Charge anywhere, cheaper
In the future electric vehicle drivers could be able to charge their cars at public charging points using their home electricity rate. SSEN is looking at whether the business case could stack up for EV owners without driveways.
By Lucinda Dann, features editor
Charge anywhere, cheaper
In the future electric vehicle drivers could be able to charge their cars at public charging points using their home electricity rate. SSEN is looking at whether the business case could stack up for EV owners without driveways.
By Lucinda Dann, features editor
The average cost of charging an electric vehicle (EV) from 10-80% on a rapid or ultra-rapid public charger in May this year was at least £43. That’s according to the RAC’s Charge Watch, which has tracked the cost of public charging since 2022. This means the cost per mile for EVs charged solely on public chargers is 26p, higher than the 21p it cost diesel drivers and 18p petrol drivers. These figures are, of course, before the impact of recent price hikes at the petrol pumps.
The public charger figure is also far higher than the 7p maximum EV drivers who can charge at home paid. While few EV owners rely solely on public charge points for their charging needs currently, for inhabitants of the 40% of the UK’s housing stock which does not have a driveway, this price difference presents a major barrier to EV adoption.
Closing this price gap is the focus of a new innovation project led by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN). It has been awarded £166,000 through the sixth round of the Strategic Innovation Fund to explore if it can make the business case stack up to allow all EV drivers to charge using their home electricity rate on public charge points.
Average price per mile for petrol cars in May
Average price per mile for diesel cars
Average price per mile for EV fast chargers
Average price per mile for home EV chargers
Roaming MPANs
Called Roaming MPANs (Meter Point Administration Number), after the unique identification code every electricity supply point is given, the initiative aims to enable instant plug-and -play connections of domestic energy devices and appliances by 2032, the third Taskforce Innovation Challenge within the SIF scheme.
Simon O’ Loughlan, innovation project manager at distribution network operator SSEN, says the project is about “ensuring customers are brought with us on the energy transition”.
“When we are looking at how we help bring customers with us on low-carbon journeys one of the biggest things customers want in order to participate in greener energy and low carbon is an EV.
“When you look at it holistically there is a big deficit between customers who have a driveway and those who do not have any off-street parking,” he says.
Many large older properties, and homes in modern high-rise developments, don’t have a place to charge EVs, while more than a third of residences in Scotland, where SSEN is the network operator, are classed as flats. Meanwhile, almost a quarter of homes in England and Scotland are terraced and also lack a driveway. While there are workaround solutions, such as a bridge connecting a private charge point to a car in the street, they are often expensive and disruptive, says SSEN.
“There is a big interest in cross-pavement charging and I’m involved in that. There are certain places where that can work quite well and there’s an enthusiasm for it, understandably. But there are also certain limitations with it. Not everyone can have it because of double yellow lines, bus stops, the lay of the land, and there’s known issues around potential earthing,” says Matthew Knight, principle technical specialist of technology innovation at Cenex, one of the project partners.
“It can work in some ways but not in others so this project helps add tools to the toolbox as you’ve got challenges that you’ve got to address with these other competing technologies and we need to understand what is the right solution in the right location.”
Terraced properties are also at increased likelihood of being connected on a looped electricity supply where one service cable supplies multiple properties. These connections often require unlooping before EV chargers can be installed, which is a costly and complex issue for network operators and could present a barrier to adoption.
“From a financial perspective for the distribution system, we know there are lots of houses that are looped, and there’s a big cost associated with that, so avoided or deferred unlooping could be a saving versus a charge point operator (CPO) putting in a new installation,” says Knight.
“The thing with roaming MPAN is making sure the maximum number of our customers are able to have a connection that they can charge their electric vehicle on. And if that’s to do with unlooping, then that’s all well and good. But if it comes from being able to instigate a project that teams up with the charge point operators, with Cenex, with DCC and the energy suppliers, making sure the economics stack up between all of those partners to enable customers to charge EVs at a reasonable price locally to their home, then that opens up a lot more households and addresses the imbalance that exists at the moment,” says O’ Loughlan.
Benefits for all parties
The project has several technical hurdles that it must overcome for the idea to become plausible. One of these is developing the technical enablers that would allow the porting of metering at a public charge point back to the customer’s home MPAN. For this, SSEN is working with Cenex, a not-for-profit specialist consultant on low and zero emission transport. “How do we do that switching and reconcile that so that everybody gets billed the right amount and pays the right amount at the right time?” asks Knight.
