Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Why isn't everyone as upset about the Supercharger increase as I am?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
This is a very common misconception. Charging is not really about selling the electrical energy. That's gasoline thinking, where you buy it by the gallon. Charging is 90% service and 10% energy for sale. That's why a fast charger costs you a lot more than a slow charger for the same energy. Charging isn't the business of selling electricity, while gas stations are technically in the business of selling you gasoline (at low profit, they actually make more money from the convenience store.)

Tesla has claimed the supercharger network is not to make money. It's to sell Teslas. I don't know if they still do that.
Electricity in Ontario is fairly cheap. Wholesale prices are probably like 3 cents/kwh. If you pay 50 cents/kwh all the rest is delivery. Not just Hydro delivery but the big expensive charging machine, and raised costs during peak times and more.

Once the kwh are in our cars then we feel we have bought kwh, and want to pay a flat rate for them like people do at gas stations for gallons. But while they are going in, we care a lot about how and when it goes in and don't pay a flat rate. We are so used to buying energy by the gallon that it takes time to get the head wrapped around this approach, and we also like very simple prices. The station's costs are:
  • Generation cost from some contracted generation provider (usually just 3c/kwh)
  • Transmission cost from a power company
  • Time of day surcharges (which vary a great deal)
  • Minutes of time on a $100,000 machine that is a DC Fast charger plus cost of the land
The last one, the minutes of time on the expensive machine, is actually the largest factor for most chargers.

And BTW, while residential electrical customers pay by the kwh (though they may also have time of use, in fact you want that if you have an electric car) but commercial customers have prices that are based on their peak use in many cases.
There’s also peak use surcharges, which one of the Big Stop managers locally told our local EV group about.
 
Yeah, but hasn't that been the case all along until the recent price increase? There is no way they had losses all along the way. There are other DC charging stations that are way cheaper. Do their owners all lose money? I don't think so. If I had a European Tesla with native CCS I would just charge elsewhere, but here in North America I am not given that choice. And sorry, some 3rd party adapter that costs a fortune and won't let me charge at >200 kW doesn't do it for me.
I still feel like Tesla is screwing me big time, regardless whether it's in $$$/minute or $$$/kWh.
 
Yeah, but hasn't that been the case all along until the recent price increase? There is no way they had losses all along the way. There are other DC charging stations that are way cheaper. Do their owners all lose money? I don't think so. If I had a European Tesla with native CCS I would just charge elsewhere, but here in North America I am not given that choice. And sorry, some 3rd party adapter that costs a fortune and won't let me charge at >200 kW doesn't do it for me.
I still feel like Tesla is screwing me big time, regardless whether it's in $$$/minute or $$$/kWh.
Why do you say that you don't think the owners lose money?

It may not be the owners, but almost all charging stations were installed with large government subsidies. So if they aren't losing money, it's because they got a subsidy, not because it is priced like a business. A lot of chargers are just there to look green, and actually are losing money. Teslas chargers are there to make you buy a Tesla, confident you can road trip in it. (It works, too.) EA chargers are there because VW lost a court case and had to pay billions to reduce emissions. Many other chargers are there with deals with car companies so they can give free charging to customers to compete with Tesla and eliminate questions by the customers about what charging will cost.

The province of Ontario just allocated another $91M to put those chargers you see at rest stops (pretty useless place, frankly, who wants to hang around a rest stop for 40 minutes?)

So yes, lots of them lose money.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Vawlkus and Tz00
I expect rapid electrical price in flation.
USA gas companies will try and sell gas (not the liquid petrol stuff - but "gas" as LNG - Liquified Natural Gas) to Europe as Europe seeks an alternative to gas from Putin. So why would the company sell gas in the USA for $0.05/kWh when they can sell it in Europe at 3x the price?
 
Most of the uk super chargers are 48p a kW
I expect rapid electrical price in flation.
USA gas companies will try and sell gas (not the liquid petrol stuff - but "gas" as LNG - Liquified Natural Gas) to Europe as Europe seeks an alternative to gas from Putin. So why would the company sell gas in the USA for $0.05/kWh when they can sell it in Europe at 3x the price?
How is any of that relevant to this thread? This is the Canada subforum and this thread is about the supercharger price increase.
 
  • Funny
Reactions: Big Earl
How is any of that relevant to this thread? This is the Canada subforum and this thread is about the supercharger price increase.
Didn't see it was the Canada subforum! Sorry. But surely the USA (and Canada)'s gas pipeline exporting gas to Europe will cause electricity prices to spike causing supercharger prices to spike. Gas makes up a lot of electrical generation, and is flexible, not baseload. Competition for that gas will drive up prices. It has massively in the UK. eg. from 13p/kWh to 35p/kWh in 1 year (roughly 48 US cents / kWh)
 
Didn't see it was the Canada subforum! Sorry. But surely the USA (and Canada)'s gas pipeline exporting gas to Europe will cause electricity prices to spike causing supercharger prices to spike. Gas makes up a lot of electrical generation, and is flexible, not baseload. Competition for that gas will drive up prices. It has massively in the UK. eg. from 13p/kWh to 35p/kWh in 1 year (roughly 48 US cents / kWh)
Canada gets only 6.6% of electricity from natural gas, though it varies from province to province. Another 12% from coal, sadly. 60% is hydro. Our electric companies have "hydro" in their name.
 
The hydro might be fairly maxed out though, I’m not sure how many hydro dams run much below their max capacity. That also depends on seasonal water flow rates and levels. Any additional unexpected load is likely to come from gas plants.

I think this is starting to show that we really need another very clean base energy load and right now nuclear seems to be the best bet.

