This week, Gridserve announced that it was introducing off-peak pricing to as low as 49p/kWh across its Electric Highway network, but that wasn’t the whole story.
We’ve written about off-peak pricing with public charging before (see here), but as ever while the headline-grabbing reduction is very welcome, the real-world reality is rather different.
For starters, that 49p/kWh is only for Gridserve Plus members who have to sign up to a monthly £7.99 subscription fee – which isn’t worth it unless you’re using their public chargers on a very regular basis. For those non-Gridserve Plus members, the price is 59p/kWh, but even that is for those using the Gridserve app, NOT for anyone just arriving at a location and doing tap and charge with a credit card.
To be fair, it isn’t alone in that fact. Instavolt is the same, offering a cheaper overnight rate but only if you go through its app to charge. The message is clear – we might be willing to offer you a reduced rate, but we want your data in return. Whether that is worth the saving from the standard price of 85-92p/kWh is a personal choice.
Then there’s the timings. That reduced rate at Gridserve only kicks in between 10pm and 6am, so an off peak window of just eight hours. And when you consider that usage of public chargers drops off dramatically after 6pm and until 7am, it’s a shame that Gridserve couldn’t extend that a little. By comparison, Instavolt’s off peak period is 11 hours running from 8pm until 7am.
Anyone using ultra rapid public chargers on a regular basis are likely to be commuters or high mileage business users, who are unlikely to be using the locations at those off-peak hours. The alternative is those without off-street parking, but few will want to charge that late in the evening or before 6am simply to save money.
The problem is that these off-peak prices don’t benefit the casual drop-in user either. How many of those are likely to be passing at that time of day is questionable and any that do will have to be hyper-aware to use the Gridserve app to get the reduced rate and not to just plug in and tap their credit card. When public charging is a distress purchase that you want to be over and done with, especially late at night and maybe if you’re alone, fore-thought and awareness is unlikely to be high on the agenda.
In Gridserve’s defence, it says this off peak rate is the first chapter in its new Choose Your Charge programme, which it claims will introduce more ways “for drivers to choose the charging experience that works for them” so we’ll wait and see what that actually means.
When public charging prices are under more scrutiny than ever, while the introduction of an off-peak rate is always welcome, a rate that’s more useable in the real world would be even more so.