[Paul_Moxhay]

There has today been a decision regarding the issue over whether it is permitted for EV charging network operators to have fees per kWh.

Until now there have been legal barriers to anyone reselling electricity for a profit if they were not an authorised electricity supply company. This meant that the likes of Chargemaster etc could not charge per kWh when setting their fees. The recent announcement by Chargermaster saw their fees set in blocks of time rather than per kWh for this very reason.

Now, well, as from 14th April, it will be permitted to resell electricity at a profit, with no maximum price, providing the electricity is sold to charge EVs!

See the ruling here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publicatio...resale-electricity-charging-electric-vehicles

This then now opens up the market for the likes of Chargemaster to adjust their pricing model to charge per KWh used.

I wonder if they will do the sensible thing or not?

 

[Paul]

The bit that concerns me is that there's no maximum price, and the reason given is "We expect this clarification to alleviate concerns that the MRP could act as a barrier to the commercial expansion of charge points".

To me this basically reads as UK Gov saying to Chargemaster et al "hey, don't worry, you can make as much as you like from the posts we subsidised for you, come and get it guys!" which is understandable, but unfair.

Overall though this is without doubt a really positive move by UK Gov.

Two questions now...

Will the operators, and most significantly Chargemaster PLC, act to increase transparency and fairness in their pricing models ASAP?

Did they know, or have indication this was coming? I would imagine they did, which would infer that the above may be unlikely.

We live in hope, do the right thing EV charge providers, you'll profit from it I'm sure!

 

[Paul_Moxhay]

Personally, I have no issue with the "no maximum price" aspect. There are very few products that have a regulated maximum price and I think that the market will enforce a significant degree of self-regulation. Companies have to eventually make a profit and so they need to set their own rates.

Chargemaster should already have a good idea of what might happen if they charge too much too soon in this EV transition period but I hope that they now recognise that over-charging will not work and this ruling gives them a great opportunity to re-jig their pricing model to incorporate per kWh pricing along with more reasonable prices overall and allow them to do it without losing face.

 

[Paul]

Personally, I have no issue with the "no maximum price" aspect. There are very few products that have a regulated maximum price and I think that the market will enforce a significant degree of self-regulation. Companies have to eventually make a profit and so they need to set their own rates.

But were not the excessive fees the problem in the first place? This doesn't help that, just makes it easier to expose... and we're just HOPING the companies will care.

And I really do hope they care enough to rethink, and rethink fast!

I still suspect they saw this coming, they could have delayed their pricing announcement until this was all in place and carried on "as is", it would cost them money just to back-track and "re-sticker" their charge posts!

Come on Chargemaster (et al) prove this ol' cynic wrong, introduce fair and transparent pricing for EV charging.

 

[Mark J Constable]

Brilliant - this should open things up a bit. I wonder if our submission helped, was ignored or got lost in the mail.

As painful as the removal of the maximum cap is in the short term, we argued for it as it will actually accelerate the arrival at the market rate, at the expense of some short term volatility.

 

[Paul]

I get the sense lots of the EV community now are just sort of holding their breath, waiting for the next move...



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[Paul_Moxhay]

But were not the excessive fees the problem in the first place? This doesn't help that, just makes it easier to expose... and we're just HOPING the companies will care.

I think you are right Paul... this doesn't help with the basic problem we had with the Chargemaster fees but it does make it much easier for them to set their fees more reasonably.

One of the reasons I suspect they set their fees so high was simply because they couldn't charge per kWh and so they had to set a fee that ensure they made a profit in all cases. This meant that in a lot of cases their fee was way too high because it had to make allowances for the people that didn't take much on each charge as well as those that charged to the max.

Per kWh charging breaks down the chargable unit to a much finer grain allowing a fixed fee plus a per kWh fee for the power taken. With this finer granularity it means that we can all be charged a more sensible rate regardless of how long we charge for or how fast we charge.

 

[Paul]

On and off-peak pricing could also be interesting, but I guess that'd just add an extra layer of complexity, at the moment clarity and parity with what folk are used to (fuel prices per litre and home elec. by kWh) are the main concerns I think we all share. This could be great news...

 

[Matt Beard]

I also think there was a lot of ignorance in the setting of Chargemaster tariffs. It is easy to imagine they think a rapid charger uses 50kWh per hour.

 

[Paul_Moxhay]

If it ran at 50kW, as we are led to believe they do, and if it ran at full power for the entire hour, which we know it doesn't, then it would use 50kWh in 1 hour

I am 100% certain this was not ignorance at Chargemaster and I believe that they knew exactly what they were doing. Perhaps they even already knew that the MSP decision was coming and wanted to pre-empt it with something we wouldn't be happy with just to replace it with something more reasonable. Who knows.

 

[Dean Hamer]

Excellent news. This is the only fair way of charging to use chargers.

Pay for the ACTUAL energy that you use!

Say you pull up at a rapid and charge from 80% to 98% that will take roughly 30mins. Which is roughly 4.5kWh. Charge master want to charge me £7.50 for this charge. £1.66 per kWh... Are you having a laugh? When domestic electricity costs £0.12.

The most I would be willing to spend is around the £0.50 per kWh for a rapid. Which would allow me to travel 4 miles per kWh this is on par what an efficient diesel would cost to run (12p a mile).

 

[SanSerif]

The more I use my car (only 2 weeks so far), the more I see public charging as irrelevant - or, at most, a fringe case requirement. Before I bought the car, I poured over maps of charging stations, studied local council strategies, specc'd DC charging and generally viewed public charging as as essential to EV ownership as petrol stations are to running a conventional car.

