[cah197]

Neat idea being trialled in California.

Supercharger costs are now 9 cents per kWh for off peak usage in an effort to reduce peak congestion:

Tesla tests Supercharger limited time discounts to offset expensive peak demand charges - Electrek

Tesla is apparently starting to test discounted rates at Supercharger stations in order to offset expensive peak demand charges. Do you think it’s going to work? Electric utilities are making large energy users pay “demand charges” during peak use that can be quite taxing, especially to charging...

electrek.co

Pretty cool if they offered that in Europe.

 

[Dennis]

California has some pretty expensive rates and I believe they're trying to slow down the demand charges around here by spreading the load to off peak times.

The original rate that Tesla had was actually lower to go to supercharge than charge during Summertime peak with my utility.

As opposed to other locales, we are still geographically constrained to our energy supplier here.

 

[dk6780]

Is this related to 'leccy costs (which could be spread by batteries) or to maximize use of the stalls which presumably lie relatively empty for most of the time? Or both?

 

[cah197]

Is this related to 'leccy costs (which could be spread by batteries) or to maximize use of the stalls which presumably lie relatively empty for most of the time? Or both?

An incentive to reduce congestion on the busiest stations, from what it seems.

I expect Tesla are still making money on that rate.

 

[dk6780]

Perhaps they are losing less than they would by increasing the size of the existing stations? You have to serve an awful lot of subsidised 'leccy to come close to the cost of a Supercharger, it's infrastructure and the land in certain areas of the West coast.

 

[cah197]

They’ve just announced record levels of planned investment in Superchargers.

This is probably just a measure to even out the peaks while the roll out of additional infrastructure takes place.

If it works for them I expect we’ll see it occur across the network.

Although this is bound to cause more confusion for Tesla newbies.

 

[Jon G]

Its a wierd one, it will shift demand of course as people will move things around to save money but if you supercharge only when you need to then you probably haven't got much control over it.

I've noticed they've put up the prices in a few places too. I recon its also time to get rid of referral supercharging miles too and just give people a £/$100 credit on accessories or £/$200 towards a new car - i recon that would go down better than people getting to the end of their 6 months and supercharging just to use up their left over miles..