Where are your visitors driving from? How far do they drive to get to your location?All of today’s plug-in cars travel roughly 3 to 4 miles for each kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity. Choosing a particular charger starts with knowing how far drivers come to your location, and with your budget. If an electric car with a 90-mile range travels 20 miles to your location, it will need approximately 7 kWh of electricity to fill up when it arrives. If the car is parked at your location for six hours, 7 kWh of electricity can be replenished by a standard household outlet (or “Level 1” charger). In comparison, a typical household clothes dryer outlet (or “Level 2” charger) can provide the same 7 kWh of electricity in about one hour.
Generally, the fast you charge, the more it will cost to purchase and install a charger. And since costs can increase quickly with higher power requirements, it’s important to your budget to choose a charging speed that matches the range-replenishment requirements you expect.
Household outlet or “Level 1” charger: 1.3k W (3 to 4 miles per hour)
Clothes dryer outlet or “Level 2” charger: 7.7 kW (20 to 25 miles per hour)
In the market today, there is a dizzying array of EV-charging equipment available. Often, the difference in cost between two charging units with identical re-charging speed can be several thousand dollars.
Fancy network chargers are expensive because they’re equipped with things like color video screens, card readers, network electronics, cellular radios and whole host of other expensive components that are present in every single charger. Would you stand outside and watch a video screen while you waiting for your car to charge? Why pay for unnecessary expensive components and features you’ll never use?
Why not make a $500 charger do all the things you wantfrom the $5,000 chargers?
That’s exactly what the HYDRA-R provides; the HYDRA-R makes $500 chargers do all the things $5,000 chargers do…at far less cost. The hardware costs less, and so do the metering, reporting and billing services you choose.
If EV charging was free at work, how often would you charge at home?
If it was the same price at work as it is at home, how often would you charge at work?
You get the picture…
Please read on…it’s a bit complex, but it’s really important for helping you make good decisions regarding EV-charging pricing.
If the driver of a 40-MPG gasoline car pays $3.50 for one gallon of gasoline, they can drive 40 miles. if the driver of 3-mile-per-kilowatt-hour EV buys electricity for $0.26/kWh, they can drive the same 40 miles for the same $3.50 — remember this number, $0.26 per kWh….
Now let’s say a typical driver travels 20 miles to get to your location. And let’s say you get two people every single workday to replenish their trip at your $0.26-per-kWh charger.
If you pay $8,000 (all in) at 5%, to install an EV charger, and $100 per year for maintenance, simple financial math shows that it would take about 16 years to recover your costs…if you’re able to convince EV drivers to pay the equivalent cost of $3.50 per gallon!
Pricing is a great tool for managing usage of your EV chargers.
Sure you can do your own billing, IF your network and data services provide lets you have access to all of your data. Some network providers purposely make it difficult for you to do your own billing, because they’d rather sell you an add-on service.
Before you decide on network services, make sure you know how much of YOUR data you’ll be able to access.
Many utilities offer incentives to consumers on days when electric loads (“demand”) are especially high. On these “peak load” days, high-load devices like air conditioners and EV chargers put undue strain on the utility system, and turning them down or off (“response”) helps reduce the need to add costly new capacity to existing utility transformers, wires and power plants.
Utilities bill for several things, including the amount of energy consumed (kilowatt hours “kWh”, what most of us are familiar with) and for the highest level of power demand (kilowatts “kW”) during the billing period. For commercial and industrial customers, this highest-level of demand often comes with a utility demand charge per kilowatt. A helpful analogy for understanding kWh and kW comes from water — kWh are like the amount of water you use, and kW are like the level of pressure you need for delivery of your water — higher pressure is synonymous with higher kW, and higher utility demand charges.
In some areas of the U.S., one kW of demand can cost over $40 each month. With utility demand charges like these, the typical 7 kW-capable (“Level 2”) EV charger can add almost $300 each month’s utility bill.