Huge batteries are great (as well as pumped hydro or other energy storage methods), but they don’t generate power. You still would need to build a gazillion wind turbines or solar panels, which I’m all for, but the rate and scale just still isn’t there right now.

I know nuclear is wildly expensive, but I kind of think the government might want to subsidize it at this point. Either subsidized the construction and then just allow rates to cover operations, or offer interest free loans to companies to build and immediately guarantee to purchase the energy for X amount of year at a specific cost.

I know everyone hates government subsidies but we have local and state levels offering incentives to a company that stuffs junk into boxes to ship out 2 day to people that didn’t want to go to the store. Attracting big companies by tax incentives or free land/water has been standard for awhile. The best way to promote green energy is offering people cheap energy. It’s great to get a rebate to change your gas heater to electric, but if it’s cheaper to run the gas… why would you change? Same with EVs.

Get an excess of clean energy so it’s available to businesses and residents at cheap rates and watch people switch away from volatile gas markets.
 
Yep. Note that tier 1 has gone up, tire 2 stayed the same, and the higher tiers went down. I had heard people saying that would stop preheating their batteries so they would spend most of their time in tier 1. That is exactly not what people are meant to do in SCs, everyone should stay for as short as possible so they're available for the next people coming in. I believe this new change will encourage faster charging, which is a good thing.
 
Yep. Note that tier 1 has gone up, tire 2 stayed the same, and the higher tiers went down. I had heard people saying that would stop preheating their batteries so they would spend most of their time in tier 1. That is exactly not what people are meant to do in SCs, everyone should stay for as short as possible so they're available for the next people coming in. I believe this new change will encourage faster charging, which is a good thing.
I have not quite understood why the law wants to get involved with whether you bill by the kwh or by the minute. Neither one is perfect -- the end product is kwh but the service is getting it to you and how fast you put it in and we pay for both. The owner of the station mostly pays for you using minutes on their expensive device, and a tiny bit for electrical generation, and more for transmission and peak use rates for the kwh.

I wonder if they couldn't charge you "by the minute" if they wanted to where the per minute rate was equal to "current kw" * 0.35/60 -- which would mean 35 cents per kwh. They could fudge tiers by having 50 different ones. If they wanted to -- in reality they don't want to charge you by kwh it doesn't match their costs at all, though it gets closer because many chargers were paid for by subsidies. They might create prices that look like "30 cents/kwh plus 20 cents/minute" or whatever makes the most sense for the market. Consumers want simple charging, so a formula above would confuse them, until they realized it was just 35 cents/kwh.
 
Here is the Measurement Canada web page about EV charging rates
In the next 18 months, we expect to allow existing and new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations that meet established technical standards to charge based on kilowatt-hours (kWh) consumed. We will do this by continuing to work closely with industry and monitoring requirements other countries are developing, as well as advances and innovations in EV charging station technologies. The requirements will be performance-based to minimize costs and regulatory burden for EV charging station operators, while ensuring consumers receive accurate and reliable measurement, and protection against unfair practices.

We will also work with EV charging station operators to evaluate EV charging stations at their installation site under typical conditions of use. If these stations meet the technical standards, they will be approved to charge for electricity based on kWh.
At the bottom of the page it states “Date modified: 2021-08-09”

So perhaps this change will happen in early 2023.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Vawlkus
Actually, that’s changing. Passive cooling systems are much more reliable but the biggest change is standardized design. Utilities wanting to build a new nuclear plant don’t need to go thru the exhaustive safety review if they choose an already approved design. Accommodating the spent rods is still the big bugaboo.

Nuclear power is set to get a lot safer (and cheaper) – here's why
Well that's good, I knew a lot of the costs were upfront "impact study" kind of costs. I'm a big supporter of it. I'm all for other green energy, but if we want to knock down some dams and remove gas plants and stuff like that, lets get some next gen nuke plants going to cover that base demand and get energy cheap. The cheaper energy is the more people are willing to convert to it. Could you imagine if you were told your heating bill in a cold area (think Canada or upstate NY or something) was going to be cut in half switching to an electric system instead of gas or something?

Instead people often are paying just as much or MORE when going electric. It's wonderful if you can spend $10k+ to retrofit your 40 year old house with great insulation and then buy a $10k heat pump system, but realistically people are going to keep the gas and just burn more of it OR switch to the heat pump and then be very disappointed when coils are running all the time. Cheap clean energy just flips the switch on all that and fixes it. So what if people are burning loads of kWh because it's cheap to do so, you've removed gas, fuel oil, coal, etc from the equation and you're a net strong positive.
 
  • Like
Reactions: rhumbliner
I wonder if they couldn't charge you "by the minute" if they wanted to where the per minute rate was equal to "current kw" * 0.35/60 -- which would mean 35 cents per kwh. They could fudge tiers by having 50 different ones.
Because that would be defacto selling by the kWh and the government might crack down. Even the current tiers could be construed that way if they really wanted to.
 
Because that would be defacto selling by the kWh and the government might crack down. Even the current tiers could be construed that way if they really wanted to.
Absolutely the tiers are trying to do that. I doubt the law even speaks to tiers, but I have not read it. Does it limit the number of tiers? You might find have 60 tiers is too many, but 10 could come pretty close to emulating kwh.

But as I have said, stations don't want to sell you kwh. They want to sell you minutes. You want to buy kwh (and you want the fewest minutes possible.) No easy way to reconcile it all.
In the end, it's going to be minutes. Both you and they want you to spend the fewest minutes at the charger. You, because you want to get going, they, because you are using up time at their expensive machine, and the time on the machine is much more expensive than the kwh.
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: Vawlkus