I’m not so sure that needs to change. While the energy has a cost which must be paid for, at public chargers it’s the time in the parking space that is the more scarce commodity.
This is only because of the shortage of chargers for now. My home charger cost $450. Saving 6 tanks of gas paid for that. Add in running a 240V 50A line from my panel, and make it 10 or 12 tanks of gas. Even allowing for cost of charging - 1kWh - 10¢ -4km vs. $1.50/L for 10km gas - the install pays back in a matter of months and represents a serious ongoing savings.
Large scale L2 charger installs will of course require serious additional wiring, but for a fleet of trucks that otherwise would burn gas in stop-and-go traffic and idling, there’s still a serious savings medium term - not to mention far lower maintenance cost of the vehicle. Plus, if the business has a night-time down time, that’s ideal for charging the fleet; and uses electrical capacity off-peak that will smooth those peaks to encourage more generating capacity.
The thing is, nobody spent a lot of money expanding the gas retail network - plenty of independent companies got into that business for the profit. Initially, Tesla had to build a massive charging network because there was none. (It’s paying off, GM and Ford have announced they intend to use it too.) As time goes on, charging at work or at home will be as standard as public charging, but even slow L2 will be a bonus for any business to provide customers. My Model 3 can charge up to 40A/240V and add almost 60km (40mi) in an hour. That’s 10kWh or about $1 of electricity. As a bonus while sitting in a restaurant or wandering the mall, it’s pretty compelling. (Plus, your car could text you when it’s full if there’s a need to move it…) Check out the map in supercharge.info or plugshare.com to see how widespread chargers have become.
The question I get asked the most is “are you not worried about being stranded with no juice left?”. But it’s a different mindset - I start each morning with a “full tank”. The only time range would be an issue is with an extraordinary long trip. In a few years, there should(!) be enough chargers that eve venturing into the hinterland, in winter, I can rely on getting there and back. For now, I can cruise anywhere the Interstates or Trans-Canada takes me in North America… Just not Fort macMurray or the Alaska Highway.
In high density cities, there’s always a shortage of public parking spaces. That won’t change even when most spaces have L2 chargers. Basically, any locale where public parking is paid for by unit of time, it still will be when there’s a charger.
But you do bring up a good point for less dense areas. It’s a bad regulation to require time-based charging when it’s not needed. Better to let each charger’s owner decide how to price it.
What we do need, is rules that require clear pricing on chargers. It’s not easy to find the price of a Tesla charger until you’re hooked in and charging.
It’s in the app, which is good for nearby chargers. (Go to Location, then scroll up from the bottom to see “Nearby Chargers”, then tap on a charger to see its pricing.) That’s great for anything within 30 miles, but realistically, I’m hardly ever going to use a supercharger within 30 miles of my house. The car might show prices at more distant chargers, but yeah, it’s annoyingly hard to find the price.
Tesla Superchargers tend to have the same price within a region, so unless it’s a choice of which side of the state line to charge on, it probably doesn’t matter. I can understand that it’s nice to know if you’ll pay $0.49 or $0.36, even if you’re going to pay regardless.
I find other chargers on level 2 networks to be even worse. Chargepoint seems to have mostly gotten their act together and lists their prices in the app, but usually the only option is to look on Plugshare.
For level 2 charging, when I have good home charging, the decision is almost always: Will I be here long enough to bother charging? Is the charging free? If the answer is “no” to either question, then I may as well just charge at home.
Finally, the worst is when the price is a lie. I’ve only found that when there are both charging fees and parking fees. Often it will say something like “$2.00/hour charging fee covers parking” only to find out that you can’t actually leave the garage without paying an automated kiosk to raise the gate. Now I’ve paid double, and is it worth my time to contact the garage and argue to get my $6 back?
Where does electricity generation figure into all of this?
Right now my street is about 2% EV, the grid can handle that easily enough but once we start getting to 30-40-50% on my street…& the next street, & the street after that is the electric co going to have increase capacity, maybe add new generation plants? Are they on track to meet the increased generation demands proposed for 12 years out? What is the cost for all of that & how is that all paid for, just increasing electricity rates?
I think they have it figured out. Our electric utility is aggressively promoting EVs. I doubt they’d be doing that if they couldn’t handle the demand. (and it’s not like they just want to see more electricity, they are always urging their customers to get more efficient appliances, etc)
In Québec, the main charging network is utility-owned (and the utility is government-owned), but it’s still prevented, per Canadian law, from billing per kWh. Hopefully they’ll change the law soon.
What’s the rationale behind such a rule?
