cwerdna said:
GRA said:
Yes, some people may hang around at chargers longer than ideal (just as some people also do now with per minute pricing), but look at what you just described. The whole point is to simplify the process to make it easier for the typical car buyer, who doesn't want (and shouldn't have) to know all the geeky details that people like us spend time on. And per kWh charging not only incentivizes manufacturers to boost max charge rates, it also encourages them to increase average charge rates, which again simplifies things for the typical ICE car buyer. That's important to help move BEVs beyond the early adopter market.
Vehicle engineering decisions have to made years in advance.
Uh huh, and California is giving charging providers several years before they
have to go to per kWh pricing, which also gives car manufacturers time to adapt.
cwerdna said:
DC FC pricing is a moving target and not consistent.
Currently true, and the whole point of requiring /kWh charging is to
make it consistent.
cwerdna said:
Even within a provider (e.g. ChargePoint), there's no consistency since the owner sets the price, not ChargePoint.
Depends. Chargepoint apparently owns a lot of their own chargers now, and those are the ones that seem to have consistent pricing ($0.25 +$0.10) statewide.
cwerdna said:
For Tesla, EA and EVgo, there are different prices and schemes depending on area, what local regulations allow, whatever the provider chooses to charge, etc.
Uh huh. By contrast, wherever you go you'll buy gas by the gallon. Which is easier to compare?
cwerdna said:
Heck even 72 kW Tesla urban style Superchargers that are 2 miles from each other in the same city are different in price by 3 cents per kWh: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/chademo-charging-the-model-3.160882/page-8#post-4983575.
Sure. So what? A gas station 1.7 miles away from me is 25-30 cents per gallon less than the one a block from me, and I choose which one to use accordingly (I could also take into account gas and per mile insurance costs to get there and back, but as I wait to gas up until I'm going by there anyway, I don't need to). What I don't have to do is know the fill profile at each of them and set up an algebraic equation to determine which will cost me less for varying amounts of gas. You're making my argument for me.
cwerdna said:
GRA said:
So yeah, there will unquestionably be some people who sit at QCs longer than is ideal while we wait for faster charging batteries, but there are three answers to that. One is to grow the market so that QCs become profitable and lots more get built.
Another, as I mentioned in my previous post, is to institute tiered per kWh pricing based on the charger's max. charging rate. Thus, LEAF and Bolt owners will gravitate to Chargepoint 48kW QCs when they're available instead of EA 150 or 350 kW ones, and Kona/Niro owners will avoid the 350kW ones, if they're all priced accordingly.
Of course, if people know they'll be there for long enough most of them will choose the slower, lower-priced charger, so that should control the distribution of various rate QCs depending on the type of location.
What ChargePoint 48 kW chargers do you speak of? https://www.chargepoint.com/products/commercial/cpe250/ is higher than 48 kW. I've seen these configured as "50 kW" and "62.5 kW" units. I've used both configs including the unit in the video at https://electricrevs.com/2018/07/17/watch-a-bolt-ev-at-a-chargepoint-express-250-charge-at-up-to-55-kw/ (unit #41 at ChargePoint HQ).
Don't remember the model # and it looked different from those, but it was presumably what Chargepoint is calling a "50 kW" charger. I was kind of surprised when I read the product plate to see that its max.
output was 48kW. Have you read the product plates on the ones you've used?
Of course, rating charging rate by kW is misleading when what matters is amps and Ah, but we're probably stuck
with kW and kWh.
cwerdna said:
There's no guarantee that there will be lower max power chargers installed nearby that have per kWh pricing or better pricing than EA.
Of course there's no guarantee, just as there's also no guarantee (although it's likely in any decent-sized town) that I'll be able to find a gas station that's less expensive than the first one I see, but at least it's trivially easy for anyone to compare prices if there is more than one.
As it happens, the closest QC to me (5 blocks) is a Chademo-only Blink, which charges 59-69 cents/kWh for members/non-members. But there's an EA site that opened about 2 miles away last year, and an EVgo about 3 miles away that opened a couple of years before that in a different direction (Edit: I see another EVGo site about 2 miles away in yet another direction has opened this year); all are less expensive than the Blink, so if I were a LEAF owner I could decide between cost and convenience. Even the Blink L2s at the nearby site are 49-59 cents/kWh, so if all I care about is cost it's an easy decision. CCS car owners could choose between EA and EVgo or FTM between one EVgo and the other - the older one has 50kW chargers, the newer one 100kW. As EVgo's current pricing here is per minute, that's an easy call for cars that can charge over 50kW, and it would be just as easy if they were priced the same by kWh.
If, OTOH, they were priced at different kWh rates, customers would also take that into account when choosing which one to use, if convenience and time weren't significant factors.
