EV Charging in Ontario. Any special charge rate incentives?

[11thIndian]

I was reading thru some of the Ontario Climate Action Plan info relating to EVs. They talk about the rebates on cars, chargers, and potentially special incetivised charging rates thru hydro companies. Are any of the local utilities like Horizon/alectra actually providing special rates for EV charging yet?

 

[sakimano]

Haven't seen anything on this. What would they do, have to install a special meter on your car charger outlet?

 

[11thIndian]

Assuming they'd have to. Either that or provide a blanket reduction to off-peak rates for any house with a registered EV or PHEV- same cars getting purchase incentives.

 

[wayner]

They have never clarified how this would work. Installing a meter is a very expensive way of doing this. To me it makes more sense to just give you a rebate if you have an EV - as in we will rebate you the equivalent of 500kWh per month, or something like that. Giving you a lower off-peak rate also subsidizes all of your other non-EV consumption and that isn't fair to everyone else. And I don't think it makes sense to give a larger rebate to people that drive more - then you are just promoting congestion on the roads.

 

[sandpiper]

Yes. Everybody consumer in Ontario gets the "Kathleen Wynne" special hydro rate. To get the rate, you assume a vulnerable position and it is "provided" into an opening that rhymes with the usual name for a common combustible petroleum product.

 

[Doug_G]

Uh, yeah, this is supposed to be a family-friendly forum.

 

[sandpiper]

Uh, yeah, this is supposed to be a family-friendly forum.

Yeah... sorry. Bad idea to post after three pints of Guinness and a half hours of arguing politics with the neighbor. .

 

[MaxTorque]

I call my utility, London Hydro, and they knew nothing about the government's promises. So I spoke with a rep from the Ministry of Energy last week about this over-night free charging promise. They really have no idea how they can administer this program to be fair and still fall within the allocated $15M over 4 years. They are looking for suggestions on how to implement a program without having expensive hardware (separate meter) or overly burdensome administration costs that would suck up the $15M before taxpayers see the benefit. They estimate that by 2020 there will be too many EVs on the road to be able to fund this program with only $15M allocated. The Ministry figures that the value of this over-night charging benefit would be $200 per year, and they do not seem to care if you have a 17KWh or a 100KWh battery, apparently everybody would only use $200 during the course of a year; I don't happen to agree with that analysis.
The Ministry is really looking for a way to encourage charging early in the morning, such as 2AM-6AM. There is concern that if EVs are charged during the off-peak hours of 7PM to 10PM, there is still a lot of demand on the grid, and the Ministry would like to not have EVs charged then. The local utilities are concerned that if 3 or 4 neighbouring houses were to have 40A-80A Level 2 EVSE out of the approx. 6-8 houses supported by a subdivision transformer, those transformers may not be able to handle the load and could fail.
All-in-all I do not think that the Ministry of Energy will have a solution in 2017, and when they do implement a process, it will be approx. $200 per year. The Government's intention was good but it came without a practical implementation policy or guidance. Unfortunately, I personally am not anticipating free over-night charging to be a practicably benefit.

 

[wayner]

Why not just build it into the subsidy when you buy the vehicle initially? Since it is difficult to administer a subsidy for electricity why not just increase the subsidy for when you purchase an EV for $1000 - which is the same as getting $200/yr for five years - except you get it all up front.

And does anyone actually charge at 7pm? I have my Model S charge at 4am, except in the winter where I want the charging to end as close to 7am as possible. Then I adjust the scheduled charge time so that it ends close to 7am, which is when I leave home and when off-peak rates end. In an ideal world to smooth the load there should be a randomizing process that starts charging vehicles between 11 pm and 5am.

 

[11thIndian]

Every EV/PHEV has some kind of charge delay function.

It's either going to come down to the grid getting smarter about it, or owners are going to have to be assigned preferred off-peak charging times. Personally, I don't care what 2hrs in the middle of the night is used to charge my battery.

But I don't think there's ANY QUESTION that the number of EVs charging at home nightly is only going up from here. So incentivized or not, Hydro is going to need to start figuring out how to deal with the extra load. Considering it's mostly going to happen at what was previously the lightest load time, I don't think the problem is insurmountable.

But like I've said many times before, the whole switch to EVs and the green energy boom that's coming is a potential HUGE opportunity for utilities to basically steal an entire market from the oil and gas companies. Canada as a whole just has to take that opportunity for what it is.

 

[SmartElectric]

Every EV/PHEV has some kind of charge delay function

My Smart ED for example does have "delayed charging", but it doesn't actually delay charging, I won't even go into the details because it's too strange to explain! So, I deliberately use 120V 12A OEM EVSE and plug in when I get home on every second day, usually that requires an 8 hour charge, meaning that my charging does use much of it's electricity after 10PM or so. Yes, I could buy a charging cord that has delayed charging, but my current method works for me and is low cost and convenient.