I don’t know specifically, I guess the rule is from pre-EV times, about regulating whether a landlord can resell electricity to tenants, etc.
(ETA: further speculation: A charge point that bills per kWh becomes a power meter, which is traditionally a highly controlled/regulated type of device.)
I was incorrect in saying it’s prohibited, a “temporary” exception allowing kWh billing for Level 3 chargers until 2029 was announced a few months ago, apparently with a view to revise the underlying rule before then.
The thought would be (if people are smart about it or there is off-peak pricing) to charge overnight. If the grid can handle everyone cooking at about the same time, it can likely handle people charging at midnight. I schedule my charging for 1AM and I’ve dumbed it down to 26A. My AC, dryer and oven going together probably use as much in the daytime. I’m imagining that there will be some incremental improvement in the grid, but I imagine something similar happens when a new suburb or collection of highrise apartments is built.
Also, for the nay-sayers who complain “but the electricity is generated by carbon fuels”… Not all of it is. Plus, a generation plant running at full capacity is much more efficient and less polluting than an internal combustion engine running as a percentage of peak and in stop-and-go traffic. Also, that electical utility carbon is not being burned right downtown at street level.
The biggest obstacle I see is those apartment buildings, row houses and downtown on-street parking where residents won’t have the opportunity to use their home power to charge their EV. My limited experience with Tesla supercharging, is that it is about half the cost of gasoline for a similar trip. That may or may not be an aceptable savings for someone who cannot charge at home - more so once EV prices come down.
I presume the logic is to prevent, say, a developer from creating a subdivision, setting up their own little utility to distribute within it, and hiking the price as they want. This brings in the whole issue of the utility not having control of things like loading, phase balance, build quality, etc. if they don’t own the system right up to the end customer’s premises.
The most important part is that it doesn’t happen all at once. As the penetration of EVs increases over the next few decades, the grid will have time to keep up. Yes, this will require building things, but utilities (in the US at least) really like building things because capital investment is one of the few ways they can justify raising rates. This has happened before, for example with the adoption of air conditioning contributing to the doubling of electricity use in the second half of the 20th century in the US.
Utilities (and utility regulatory commissions) are putting a lot of effort into modeling electric vehicle adoption, photovoltaic adoption, and how both dimensions will grow over the next X years. They have increasingly good models of how this will work and where their pain points are likely to occur, based for instance on socio-economic factors. That will inform what kinds of gadgetry and/or billing incentives they can introduce to smooth the load at peak times, etc.
I recently got a survey from our utility asking 1) when do we typically charge, and 2) would you charge at off peak times if the electricity cost less? I’m sure it’s coming. It is very easy to set up our charger to turn on at midnight, for example, which would be more than adequate most days to bring us up to “full.”
I’ve described in other posts the system where the utility can determine when my car charges. All I, and most people, will usually care about is that the car is ready to go when they need it in the morning. It doesn’t matter one bit to me whether the car charges the first 7 hours it’s plugged in, the last 7 hours, or something in between.
This level of control on a mass scale is complex, and will require writing software to coordinate it (something already happening), but is still going to be much cheaper than building new power plants and adding transmission capacity. This is a much more direct method of spreading load than just off-peak pricing.
Many utilities already do something similar with air conditioner cutoff switches, that can disable some ACs if demand is too high.
I think something more germane is the individual house setup. I have a 100A house service, all my appliances are electric except the furnace. I ran a 50A plug for the charger, but I have the car set to only charge at 26A because (a) I don’t want to pop the main breaker and (b) it’s still finished by 8AM if it starts at 1AM. There are no special or external controls for peak. The other consideration is unlike the guy down the street with a Model X (which I assume can charge 80A) I don’t have the 200A house service, and installing that would run tens of thousands of dollars. This was hashed out in an earlier thread - some people cannot even get 200A service unless they want to pay for a mile or more of grid/wiring upgrades. Some really old houses have only 60A service (I asssume these have gas stoves and hot water heaters).
80 amps will give you 65 miles of range for each hour plugged in. While this would be useful on the highway between cities when traveling, it would be ridiculous to install such a charger in a house, where presumably the car will spend hours overnight sitting in a garage.
Totally unnecessary.
But what if, in the course of my duties as an insomniac trombone repairman, I have to drive 300 miles, then sleep for four hours, then drive another 300 miles first thing in the morning? What then, huh?
California “bans” a bunch of stuff that are seldom enforced. Like noisy after-market exhaust systems.
This only counts if you have to haul a trailer full of hay over a mountain pass in the winter. As your commute. Every day.