Another odd feature of electricity pricing is demand charges. These are fees paid by the hosts of electric vehicle charging sites that are based on the highest usage, in 15-minute to hourly intervals, during a payment period. These demand charges help utilities deal with the various costs of building and maintaining an electric grid. But they are frustrating in the context of electric vehicle charging, because some chargers are used very rarely, but when they are used they demand a lot of electricity in a short period of time. That creates demand charges.
These demand charges can reach “hundreds of thousands a year for a specific site,” says Rachel Moses, who heads sales, marketing and business development at Electrify America.
Meanwhile, some utilities charge “peak” prices – that is, they charge more money when there are lots of other people using electricity. This means it often costs more for charging points to provide electricity between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when everyone comes home, turns on their TVs, air conditioners or heating units and maybe plugs in their cars. All of this translates into slightly unpredictable charging prices.
Electrify America says its pricing is “station-specific,” meaning it will charge customers more money to charge at stations that are more expensive to operate. But other EV charging companies take a broader approach, averaging the operating costs of their entire network to determine pricing across a wider area.
In addition, companies are allowed to charge dynamic EV charging prices can change, but fortunately there is a limit to this strategy. Rules on funding national public charging infrastructure mean that chargers built with public funds cannot change their prices when you are charging your car, even if the price the company pays for electricity changes.
All of this means that, at the moment, it’s difficult to predict how much you’ll pay to recharge your battery at a public fast-charging point. No wonder drivers are frustrated.
New gas station?
But ought Are drivers frustrated? Not knowing exactly how much you’ll pay to charge your car at a public fast-charging point can be annoying. But it’s also not a complete reflection of most people’s experiences with electric vehicles.
The real advantage of owning an EV is that while you might only find gas at a gas station, cars can be charged in many different places. At home, at the grocery store, at work — not all of these places may have fast chargers, but many have outlets and slower “level 2” chargers where drivers can top up a bit of power.
Newspaper headlines (and some drivers) obsess over public charging stations, but roughly 90 percent of today’s EV drivers have garages, driveways or other places where they can charge their cars overnight. Someday, that won’t be the case, and public chargers will have to fill in empty spots for people who live in apartments or park on the street.
But for now: maybe don’t get too hung up on… public chargers, which today mostly fill the gaps when EV drivers take long car trips.
“We’re thinking about the gas station model,” said Kellen Schefter, senior director of electric transportation at the Edison Electric Institute, an association representing investor-owned U.S. electric utilities. “If our goal is just to replicate the gas station model for electric vehicles, we’ve missed one of the real benefits of electric vehicles.”