And does anyone actually charge at 7pm? I have my Model S charge at 4am

Me too.

But, having driven and reviewed many of the current crop of EV's and owning two different EV brands (Smart, Tesla), these statements need some refining.

1. Many (even most, but not all) EV's have delayed charging capabilities, some even have scheduled charging like the Tesla.

2. Setting the settings to have non-Tesla EV's charge at a specific overnight period can be a demanding UI challenge with their too-hard-to-navigate control systems.

3. Current early adopter owners of EV's might care when the EV is charging, but the next set of owners who aren't tech-types will not be as diligent and dare I say geeky/interested.

 

[Doug_G]

My car is set to charge at 1 am. That is to make sure the car is ready when I need it the next day. At 40A that is almost always enough.

(The one recent exception was last Friday night. The car needed over 60 kWh and I only had 5 hours to charge before I had to leave on a road trip, Fortunately I've converted my Roadster HPC to J1772, and I can charge on it at 70A.)

 

[wayner]

My car is set to charge at 1 am. That is to make sure the car is ready when I need it the next day. At 40A that is almost always enough.

Is that what you use in the winter as well? I think I learned from you that you want to end charging as soon as possible to your departure time in the winter as that will facilitate regen. This is why Teslas should have a charge end time rather than a charge start time - and some of the third party apps offer this functionality. Of course this isn't necessarily good for the grid if everyone is charging from 5-7am.

 

[RAM_Eh]

I for one charge every night at 8PM as my mileage varies every day. Some days I need over 300km and some 50. My 90% even in cold weather is good enough 99% of the time. If I need to venture further that's what superchargers are for.

 

[Doug_G]

Is that what you use in the winter as well? I think I learned from you that you want to end charging as soon as possible to your departure time in the winter as that will facilitate regen. This is why Teslas should have a charge end time rather than a charge start time - and some of the third party apps offer this functionality. Of course this isn't necessarily good for the grid if everyone is charging from 5-7am.

I park in a garage. It's not heated but the car is protected enough that I usually get 50% regen in the morning. If it's really cold I can do a little cabin preheat before I unplug.

I'm not going to sit in the garage doing math to figure out the optimum charge start time. It would be nice if the car could do that for us though.

 

[wayner]

I park in a garage. It's not heated but the car is protected enough that I usually get 50% regen in the morning. If it's really cold I can do a little cabin preheat before I unplug.

I'm not going to sit in the garage doing math to figure out the optimum charge start time. It would be nice if the car could do that for us though.

I park in a garage as well but I still think charging close to your departure time is helpful. I have written some python code that determines the optimal charge start time given an end start time- but you need to know your charge rate to use it. I haven't used the code in a few months though. The other think to keep in mind is that you may want to end your charging by 7am if you have TOU pricing and rates go up at 7am, which is the case in Toronto and I think is the case in other parts of ON.

 

[Doug_G]

Sure, but for me it's not worth the effort. TOU ends at 7 am and my departure time varies widely. Most of the time the car would be stone cold by the time I got into it.

 

[SmartElectric]

I downloaded my electricity usage from my provider last night as part of preparation for a Net Metering proposal and found something truly interesting.

Our yearly usage is ~10000 kWh between the hours of midnight at 5 AM, that's like 120 full fill ups on our S 85, or alternatively 500 fill ups of my Smart Electric! Fully 80% of our electricity usage is "off peak", and I mean truly off peak, as in, when Ontario would otherwise be producing excess power from our Nuclear fleet.

Meanwhile our mid-day usage is ~ 1000 kWh during 10 AM - 4 PM "peak rates" period.
Due to pool pump and AC, our usage averages 1.5 kW summer and then only 0.8 kW off-summer.

Turns out I only need 8 solar panels to do the "load displacement" of our peak usage. My interest is only to shed our load, not to make money selling to the grid, so I am doing the research to "right size" my proposed solar array.

Given the drop in rates for off peak to 7.7c/kWh (about $0.12/kWh with taxes and distribution included), there is no economic incentive to get a Powerwall battery, and for sure, I'd rather soak up the excess power we otherwise sell at a loss to the US overnight anyway.

 

[Phillip L]

I do the right thing for the grid and always set the charger to start about 2 or 3 in the morning but I had my Tesla charger installed at the full 100 amps so I can even charge a nearly depleted battery on my 85 D by 07:00. I wonder if the simplest thing for hydro to do for ev charging is make another tier in TOU electricity rates such that between 2 and 5 am the rates are really,really low to encourage use then. I assume that technically that would be very easy. Might even get ev and non ev owners to set their dishwashers and clothes washers/dryers to run then as well!

 

[wayner]

@SmartElectric - Why do you run your pool during the day? Do you have a solar heating system? If not (and if the noise isn't a concern) then you can just run your pool pump at night. Often 4-6 hours per day is enough to filter the water sufficiently - the aim is to turn over 100% of the pool volume per day.