We're not unusual in being a two car family and the i3 has become our default vehicle for all journeys within 40 miles (or so) of home. That's 90%+ of all our driving. For longer trips we'd dust off the ICE, hire one (if we didn't own one) or, our preferred long distance solution - take a train.

*Destination* charging makes more sense; if you can charge at work or anywhere the car will be parked up as part of its use cycle then you effectively double your range at no time-cost.

Topping up mid-trip will always be a faff - even with an utterly reliable network of charge points. It's not something you're going to do frequently - if your usage requires doing this often then you have to question how appropriate an EV is for you. That's what I mean by "fringe case" - most people will do it only occasionally and many people will use an EV for years and never do it. A highish fee for those occasions is not unreasonable.

I do, however, have a REx! That said, even this has remained almost entirely unused to date (apart from experiments). I have done one trip were I *needed* it for 15 miles or so - and I could probably have avoided that if I'd slowed down (or benefited from the extra range of the BEV; or if I'd had destination charging while I slumbered in a boring meeting).

 

[Dean Hamer]

Me personally I would be willing to pay £20 a year for the subscription. £0.25 per kWh for level 2 and £0.50 per kWh for rapid charging.

 

[Dean Hamer]

£0.50p per kWh for rapid, full charge is gonna cost £10 at that rate, thats more than they proposing now!

I'm all for making the cost of rapid charging fair at the end of the day. Lets be honest we cant pay the basic rate of what we pay domestically around the £0.10-£0.15 kWh as these rapid chargers are expensive pieces of equipment. Factor in the installation costs and upkeep costs.

Lets say an efficient Diesel car costs 15p a mile to run. 80 miles will equate to £12 in Diesel.

20kWh in my Leaf will allow me to travel 80 miles. Call it £0.40 per kWh. £8 in electricity. Still a saving over Diesel.

When you say its more than their proposing now, not necessarily. They will charge you £7.50 every 30 mins, even when the charge rate drops off to 10A at 400v! It could take on some occasions 20-30 mins to get your charge rate from 80% to 98%!

Charge per kWh is the only fair way of doing it!

Luckily my daily commute is 50 miles a day - easy for my leaf. On the rare occasion I have something planned after I finish work that exceeds my 30-40 miles remaining on the GOM I would be more than happy to pay a premium to charge, as i'm saving over £2000 a year in fuel costs alone!!!!!

 

[Dean Hamer]

I think we would all agree to paying a premium for a rapid charge if we had a nice reliable network of rapids that you could 100% trust on them rare occasions you push the normal daily range.

I wouldn't hesitate about paying the premium one single bit, so long as the cost doesn't exceed the equivalent cost of 15p per mile of a diesel car.

 

[Paul_Moxhay]

I think it has to be charged per kWh and it must be cheaper than a reasonably diesel... say 50mpg.

50mpg at today's prices would be about 13p mile. Assuming I get 80 miles from a 24kWh charge (big assumption for the figures!) then that equates to 3 miles/kWh. If it were to be cheaper than diesel then for me that would equate to about 40p/kWh.

So for me, the starting point for me to be interested is about 40p/kWh.

Once they start charging per kWh and at less than about 40p/kWh then I would consider using them but to use them regularly I would need to see no ICEing and solid reliability.

 

[Matt Beard]

The way I see it you have to consider that anyone buying an EV has the option to buy an EREV or plug-in hybrid. You need to convince people to pick the EV rather than the hybrid. Full EVs tend to cost more than hybrids and are similar to EREVs, however an EV is a lot less convenient. So you either have to either hope the population in general will suddenly put ecology over their own financial interests, or public charging needs to be significantly cheaper than fueling a hybrid. It looks like no commercial charging network will be that cheap. I'm starting to think that the plug-in Prius is about as good as it will get in the UK.

 

[AndyG]

The way I see it you have to consider that anyone buying an EV has the option to buy an EREV or plug-in hybrid. You need to convince people to pick the EV rather than the hybrid. Full EVs tend to cost more than hybrids and are similar to EREVs, however an EV is a lot less convenient. So you either have to either hope the population in general will suddenly put ecology over their own financial interests, or public charging needs to be significantly cheaper than fueling a hybrid. It looks like no commercial charging network will be that cheap. I'm starting to think that the plug-in Prius is about as good as it will get in the UK.

Why the PIP, only 10ish mile on electric, the Volt and Ampera are more like 40 miles and the i3 more like 80 miles and are a far more of a realistic option.
The average car travels 12k a year. 12000 miles / 6 days a week / 50 weeks a year is 40 miles a day exactly what the Volt was designed for.

 

[Dean Hamer]

Give it 5 years and it will all change. We will be talking about how I can get 150 miles on a full change out of my 2018 Nissan Leaf ☺

Well I'm hoping I'll be saying I can get 200 miles out of my Tesla model E in five years time

I just feel sorry for the people who want to switch to EV's but have no off road parking for a charger at home.

 

[Matt Beard]

Why the PIP, only 10ish mile on electric, the Volt and Ampera are more like 40 miles and the i3 more like 80 miles and are a far more of a realistic option.
The average car travels 12k a year. 12000 miles / 6 days a week / 50 weeks a year is 40 miles a day exactly what the Volt was designed for.

Except that the vast majority of trips are very short (well within plug-in Prius range) with the average skewed by less frequent long trips (where you might expect to regret a BEV). Unless you really do loads of trips between 15 and 30 miles the Prius is probably better.