EV Charging in Scotland Unfair

omega22 said:
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?
Click to expand...
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!
 
Just for information. In Caithness and Sutherland they are charging 70 p per Kw on rapids.
 
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.
 
Dstretty said:
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.
Click to expand...
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 :):)
 
Rolfe said:
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.
Click to expand...
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 said:
So it's just that your council are a bunch of skinflint meanies out to supplement their council tax income, then?
Click to expand...
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.
 
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?)
 
Rolfe said:
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?)
Click to expand...
Well off topic now, but I think you may be mistaking the Highland Council for a well-run tier of local government.
 
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.
 
omega22 said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dstretty said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Gomev said:
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.
Click to expand...
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,
 
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.
 
GaryMG4 said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
tsedge said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
tsedge said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 

Similar threads

JohnV6
EV charging , batteries & insurance
Replies
0
Views
221
JohnV6
JohnV6
tonybridge
A positive charging story!
Replies
1
Views
353
Alb
Alb
AndrewS
Charging on the M6 Southbound
2
Replies
36
Views
2K
SimonS
S
A
MG ZS EV: Charging Issues & Battery Problems – Know Your Rights
Replies
3
Views
519
hmadsen
H
V
Considering a ZS EV
Replies
11
Views
605
fred12345
F
Support us by becoming a Premium Member

Latest MG EVs video

MG Hybrid+ EVs OVER-REVVING & more owner feedback
Published
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom