EV Charging in Scotland Unfair

[DJS]

It's to make up for you getting free prescriptions

Level playing field and all that.

 

[sandra54]

I live in Aberdeenshire. I have a home charger but our current tariff is 32p per kWh. None of the utility companies will offer cheaper tariffs. There are 2 EVs in our family a ZS and an MG5. We currently charge at our local library. From 8pm-8am it’s 24p per kWh and 47p at other times. How badly are we being let down compared to other parts of the country, especially considering we are regarded as self-sufficient in electricity up here with most of the wind power heading South?

Not the same area but Scotland all the same , and yes we do pay more for our energy. I have Octopus agile and charge when rate is cheaper, that can range from a few pence to the peak rate of around 33p My MGZS is not supported by Octopus, neither is my charger so I can only get 4 hours at 12p on an overnight tariff, but I’m not willing to pay the much higher rate for the other 20 hours!

 

[Orcadian]

Just for information. In Caithness and Sutherland they are charging 70 p per Kw on rapids.

 

[Rolfe]

Not only there, I see that quite a lot. Our local village charger is on 30p, but in the village of Abington just over 20 miles away the same charger is 70p. Why? Because Abington is beside the M74 and there is a service station there and the rapids at the service station are charging at least that. Can't have the tourists coming off the motorway and queuing for the locals' cheap electricity, can we?

Some of these ChargePlace Scotland chargers are as low as 25p, while others are at 70p. It's a huge discrepancy, and seems mainly to be explicable according to whether they think they'll only be used by the locals, or whether tourists are likely to be passing. I noticed that @QLeo's local charger, in a very small town in the back end of nowhere, is on 70p. That town is on the North Coast 500 route. Go figure.

 

[johnb80]

Correct. I am on Octopus go and only charge at home and at night. The only true way of calculating real cost is to acknowledge that daytime use IS more expensive and average the total cost. On my calc my actual cost for electricity is 27p per kWh overall. My night useage is about 40% of total. So the real cost of running my EV is 27p Per kWh used equating to about 8p per mile travelled. Accurate and fact.

Not quite sure your maths are correct.........

If 40% is on 9.5p and 60% is on 29.6p the average is 21.56p kWh or 6.4p per mile.

More accurate and fact

 

[QLeo]

Not only there, I see that quite a lot. Our local village charger is on 30p, but in the village of Abington just over 20 miles away the same charger is 70p. Why? Because Abington is beside the M74 and there is a service station there and the rapids at the service station are charging at least that. Can't have the tourists coming off the motorway and queuing for the locals' cheap electricity, can we?

Some of these ChargePlace Scotland chargers are as low as 25p, while others are at 70p. It's a huge discrepancy, and seems mainly to be explicable according to whether they think they'll only be used by the locals, or whether tourists are likely to be passing. I noticed that @QLeo's local charger, in a very small town in the back end of nowhere, is on 70p. That town is on the North Coast 500 route. Go figure.

Oy! What back of nowhere? This is Centre of the (known) Universe, you know.
The chargers in Lochinver, like many ChargePlace Scotland-managed chargers in the Highlands, are owned by the Highland Council. All Highland Council chargers are 35p for slow chargers and 70p for fast charging. (ie, not to do with location. They location-agnostic when it comes to fleecing EV drivers). There is one fast charger in Ullapool that belongs to the Harbour Trust which is still just 20p.

 

[Rolfe]

So it's just that your council are a bunch of skinflint meanies out to supplement their council tax income, then?

 

[QLeo]

So it's just that your council are a bunch of skinflint meanies out to supplement their council tax income, then?

Yup. It gets worse. At the committee meeting where they resolved to increase the chargers by 130%, the votes were tied at 8 a piece. The chair cast a deciding vote. But one councillor was late, after having a problem with.... charging her EV. Her vote would have swung it the other way. See Highland Council more than DOUBLES the cost of its EV charging - from £12 to fill up to £28
They must be coining it, as most of the infrastructure in the Highlands is there's.

 

[Rolfe]

Two points. First, the chairman was out of order. If a vote is tied, the chair is obliged to cast the casting vote for the status quo. He should have voted against the price increase. Second, the women who was late was allegedly in favour of the price rise, because she was sick of chargers not working and wanted more investment, funded by increasing prices.

(And third, didn't she have home charging? How far was she driving in a day that she even needed a rapid charger?)

 

[QLeo]

Two points. First, the chairman was out of order. If a vote is tied, the chair is obliged to cast the casting vote for the status quo. He should have voted against the price increase. Second, the women who was late was allegedly in favour of the price rise, because she was sick of chargers not working and wanted more investment, funded by increasing prices.

(And third, didn't she have home charging? How far was she driving in a day that she even needed a rapid charger?)

Well off topic now, but I think you may be mistaking the Highland Council for a well-run tier of local government.

 

[Rolfe]

How can I be mistaking it for something that doesn't exist?

