How Much Does It Cost to Charge an Electric Vehicle? (A comparison at home and on the road, with gasoline)::Few people know what a kilowatt-hour costs them, so they don’t realize how cheap EV home charging is versus gasoline. On the road, it’s more complicated.
$0.058 / kWh at home for me.
About $0.115 at my friend’s house.
About $0.25 at some public chargers.
Those are amazing prices.
In Germany I pay:
-0.33$ at home and work
-0.72$ - 0.88$ on public chargers
Gas is currently about 7.68$ per gallon. ._.
Those are amazing prices
Right?!? Wildly jealous of those low electricity prices. I’m also in the EU and paying 46.6c (euro) / around 50c US at home.
Some UK prices for comparison:
At home within the EV charging window with Octopus I pay 9p a kwh, outside that window its just over 29p, so I never charge outside the window. I also run my dishwasher, washing machine and anything else I can during that window, typically excluding my EV charging (we are a 3 EV household as both my kids have EVs), we have about a quarter of our electric usage during the cheap window.
Typical cost outside the home for a charger up to 22kw is about 45p a kwh, rising to 75p a kw for ultra rapid pushing out a couple of hundred kws. Its pretty normal in the UK to pay more for a faster charger.
Some places still have free charging but these are drying up, and typically they are limited to a couple of hours of charging at 3 to 7kw.
Petrol is 155.5p a liter, or about £7.06 a (UK) gallon. A modern ICE than is a similar size to my EV should be getting around 50mpg, so 14.12p per mile. 70mpg is possible out of a modern self charging hybrid, this is about 10p a mile. Plug in hybrids potentially offer the same battery power only for 100% of the journey that a full EV offers in the UK for the majority of journeys, as the UK average distance is about 8.5 miles.
Worth pointing out that petrol on a motorway service station (where you will mostly be charging your EV on a long journey) jumps from 155.5p to 177.86p. This increases the cost per mile for the 50mpg example to 16.14p.
My EV gets 4.5 miles per kwh in the summer so about 2p a mile, when its properly cold in the winter than drops to about 3.5 miles per kwh or 2.57p per mile. Assuming an ultra rapid charger at 75p a kwh, cost rises to 16.67p for summer, and 21.42p for winter. Obviously you only charge what you actually need to complete your journey at that price, not fill it up to 100%.
Assuming an equal cost to own and run (which is not the same as purchase price) EVs are significantly cheaper in the UK if you charge at home. If you cannot charge at home then I would look into a provider like Shell installing an on street charger in a lamppost or not bothering at this point if you are motivated by cost.
How does the process of requesting a street charger work, wouldn’t that require council approval or some such?
As its street furniture it will, like the approval to hook up a charger to the grid, which all fixed (home) chargers need in the UK, it should be handled by the installer for you. As there are as many NIMBY councils you have a non zero chance of it being approved or not approved, there are councils will reject solar panel installs for example.
Now that almost everyone in the US has coalesced around NACS, I’m hoping this leads to more aggressive pricing competition with fast charging.
As far as most of my driving, the cost has been great since it’s mostly local. I eliminated a gas bill for a marginal bump in power bill.
When I go on trips I save a little bit by finding hotels with charging or have been known to let people use power outlets. By time I leave the hotel I have a “filled tank” for only a couple dollars at most. Plugshare has been wonderful for finding hotels with this in mind.
This should happen, as in, I expect it to.
Similarly how nearly all gas stations in a given region obtain gas at similar costs from, often, the same distributors, they really only profit from the higher margins on food, etc. in the attached store. If we don’t end up with many more dedicated charging locations like Buccees in the next decade, I’ll be very surprised.
In Europe we’ve had the CCS2 standard for ages, yet charging at different brands is still a fucking jungle when it comes to pricing. Every company seems to insist that charging your EV should be a subscription service, and if you want to use their chargers without a subscription they screw you over with insane pricing like 1.5€/kWh. This trend of everything “as a service” is the bane of modern existence and should be banned.
There are a few similar things with “subscription discounts” on the CCS companies trying to stabilize income in the states.
Granted, charging installations are expensive as hell, and simple prices per kWh with regional electricity rates being all over the place truly isn’t a sustainable model.
Tesla’s infrastructure rollouts were certainly working as a loss leader because they had the cash to get it done, and subsequently ‘won’ in North America because any other charging experience outside of Tesla is awful. Other private startups just don’t have the resources to eat up-front costs, and I guess subscriptions are the easy way out, but just as you saying, they utterly suck for the consumer.
That’s why I think gigantic installs with mall-like facilities with higher-margin food/drinks and other amenities to kill time ala Buccees is where most will end up in the states. There is a similar, and much more elegant, setup in Germany with the “Sortimo Innovationspark” between Stuttgart and Munich I’ve seen in some videos.
19 cents/kwh at home, and that includes all fees and taxes. The most expensive charge I did was at a Petro Canada, which was 53 cents a minute. I was just topping up so the 20 minutes I was there came to a whopping 91 cents/kwh. There’s a lot of free fast chargers where I am too.
