-heavy is not plug-free. Roughly four in ten homes in those zips are houses, a rented house has the same driveway as an owned one, and at Anaheim’s rates even a standard wall outlet pays. The gate is a plug where you park, not a deed.
No matter how cheap the electricity, EVs don’t work equally well for everyone. For maximum convenience and savings, the first hurdle is simple: can you plug in where you sleep? Home charging and a second, gas-powered vehicle in the driveway make EV ownership extremely viable for most. No plug at home, no workplace charging, no other convenient or discounted option? Public fast charging at ~48¢/kWh costs more per mile than a good hybrid, so for many drivers looking to cut per-mile costs, the better answer is often a high-efficiency hybrid instead.
But if you live in Anaheim and can plug in at home, an EV will save you more than it will your friends and family in neighboring cities.
Shopping now? Browse Bestest-approved used EVs or hybrids.
How I measured it: I modeled every OC zip code’s expected EV adoption from nine facts about each zip: income, education, housing type, ownership, resident age, housing age, 2024 political lean, public charging ports per household, and commute time and mode. Together they explain about 91% of the differences between zips (the demographic and housing factors do most of that work), and the two price-extreme territories were held out of the model’s training, so their gaps are measured against the rest of the county, not themselves. I then compared expectation to actual DMV registrations, zip by zip. UC Davis economists documented the same effect statewide years ago: electricity prices show up in EV adoption. Their published elasticity predicts a larger effect than I measure for a rate gap this size, making my number the conservative one. It’s an observational finding: “consistent with,” not proof, and zip-level patterns describe neighborhoods, not any individual household. I stress-tested it: Anaheim’s gap holds whether zips are weighted equally or by fleet size, under model forms with curved income terms, and with any combination of the political, charger, and commute factors included or dropped; it lands 12–20% above prediction across every variant, and I report a conservative middle. South OC’s shortfall is the less settled of the two headline figures: it survives the political and charger controls, and its zips individually run 7–15% below prediction in every variant, but the fleet-weighted version shrinks when the commute factors enter, driven by the model’s treatment of San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano. Fuel-cost equivalents apply 3.5 mi/kWh against a 25-mpg car at AAA’s OC gas average, using each utility’s average residential rate; Anaheim’s TOU-2 all-in rate is essentially the same ~20 cents. Cheap-window widths from published time-of-use schedules: APU’s off-peak covers 143 of the week’s 168 hours, SCE’s EV-plan off-peak 133, and SDG&E’s super-off-peak about 78. Anaheim charging figures include the utility’s published Rate Stabilization Adjustment factors (Schedule RSA: power-cost adjustment 2.0¢/kWh above 10 kWh/day, environmental mitigation 1.5¢/kWh on all kWh; an EV’s charging load effectively pays both).
Method & sources: CA DMV “Vehicle Fuel Type Count by Zip Code” (data.ca.gov), Jan 2020–2026 snapshots, light-duty, 88 OC zips; Census ACS 5-yr (2019–2023); 2024 precinct returns via UC Berkeley’s Statewide Database; DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center charger locations; Census ACS commute tables (2020–2024); APU Schedule TOU-2, SCE and SDG&E published tariffs (EV-TOU-5 total rates table eff. 1/1/2026); AAA OC gas average; Marketcheck dealer inventory across 23 OC cities, verified against Cars.com, Edmunds, CarGurus and Autotrader; academic references: Bushnell, Muehlegger & Rapson, “Energy Prices and Electric Vehicle Adoption,” NBER Working Paper 29842; Ito, “Do Consumers Respond to Marginal or Average Price? Evidence from Nonlinear Electricity Pricing,” American Economic Review 104(2), 2014.
The work behind this study, compiled by Claude from our session logs and audit records: about 25 hours of analysis, verification, and editing over three and a half weeks (log-measured, rounded down; publishing and promotion not counted). Data pulled and checked along the way: seven years of DMV registrations across 88 zip codes, Census demographics, three utilities' tariff documents read at the source, 2024 precinct-level election returns, public charger locations, and commute data. The text went through twenty drafts. Near the end, the model was rerun five different ways in an attempt to break the result; the Anaheim finding survived, one secondary finding softened, and the study says so.
About the author: Jason Allan is the Editor-in-Chief and founder of Bestest. He previously led vehicle reviews and ratings at Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, and he does the data analysis behind Bestest’s research, including this study. More about Jason. Questions or data requests: jason@shopbestest.com.