 

[omega22]

Just a further update and to get back to my original post, I am now with Octopus Go, thanks Johnb80. It took a phone call. There are so many tariffs it’s quite confusing. Anyway, as I had a dual fuel supplier I had to first move both meters to Intelligent Octopus, after a few days once they’d found my electric smart meter on the system they swapped me onto Octopus Go. Tonight will be the 1st test of having low cost charging to the EV from 0030 to 0430. See how it goes.

 

[johnb80]

Just a further update and to get back to my original post, I am now with Octopus Go, thanks Johnb80. It took a phone call. There are so many tariffs it’s quite confusing. Anyway, as I had a dual fuel supplier I had to first move both meters to Intelligent Octopus, after a few days once they’d found my electric smart meter on the system they swapped me onto Octopus Go. Tonight will be the 1st test of having low cost charging to the EV from 0030 to 0430. See how it goes.

Octopus is a great company, really good pricing and very innovative. Sometimes answers to emails can take a while but a phonecall usually gets things resolved straight away after a short wait for the call to be answered.
Please let us know how your charging goes.

 

[Gomev]

Correct. I am on Octopus go and only charge at home and at night. The only true way of calculating real cost is to acknowledge that daytime use IS more expensive and average the total cost. On my calc my actual cost for electricity is 27p per kWh overall. My night useage is about 40% of total. So the real cost of running my EV is 27p Per kWh used equating to about 8p per mile travelled. Accurate and fact.

That is the way of calculating overall cost per kWh of electricity usage in your house, not the cost of running your EV. Your calculation means the car is subsidising your daytime usage.
Imagine you didn't have an EV and a night rate, you just had a day rate, i.e. just your daytime usage. What is the total cost of your electricity usage ? Let's say X.
If you then have your EV and night rate, what then is your total cost ? Call it Y.
The real cost of running your EV is then Y minus X then divided by the number of kWh added to the car. This should be slightly more than the cheap rate, and a whole lot lower than the day rate.
You cannot average the uses to calculate the cost of one part of it, and secondly the cost of day rate on Octopus Go is now barely more than the SVR, maybe 0.5p/kWh higher.

 

[tsedge]

That is the way of calculating overall cost per kWh of electricity usage in your house, not the cost of running your EV. Your calculation means the car is subsidising your daytime usage.
Imagine you didn't have an EV and a night rate, you just had a day rate, i.e. just your daytime usage. What is the total cost of your electricity usage ? Let's say X.
If you then have your EV and night rate, what then is your total cost ? Call it Y.
The real cost of running your EV is then Y minus X then divided by the number of kWh added to the car. This should be slightly more than the cheap rate, and a whole lot lower than the day rate.
You cannot average the uses to calculate the cost of one part of it, and secondly the cost of day rate on Octopus Go is now barely more than the SVR, maybe 0.5p/kWh higher.

In my case, running the dishwasher and washing machine overnight covers the additional day rate cost, so my car costs exactly the night rate to charge or about £5 when nearly empty,

 

[GaryMG4]

It gets even more complicated when you add solar into the mix. If I notice I'm dumping more than 2kw into the grid I'll pop in the granny charger so those kw are free, but the cloudy July/August means at some times I end up paying for a few hundred watts, now I just cut the charge at an arbitrary value.

 

[tsedge]

It gets even more complicated when you add solar into the mix. If I notice I'm dumping more than 2kw into the grid I'll pop in the granny charger so those kw are free, but the cloudy July/August means at some times I end up paying for a few hundred watts, now I just cut the charge at an arbitrary value.

Technically, with solar (or battery) you should factor in the install / maintenance cost. I should really have added in the cost of a home charger to my calculation too.

What's a reasonable lifespan to expect to get from a home charger? Typical warranty is 2 years, but I am betting most last 5 or more.

 

[GaryMG4]

Technically, with solar (or battery) you should factor in the install / maintenance cost. I should really have added in the cost of a home charger to my calculation too.

The solar was on the house when we bought it, and it wasn't a factor that influenced the decision to buy, maintenance has consisted of washing them after harvest time if it hasn't rained much.

 

[bowfer]

Technically, with solar (or battery) you should factor in the install / maintenance cost. I should really have added in the cost of a home charger to my calculation too.

What's a reasonable lifespan to expect to get from a home charger? Typical warranty is 2 years, but I am betting most last 5 or more.

My charger is 7 years old.
I don’t see why they shouldn’t have a very long lifespan, literally decades.
It’s only a big electrical socket, the ones in the house are 25 years old and working fine.
Maybe weather ingress is an enemy of chargers, hence me mounting mine inside the garage, even though I charge outside.
It still looks like new.

 

[5teep]

What's a reasonable lifespan to expect to get from a home charger? Typical warranty is 2 years, but I am betting most last 5 or more.

Uneducated guess here, older dumb chargers will probably outlive smart chargers just because they are dumb. Less fancy electronics to go wrong.