BY Chris Kaiser

Trying to understand what the cost of electricity is for operating EV charging stations from information provided by the utility is nearly impossible!

I could go on a long tirade about why this is BS and how the entire utility industry has been coddled and spoiled due to their monopoly power and cozy relationship with public service commissioners so they don't create tools that help companies (i.e. their "customers") that want to profitably operate EV Charging stations...but I will do my best not to because. So, let's look at an example.

Our first fast charging stations that we own and operate are in Xcel Energy territory outside Denver CO. You can find their rate books here and then find their electric tariffs here and scroll to page 99 to find their "Schedule-EV" rate and it looks like this:

And so, you can take that information and put it in a spreadsheet and it looks kind of like the image at the top of the post. And after doing some basic math and assuming "utilization kWh consumed per month" are spread out over an equal distribution across the 24 hour period (so that's how you distribute "time of use" charges) you get a blended $/kWh of $.061/kWh in Summer and $.03/kWh in Winter and then you know your demand charge is $3.01/kW and you can kind of assume what peak demand in kW will be and the facility charge is easy and straightforward and based on the information that you have found online or were given this is all you think you need...BUT YOU'RE WRONG!

Because obviously there are a bunch of additional fees on the bill that are initially obfuscated and unnecessarily incredibly hard to determine. For instance, this is what our bill looks like (once we got our account switched to S-EV...numbers below do not represent a full month because we switched over to S-EV in the middle of a billing period):

And you ask: "But Chris, how would you have known about all those charges within the purple box (excluding the Distribution Demand which is on the tariff)" and I'd answer, "AMAZING QUESTION!" Remember when I said: "you get a blended $/kWh of $.061/kWh in Summer and .03/kWh in Winter"? Once you include all those kWh fees in the purple box, those blended rates are $.163/kWh in summer and $.132/kWh in winter! That's over a 150% increase in what's found on the tariff in summer and 340% increase in winter!

In case you're wondering - and so it doesn't go overlooked - our blended cost/kWh for the dates in question is found by taking total cost of the bill ($925.40) and dividing by total kWh used over the dates (2770) for a whopping grand total of $.33/kWh! This could have been higher than what the current charge to use the stations is ($.50/kWh) but the demand charge was only 100kW (rated demand if both stations were in use at same time is 240kW).

And this isn't just one utility company's issue. It's ALL utility companies that I've ever dealt with. And guess what...the fix isn't even that hard! All they need to do is embed a calculator in their website that has the ACTUAL utility bill calculations for each schedule type (or at least for EV schedules) and then CPOs could interact with it for a given set of demand (kw) and utilization (kWh) assumptions.

Con Edison kind of bungles the utilization calculation method, but at least they try on this page (see below). This is the idea behind the type of tool more utilities need to provide EV Charging station operators! With all this said, if/when utilization is high enough, energy costs play a smaller role in station profitability. But if utilization is low (which it invariably is for most new stations in the early years and at existing adoption rates) then Charge Point Operators should expect to have their energy costs BE HIGHER THAN THEIR REVENUE (this result is heavily dependent on what the demand charge is).

Now, I'm admittedly fairly new to this aspect (predicting what utility rates will be for new construction EV Charging stations) but I've been doing energy stuff for 20 years so I probably know more than average...but please...and this is why I do this...if you can help me with advice on how to improve all this on the front end then let me know. I've spoken with Arcadia in the past...so maybe the only solution is a paid one?

And utilities, if you care to fix this issue and make things easier for your customers, I'm available to help consult on what the industry needs as a fix! ;)