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If anyone here has charged outside the tesla network for a non-tesla EV, the prices being charged for electricity is absurd. I've heard rates as high as 45c/kW

If anyone here has charged outside the tesla network for a non-tesla EV, the prices being charged for electricity is absurd. I've heard rates as high as 45c/kWh. How can the government be hellbent on giving EV tax credits and incentives and turn a blind eye to the 5x markup being charged at charge stations. Canada has several 350KW fast chargers that are 20c per minute. You can pull down 4KW a minute on many fast charge cars (Hyundai Ioniq5, Kia EV6, Porsche Taycan, Lucid Air for example). A drive-up 70% charge (good for ~200 miles) on an Ioniq5 would cost you $3.60 Canadian dollars or just under $3 USD. Electrify America's fast-chargers in California for example are $0.43/kWh - that's $26 USD for the same charge. Electricity costs in California are only about 50% higher than Ontario, so that doesn't account for the markup. Even with a paid monthly membership, you're still at $18 per charge compared to the <$5 cost of power. Guess what - 200 miles on a 35mpg gas car in San Francisco is $23. I really think some progress needs to be made on charge costs. Granted it's cheaper than gas and it's a free market, I don't think it's in the industry's best interest to keep on this track. edit: Just checked PG&E's business EV rate plans... they max out during peak at $0.31/kWh and that is only from 4-9pm. It is $0.13 or $0.11 for the remainder of the day. https://www.pge.com/en_US/small-medium-business/energy-alternatives/clean-vehicles/ev-charge-network/electric-vehicle-rate-plans.page https://www.pge.com/en_US/small-medium-business/energy-alter...

