How do people think this could be improved?

Higher utilisation would drive down the standing charge per customer.

Along similar line, shared capacity and battery backed rapid charging would better utilise a smaller cheaper grid connection, thus lower standing charge.

Combining shared capacity and wanting to give best customer experience (no queuing), it would mean installing as many charging heads as possible. Once hit a critical number, could also offer a 2 tier pricing system, people in a rush tell the chargers to charge at max rate, people who don't mind staying 40min (eg food) could tell chargers to charge with available power for cheaper.


Personally, I think rapid charging should not be the main focus. It should only be used when driving en-route somewhere. Not the default option when away from home as it is now due to ease of use. Cheaper destination charging, mainly hotel car parks, should be the main focus for cheaper charging away from home.

 

Personally, I think rapid charging should not be the main focus. It should only be used when driving en-route somewhere. Not the default option when away from home as it is now due to ease of use. Cheaper destination charging, mainly hotel car parks, should be the main focus for cheaper charging away from home.

A nice idea but hasn't worked for us in the real world.

We visit a place in Hayling Island occasionally. There are no publicly available chargers on the island, the nearest chargers are podpoints in the Havant Tesco or Teslas on an industrial estate ,both 7 miles away, hence the only practical choice is to use a rapid charger.

Stayed at a small hotel near Durham recently, the nearest slow charger was a mile away, that's not useful. In France a convenient slow charger near a hotel we stayed in was occupied on the night we stayed, so useless. They can also be very expensive.

We'll carry on using rapid chargers.

 

The term 'standing charges' isn't really correct. High capacity electricity connections pay a standing charge, and a significant 'availability charge' for the level of kVA the site needs. This can run into £1000s per month. you can't avoid these ongoing costs; they aren't going to get cheaper.

Add to that the high initial costs of setting up a new site or upgrading the electrical connection, and that can be in the tens of thousands. This investment needs to be paid for somehow.

 

"around 20p-30p of the price paid per kWh when charging at a rapid or ultra-rapid hub is now taken as part of the grid’s standing order charge "

WTF...is this means that everyone that uses the charger pays this "standing order charge" with every plug in? If you have 20 cars today and they pull 1000kW, this is staggering £200/300 quid A DAY on standing chargers alone?? This cannot be right, is it?
A hub with 5 rapids, makes between £1000 and £1500 every day just on that Robbing ba$tards....

 

"around 20p-30p of the price paid per kWh when charging at a rapid or ultra-rapid hub is now taken as part of the grid’s standing order charge "

WTF...is this means that everyone that uses the charger pays this "standing order charge" with every plug in? If you have 20 cars today and they pull 1000kW, this is staggering £200/300 quid A DAY on standing chargers alone?? This cannot be right, is it?
A hub with 5 rapids, makes between £1000 and £1500 every day just on that Robbing ba$tards....

5 rapids at 350kW is 1750kVA. The electrical distribution grid charges £1/kVA/month, so it’s £1750 per month even if no cars are using the chargers. That’s just the availability charge before any standing charges or infrastructure costs to set it up.

 

I think this is why Tesla can afford to drop the price on some of their sites to 50p/kWh or less. Their cars automatically route customers to superchargers, and opening the less busy sites to all EVs means they can maximise utilisation. Looking at sites like Luton for instance, it's rare to see less than 50% occupancy now. Assuming that 50% of stalls there (8) are dispensing 50kW average across the day, then the site is selling 400kWh every hour at, say, a 10p/kWh gross margin -- £40 an hour.

That means even if they are spending, say, £300 a day in keeping that site connected to the grid, if they just keep utilisation high, the equipment is profitable. And Tesla's policy is that they want to install this kit for their customers as it sells more cars, so they aren't necessarily as worried about spending several million installing a site, it's almost a marketing/sales expenditure from which they expect to generate car sales, and any extra usage is just gravy for them since it pays for maintenance and grid costs.

There's a 6-station Instavolt hub just across the road there, and the data shows that it rarely has more than 2 stalls in use, and only has more when the supercharger is completely full.

It's also why Ionity offers a subscription now: if you can keep people 'in network' by binding them to a subscription, you can increase utilisation of your own chargers, which means it's practical to sell electricity at nearer to cost price. Utilisation is the key...

 

This is it! It's supply and demand; there's no use having a 4, 6, 8 (..more?) bay rapid charge station stood empty. Sure, there's a balancing act between the cost to serve each charge (the plug just got a tiny bit more wear & tear on it, there is likely a fee for credit card charges / app backend payments, and there were several kWh of electricity bought from the supplier to dispense), versus the cost per hour that the charger has (presumably, the groundworks to install it need paying back, the daily fee for the grid connection, and the resting power draw - the screens are lit, the site is floodlit, etc).

So subscriptions, or offpeak overnight prices seem to make a lot of sense. I don't understand the view of companies like Geniepoint, Gridserve, Applegreen, MFG, etc to therefore just charge a high price 24/7.

 

This is click bait media again. Yes it is a standing charge for the whole site and the cost depends on utilisation of the chargers. Osprey are one that is going to go bust because they do not have the through put. Tesla have been quick to recognise this and see that at all costs they must keep the utilisation rate regardless of profitabality would be my guess.

The people with the ace cards are those organisations who already have paid for the big connection eg supermarkets and workplaces. Many of the original paid for connections would have had a just in case element suitable for EV charging now but also they can be on an estate where the leccy infrastructure cost were shared out.

The Gov gave out big grants for some of these hubs to have upgrades when they installed eg Exeter services.

I dont really see what the problem is as every industrial site etc has to pay costs.

I have been saying for a long time now that i believe there is no business case for on route stand alone charging.

Paid for destination charging will become king (or queen)

 

Yep, the issue is the low utilisation of a lot of the rapid network. Especially for small sites with a couple of chargers. Bigger sites have more even usage and do power sharing so the total grid connection per charger can be smaller.

i.e. a single 350kW charger needs a 350kW grid connection, whereas a site with 20 350kW chargers can get away with 2000kW, because the typical charging rate, accounting for time to pull in and out, is <100kW.

There are also economies of scale to grid connections; a big connection near the transmission nodes is a lot cheaper per MW than a small one on the end of the distribution network.

In short, there's scope for costs to decrease as super-hubs become a big fraction of the total sockets on the network.

Tesla's peak pricing is also a lot more cost-reflective and practical than most other operators. There's not much usefulness to super-off-peak rapid pricing midnight-7AM.

 

This all stems from the change in the way DUoS charges were calculated starting in 2022. The original review started back somewhere around 2017. The issue at the time was that for large commercial and industrial users your annual charges were determined by your consumption in the 'triad periods', TNUoS for 1/2-hour metered sites still work this way. The triad periods are, I believe, the 3 highest demand 3-hour periods in the year, where those periods are separated by a number of clear days (10?). The largest users got really good at driving their demand down to near 0 in that time, so basically paid almost nothing for their distribution. Given that connections are sized by peak demand and the maintenance costs at least partially scale by time near peak this was leading to folks that could not alter their demand in these times, eg folks with electric heating but no time or ability to look ahead as to when the triads might be, paying for the costs born by others. The current model was pretty universally supported by all players when it was signed off.

The results is that we moved from triads for the 'fixed asset' costs to /day based charges. That is either the /MPAN based or the capacity based. The we have the /kWh that is based on the green/amber/red periods (this accounts for loading as the triad peaks tend to be in the late afternoon/early evening). These periods differ by DNO region as their temporal demand profile differs. Many of the charging models, which now have the /kVA/day capacity charges had reasonable charges and significant over capacity penalties. This meant getting a balance as to how much you 'ask for' and how much you actually use right a challenge. If I remember correctly the over capacity charge applies uses the sites peak consumption in the preceding X months (X=3?) and then applies it to every day. So if you are a site that typically needs 500kVA but then one day due to a spike in demand you hit 750kV for 1/2-hour you would pay the over capacity charge on 250kVA every day for the next 3 months. Using ENW charges for this year the capacity charge is 9.34p/kVA/day and the over capacity is 9.34p/kVA/day. It used to be significantly higher, so it might have been 8.2p/kVA/day for the capacity and 12.5p/kVA/day for over capacity. So finding the balance is critical. Given that most sites don't vary their prices day-to-day, for lots of reasons, it can be catastrophic for a site to go high utilisation, with high peak loads, a few times a year.

One thing CPOs could do is have slightly different regional pricing, in addition to temporal pricing. So from next year a 500kVA, with no over capacity charge, site in NW England will go from £58.44/day in MPAN and capacity charges for DUoS to £38.95/day. For a site with 5% utilisation that drives the cost /kWh from 9.74p to 6.49p/day. Incidentally that same site would see the delivery DUoS charges in the 16:00-19:00 red period drop by 4.84p. So they could drop their charges by 9.7p/kWh at this times and stand still. On the cost side, if you are not close to hitting your capacity depending on how you pay for wholesale electricity there will be almost no benefit in charging more or less depending on time of the day. It's all about managing utilisation.

 

Some battery buffering may end up being helpful too, even for the bigger sites; if you can drop your usage in the peak periods, you can save a lot of money on distribution charges. And maybe recharge overnight for cheap. And possibly even find other ways to make money out of your battery.

 

There's not much usefulness [for EV owners] to super-off-peak rapid pricing midnight-7AM.

And maybe recharge [static batteries at chargers] overnight for cheap.

... If I'm out from midnight to 7am, and there's a discount, I'd want to be able to take it. The Tesla chargers near me drop to 25-ish p/kWh overnight, and are pretty busy for it. There's a MFG 8-bay charger that I sometimes drive past at a similar time of day: Ghost town.

 

I imagine you get a lot of minicab drivers at those sites. They often work antisocial hours and can plan around charger pricing. Also, I bet there's a lot of shared knowledge about the most competitive sites, what gets busy at what time, etc. The Luton site I mention above seems to be very popular with airport taxis for obvious reasons, it's only 5 min from the terminal building.

 

Indeed - round Manchester, DPD have a fleet of electric delivery vans. At 23:00 (when the pricing goes cheap for charging) there's a load of them at the two public Tesla Superchargers (Trafford Centre, and the one by the Etihad). Similarly there are a few who are enjoying the 25p rates at the Be-ev charging hubs, too.

Taxis are another excellent point - if they're going to be working until 4 or 5am, a couple of 10-15 min rapid charges might work well (if not parked at home to take advantage of cheap overnight domestic rates).

 

Ban chademo

 

I would like the capacity charges to be distributed (at least at charging sites) according to electricity used rather electricity theoretically available. I understand that's how it used to be done. This would bring down the costs for lower utilised sites and allow those CPOs to charge lower prices. Right now the system incentivises CPOs to only build and operate sites in extremely high demand areas, whereas we need a charging network that is broad in extent. At the moment the system penalises a company that builds a good site somewhere a bit out of the way where utilisation will be low but it might be really important to remove a black spot and enable more EV uptake in future. The current system might well be appropriate once everyone is driving EVs and the market is more mature.