Two years ago, the EVC produced a report on home EV charging and the grid, looking at global data and local trials. In the time since, lots more has been learned, so the EVC refreshed the report with new content.
The new version went up on the EVC website last week and can be downloaded from here:
One of the things the EVC collected and published data on was that where EV drivers are on retail plans that incentivise charging at non-peak times, their contribution to peak demand is tiny.
For example, on the highest demand day of the year in Queensland, EV drivers on retail deals that reward grid friendly EV charging behaviour contributed about 40% less to peak demand (on average) than typical residential customers without EVs or Solar.
Far from presenting a risk to the energy system, the uptake of EVs, coupled with the right pricing structures being on offer is improving network utilisation and putting downward pressure on energy bills for everyone.
The EVC also learned through our EV driver survey this year that while typical home EV charging behaviour doesn’t contribute much to peak demand, there’s a large gap between the number of EV drivers who want to pay less for electricity by making their home EV charging grid-friendly, and the number of drivers who are actually getting a cheap rate for grid-friendly EV charging from their retailer.
In some parts of the country, this is because good retail deals aren’t available. The availability of good retail deals correlates very strongly with the degree to which the retail market is competitive – in parts of the country that lack effective competition among energy retailers, state governments are going to need to step in to sort this out.
For most of the population, however, it’s an awareness / education issue. One thing the EVC team knows for *sure* is that the average EV driver isn’t going to read a long report from us on this topic to help them pick a retailer!
With this in mind, the EVC has stood up a simple tool to showcase excellent retail deals available for EV drivers around the country:
To qualify for the EVC’s list, the plan needs to offer 10c/kWh or less overnight, coupled with a peak-time price that’s no more than 30% higher than the typical flat rate in the area.
The EVC isn’t looking for plans that ‘theoretically break even’. The goal here is to get the average person to change their retail plan and their behaviour, so the deal needs to be *better* than the local flat rate product, passing on some of the benefit the EV driver is creating through ‘well behaved’ EV charging.
A retail plan that gives a small discount for overnight EV charging, but couples it with a very high price in the afternoon for heating or cooling the house, is not what we’re looking for.
Synergy’s offer in Western Australia, which has been in place for a couple of years, is an example of a product that was well intentioned, but didn’t quite hit the mark.
The flat rate on offer in WA is about 32c/kWh. The EV plan drops the overnight rate to about 19c/kWh, but lifts the peak time rate to about 53c/kWh… so, there’s a 13c/kWh discount for EV charging, but a 21c/kWh increase for typical home usage in the afternoons.
Perhaps not surprisingly, while there will be some drivers for whom this stacks up – especially among the growing community of ride share drivers in EVs – general uptake of that offer has not been particularly high among EV drivers in WA. The EVC understands that the WA government is looking into this one.
Queensland is a bit of a unique circumstance: The south-east corner around Brisbane has retail competition, with multiple good retail deals available for drivers… but regional Queensland does not.
The EVC has tried to address this through engagement with Ergon Retail and the Queensland Competition Authority on multiple occasions, without any luck so far – at time of writing, charging an EV at home overnight in regional Queensland is about three to five times more expensive than doing so in Brisbane.
Middle-of-the-day EV charging is of course the best, to soak up excess solar. Future work on this tool will look at that, but the EVC is starting with really simple thresholds, on the basis that most EV drivers already have rooftop solar – so the cheapest electricity available to them is already in the middle of the day, if they’re at home to make use of it.
Making the overnight rate cheap, while keeping it slightly higher than the typical solar feed-in-tariff is about saying, “if you can’t charge your car in middle of the day, please charge it in the middle of the night, instead of in the afternoon”.
Ross De Rango is head of Energy and Infrastructure at the Electric Vehicle Council