thatfrenchguy 5y ago
ElectrifyAmerica is $0.31 a kWh with a $4 a month subscription (that you can cancel at any time), it’s pretty reasonable, given you’ll basically take it on any road trip where you charge more than 33kwh. $0.31 is less than what PGE charges me most of a time at home, and less than most Tesla Superchargers in the area! Your example about per minute rates is a bit misleading, given most people who’ll use those PetroCanada stations won’t have such a fast charging car and that petrocanada will charge more when they switch to per-kWh pricing.
- tgtweak 5y ago
  I added the discounted membership cost, again it's still pretty heavily marked up over the cost of that power being charged to the stations (which is way lower than you PG&E peak residential rates). edit: You can head to the business BEV calculator and calculate for 200 cars doing full charges daily between 6am and 10pm (200 mile charges), every day of the month, the total monthly cost for power divided by the number of charges gets you to ~$10.50/charge power cost. So they're marking it up 80% in the cheapest case. If you only charge during peak hours (4-9pm) you could come out slightly ahead of the cost of energy assuming you paid for the membership.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Utility demand charges for pulling 50-300 kw of current makes up the majority of the cost of providing fast DC charging. Fast DC providers like Tesla and Electrify America attempt to offset this by colocating batteries at the station to shave utility demand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqqOM9nzz-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqqOM9nzz-A https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1543251 https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1543251
    - tgtweak 5y ago
      It's included in the above calculator by PG&E. They have an hourly-rate all-in plan for EV charging which rolls in power demand and energy.
      - thatfrenchguy 5y ago
        If you ask PGE for 350kw, you'll see quickly how much more they'll charge you in demand charges :)
haspok 5y ago
You can probably think of this as gas prices at motorway stations vs gas prices at your local supermarket. OK, the spread is smaller for gas, but the underlying principle is the same. You pay for convenience and speed. Also, if you don't really need it, you shouldn't use fast chargers - charge at home, or at slower AC charge points. With those higher DC prices you are incentivized to do so.
ip26 5y ago
It pisses me off, and I think it is harmful when 6.6kW Chargepoints cost 34c/kWh (operators say, "gee nobody is using this station, why build more") On the bright side, it should be improved with competition, and 99% of charging is at home anyway. There is a reasonable argument to be made that remote 350kW charge banks have high infrastructure & peak price costs, but urban L2 chargers have no such good argument to hide behind.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  IMO, EV chargers that provide less than 50 kW never should have existed and did a lot of damage to EV adoption. For fuck's sake, my charger at home is 11 kW. (240V, 48 amp.) There's no reason any public charger should be less than that.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    It's not good for batteries to fast charge them all the time. You should only use fast chargers when you need to, like on long road trips. It absolutely makes sense for public chargers at, e.g., office buildings to only be Level 2.
    - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      Oh yeah, chargers at the office could be level 2. But at the grocery store? I think those should all be level 3. Though really, I think that if you can't charge at home, then a BEV just isn't the car for you. Even if you can charge at work, what happens when you start looking for a new job, or you begin working from home?
  - tgtweak 5y ago
    A simple AC->DC rectifier/transformer and some voltage regulation banks + integrated circuits and 10ft of cables should not be a $200,000 a piece. I can almost guarantee you Tesla's BOM (at least for their 72KW supercharger) is not over $20k as delivered & installed cost for an entire station was on average under $200,000 in 2016, and stations have on average 10 chargers per station. From Tesla's disclosures on capital expenditure as it relates to supercharger stations in 2016, before scale-out savings or optimizations to date (They are now over 3,000 stations) : While $40.6 million might seem like a lot, it's a tiny portion of Tesla's total capital expenditures. Tesla spent about $1.3 billion on capital expenditures in 2016. Since Tesla's total Supercharger locations expanded from 584 to 790 during this period, the company likely spent around $197,000 per new Supercharger location during the year.
sigio 5y ago
Same prices as FastNed and still way cheaper than ionity. Supercharging will always be more expensive than slow-charging, but I've used 45ct/kwh for a 2000km trip this month, and it still is less than half the price of using gasoline.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
IIUC, these chargers cost $50-$250k a piece. I imagine the technology will improve and they'll need to be upgraded in less than ten years. Each gas pump probably costs similar or less - and you only need to use one for a couple of minutes. A charger you can tie up for a half hour or longer. Even at that price - charging would be about half the revenue as the average re-fuel. So you need to charge more to make similar profits. Gas stations don't really make any money selling gas - they make it all from selling candy bars and sodas. I would expect the spread to be much higher on charging than re-fueling.
- metabagel 5y ago
  I’ve decided I’m going to stop trying to figure out what acronyms like IIUC mean. I figured it out, but I realize my time is better spent elsewhere, and ultimately it’s OK if I don’t solve the little puzzle embedded in the comment.
  - gabrielsroka 5y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=iiuc+acronym https://www.google.com/search?q=iiuc+acronym
- vel0city 5y ago
  > I imagine the technology will improve and they'll need to be upgraded in less than ten years. What improvements do you foresee which will require these to be upgraded?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    I imagine we have not reached the physical limit for how much power can be transfered over a period of time. So I would imagine that better chargers can exist, and I imagine upgrading will be significant capex.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      As far as the cables and plugs themselves, we're pretty much nearing the practical limits of our known physics. These days car battery packs can't keep up with the max theoretical rate these chargers can supply for longer than a few minutes. We'll have to come quite a bit further with our battery technology to really stress CCS cables and connectors.
markvdb 5y ago
.69€ or $.77 on on Fastned, one of the largest relatively fast charging networks in the EU. .45€ or $.50 with an 11.99€/$13.37 monthly subscription.
xiphias2 5y ago
BP just announced in their Q4 earnings report that they are starting to make more money on electric charging in the US than on gas, as their margins are uncomparable. The free market will figure it out.
slavik81 5y ago
> You can pull down 4KW a minute on many fast charge cars What does that mean?
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  They probably meant 4 kWh

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

ElectrifyAmerica is $0.31 a kWh with a $4 a month subscription (that you can cancel at any time), it’s pretty reasonable, given you’ll basically take it on any road trip where you charge more than 33kwh. $0.31 is less than what PGE charges me most of a time at home, and less than most Tesla Superchargers in the area! Your example about per minute rates is a bit misleading, given most people who’ll use those PetroCanada stations won’t have such a fast charging car and that petrocanada will charge more when they switch to per-kWh pricing.

tgtweak 5y ago
I added the discounted membership cost, again it's still pretty heavily marked up over the cost of that power being charged to the stations (which is way lower than you PG&E peak residential rates). edit: You can head to the business BEV calculator and calculate for 200 cars doing full charges daily between 6am and 10pm (200 mile charges), every day of the month, the total monthly cost for power divided by the number of charges gets you to ~$10.50/charge power cost. So they're marking it up 80% in the cheapest case. If you only charge during peak hours (4-9pm) you could come out slightly ahead of the cost of energy assuming you paid for the membership.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Utility demand charges for pulling 50-300 kw of current makes up the majority of the cost of providing fast DC charging. Fast DC providers like Tesla and Electrify America attempt to offset this by colocating batteries at the station to shave utility demand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqqOM9nzz-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqqOM9nzz-A https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1543251 https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1543251
  - tgtweak 5y ago
    It's included in the above calculator by PG&E. They have an hourly-rate all-in plan for EV charging which rolls in power demand and energy.
    - thatfrenchguy 5y ago
      If you ask PGE for 350kw, you'll see quickly how much more they'll charge you in demand charges :)

haspok 5y ago

You can probably think of this as gas prices at motorway stations vs gas prices at your local supermarket. OK, the spread is smaller for gas, but the underlying principle is the same. You pay for convenience and speed. Also, if you don't really need it, you shouldn't use fast chargers - charge at home, or at slower AC charge points. With those higher DC prices you are incentivized to do so.

ip26 5y ago

It pisses me off, and I think it is harmful when 6.6kW Chargepoints cost 34c/kWh (operators say, "gee nobody is using this station, why build more") On the bright side, it should be improved with competition, and 99% of charging is at home anyway. There is a reasonable argument to be made that remote 350kW charge banks have high infrastructure & peak price costs, but urban L2 chargers have no such good argument to hide behind.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
IMO, EV chargers that provide less than 50 kW never should have existed and did a lot of damage to EV adoption. For fuck's sake, my charger at home is 11 kW. (240V, 48 amp.) There's no reason any public charger should be less than that.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  It's not good for batteries to fast charge them all the time. You should only use fast chargers when you need to, like on long road trips. It absolutely makes sense for public chargers at, e.g., office buildings to only be Level 2.
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    Oh yeah, chargers at the office could be level 2. But at the grocery store? I think those should all be level 3. Though really, I think that if you can't charge at home, then a BEV just isn't the car for you. Even if you can charge at work, what happens when you start looking for a new job, or you begin working from home?
- tgtweak 5y ago
  A simple AC->DC rectifier/transformer and some voltage regulation banks + integrated circuits and 10ft of cables should not be a $200,000 a piece. I can almost guarantee you Tesla's BOM (at least for their 72KW supercharger) is not over $20k as delivered & installed cost for an entire station was on average under $200,000 in 2016, and stations have on average 10 chargers per station. From Tesla's disclosures on capital expenditure as it relates to supercharger stations in 2016, before scale-out savings or optimizations to date (They are now over 3,000 stations) : While $40.6 million might seem like a lot, it's a tiny portion of Tesla's total capital expenditures. Tesla spent about $1.3 billion on capital expenditures in 2016. Since Tesla's total Supercharger locations expanded from 584 to 790 during this period, the company likely spent around $197,000 per new Supercharger location during the year.

sigio 5y ago

Same prices as FastNed and still way cheaper than ionity. Supercharging will always be more expensive than slow-charging, but I've used 45ct/kwh for a 2000km trip this month, and it still is less than half the price of using gasoline.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

IIUC, these chargers cost $50-$250k a piece. I imagine the technology will improve and they'll need to be upgraded in less than ten years. Each gas pump probably costs similar or less - and you only need to use one for a couple of minutes. A charger you can tie up for a half hour or longer. Even at that price - charging would be about half the revenue as the average re-fuel. So you need to charge more to make similar profits. Gas stations don't really make any money selling gas - they make it all from selling candy bars and sodas. I would expect the spread to be much higher on charging than re-fueling.

metabagel 5y ago
I’ve decided I’m going to stop trying to figure out what acronyms like IIUC mean. I figured it out, but I realize my time is better spent elsewhere, and ultimately it’s OK if I don’t solve the little puzzle embedded in the comment.
- gabrielsroka 5y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=iiuc+acronym https://www.google.com/search?q=iiuc+acronym
vel0city 5y ago
> I imagine the technology will improve and they'll need to be upgraded in less than ten years. What improvements do you foresee which will require these to be upgraded?
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  I imagine we have not reached the physical limit for how much power can be transfered over a period of time. So I would imagine that better chargers can exist, and I imagine upgrading will be significant capex.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    As far as the cables and plugs themselves, we're pretty much nearing the practical limits of our known physics. These days car battery packs can't keep up with the max theoretical rate these chargers can supply for longer than a few minutes. We'll have to come quite a bit further with our battery technology to really stress CCS cables and connectors.

markvdb 5y ago

.69€ or $.77 on on Fastned, one of the largest relatively fast charging networks in the EU. .45€ or $.50 with an 11.99€/$13.37 monthly subscription.

xiphias2 5y ago

BP just announced in their Q4 earnings report that they are starting to make more money on electric charging in the US than on gas, as their margins are uncomparable. The free market will figure it out.

slavik81 5y ago

> You can pull down 4KW a minute on many fast charge cars What does that mean?

Rebelgecko 5y ago
They probably meant 4 kWh