During this discovery phase, the project will undertake a study on the metering data and the codes, such as the balancing and settlement code, but also consumer codes, that would underpin that reassignment, which is why project partners Smart DCC and supplier EDF are also involved in the project.
“In terms of the mechanism for reconciling the billing there’s physically a lot that has to happen with energy suppliers in their billing systems to get it right, to make it understandable for the end user, to potentially add in the opportunity to participate in other fairly advanced services. There’s quite a lot of difficulties and challenges that will come out of that,” says Knight.
“We will also be exploring the benefits for suppliers, such as the potential for making customers more sticky if they can get their EV charging lumped in with their domestic tariffs. And you’ve got suppliers that are now leasing EVs and packaging up their electricity tariffs with it, and if someone can’t use their home electricity tariff there’s no point that EV being leased from that supplier,” says O’ Loughlan.
“At the end of the day suppliers have obligations about people who are on the marginal end from an affordability point of view. If those people with the least amount of funds are faced with the highest cost of charging there’s a big equity element there, so from the social value work that suppliers are doing it’s a very useful tool to be able to offer. My hope is if we can get this working, it becomes part of the cost to compete in the market,” adds Knight.
Another potential issue that will need to be unpicked is that much of public EV charging infrastructure is deployed under concession arrangements, which allows a private business to run a service or build infrastructure on council-owned land for a set period of time. For EV infrastructure these contracts are likely to be quite long term and will need to be changed.
“We will need to look at the ability to potentially modify those mid-term to fit within the scheme, and the ability for local authorities to administer their costs and overheads associated with it,” says Knight.
“You’ve got suppliers that are now leasing EVs and packaging up their electricity tariffs with it, and if someone can’t use their home electricity tariff there’s no point that EV being leased from that supplier,”
Simon O’ Loughlan, innovation project manager, SSEN
Alternative business model
Perhaps most importantly, the project will need to come up with a viable alternative business model for CPOs. “This would be a very big change to their business model. CPOs still need to provide the infrastructure, so the investment in connections, the charging equipment and maintenance of that, providing a back office and user support,” says Knight.
“We need to look into what it means for sustainable business models for CPOs because it’s likely to change what that is and there’s a number of options of how that could look. That’s why we have Chargemystreet involved because they are a community-focused, slightly disruptive CPO and so they are very interested in looking at these alternative business models and supporting an alternative approach.”
For regular EV users, such as those that would use it as part of their business, a subscription model might be the best option. Meanwhile for low users who only make the occasional journey a subscription could prove expensive and instead a model based on ad-hoc charging, be that a daily rate or paying per kilowatt hour, might be cheaper.
“You’ve got four people who need to benefit, or at least not be detrimentally affected by this kind of project. You’ve got customers at the centre of it all, you’ve got the CPOs who own the infrastructure, you’ve got the DNOs who own the network and you’ve got suppliers who are handling the billing. Whatever process and frameworks that come out of discovery have got to fulfil the needs of all four partner groups,” says O’Loughlin.
If the project is able to progress beyond discovery to the alpha phase then SSEN intends to conduct trials across its operating areas in Scotland and central and southern England. “What we are looking at is areas where there are already constraints on the networks, where there are already flexibility payments being made and looking at time of use tariffs that are already deployed by suppliers and seeing how that would map across to charge points that are connected to our networks,” says O’ Loughlin.
“It may be that the cheap rate charging kicks in at 7pm and runs through until 6am and that would be an encouragement for the CPOs who have lower usage during evening and nighttime hours to participate as well. Its making use of their assets when they’re not in use and making use of our network capacity when there is capacity available.”
The scheme could also make better use of excess renewable energy, with EV owners partaking in a future scheme receiving price alerts via a mobile app to alert them to cheap charging rates.
“It’s a proper innovation project which is looking at all of the options and how best to make accessible EV charge points which are on our networks to make sure as many customers as possible can adopt low carbon tech, and make sure that it done in a way that doesn’t necessitate us putting more copper in the ground. It could be used for flexibility, it could be used to defer reinforcement, and it’s fulfilling our obligations to make sure that we are enabling low carbon technology,” says O’ Loughlin.
