Do you want to charge in public? ChargePoint Cards available

I almost used chargepoint today in a Aliso viejo walgreens. After buying ice cream at Walgrens - I stoppedal next door to refrigerator shop at Lowes. I was there at both stores almost 1 hour. Chargepoint minimum Cost - two dollars. That $2 for a 1 hour stay would get the PiP down the road about 7 or 8 miles.
So obviously nobody in their right mind would take a charge for just 1 hour or even 2 hours if the equivalent fee would be like buying gas at $10 a gallon. Even in an Emergency I would simply call the auto club & have our plug-in vehicle flatbed'ed back home. I think the chargepoint people need to rethink their business model - because even 75 cents/kWh is 2x the going rate for power in Orange county - and yet $2 for a 1 hour minimum would be $1 /kWh for a PiP's 2kW+ per hour recharge rate. Maybe after a year or more of the walgrens' charger plugs just sitting around unused - someone at Chargepoint will figure it out.
Anyway from now on I'm going back to cvs to fill perscriptions. I'd only started patronizing walgreens to support their chargers. But I can't in good conscience suport gouging.

 

Charge Point is not the one responsible for the fee. It is a company called 350 Green. You can find them on a google search. I emailed a complaint about the cost to charge and they said some EV owners were using their charging stations as a home charging station so they had to start charging a fee.

The Walgreens I used To go to that has a charge point station told me that there was someone in their local area that would park overnight every night to charge at their station. Seems like they could have tried other alternatives like turning offf the station after business hours for the stations that were being abused. Or not allowing access to the charge point card for the ones doing their overnight charging.

There are still free stations available. I use my charge point app for my phone to see info on the stations to make sure they are free. I also use other apps to find other charging stations that are free.

 

I truly realize how important it is that companies make $$$ on EVSE ventures. But by the same token, the companies that have the EVSE installed are given reccomendations/guidelines that the individual businesses can either follow or ignore. I'm guessing Chargepoint has a good amount of influence as to why/when/how-much a business sets its price point at.

 

Here is an excerpt from the email I received from 350 Green:
As to the $2 charge, unfortunately EV drivers started abusing our Level 2 stations and parking overnight using retail locations like their home charging stations. Retail partners were not very happy and we had to turn the payment option on.
350Green is not allowed to charge by KW and we have set the price to accommodate every EV. When a Ford Focus EV is using a Level 2 station drawing 6.6 KWh, it comes out to 30cents per KW. Add to this installation and equipment amortization cost and $2 per hour is a reasonable charge.
Thanks for your support
350Green Team
- - - - -

The coolest free charging station I have used is at the Santa Clara Valley Water District where the EV charging stations are Solar Powered

 

They are referring to the bureaucratic rules in many states that say that if you sell electricity by the kwh, then you are declared to be an electric utility, and therefore subject to the state regulations pertaining to electric utilities. If you just rent time at the charger (that incidentally happens to be providing some unspecified amount of electric energy), then you are not a utility.

Maybe it's an unintended consequence of advancing technology interacting with old laws, but that is the way it is now.

 

30¢ kWh? Not so - except for that 5% minority that have 6.6kw capacity. Not so with the PiP ... not so with the Volt ... not so with the Leaf. But even if you DO only "focus" on the Focus EV ... if you go to a strip mall to buy a frozen yogurt, or a burger, or into Home depot for drywall mud or light bulbs, you're in & out in less than 30-40 minutes. It'd still be a looser to plug in at 6.6kW charging. If some day, the lion's share of plugin's are at or above 6.6kW charging - AND you're stopping for an hour or more ... then & ONLY then ... you're good to go.
As for:

statement, all that takes is proper sinage:
"parking while charging ONLY ... all others will be towed"
so that allabi is hard to swallow.

Recently in CA, new reg's have been established, so that EVSE's no longer fall under electric utility/power selling rules.

.

 

I don't think the $2/hr charge is userous at all. The meters in my city are $1/hr just for parking on tax payer funded streets, and even then there is a time limit. Many cities are more. The idea is to get chargers out there for EVs so that they can get rid of range anxiety, not to provide parking spaces for phevs. Free chargers distort the market enough so that people think we need more chargers than we do. The prius phv doesn't really need L2, the solution there would probably be just plain old outlets.

IIRC the city or austin charge point stations are $2/hr but you can charge unlimited for $25/6 months. That seems like a good way to accurately gauge demand. Those doing a 6 month subscription may be likely to free up the stations for other subscribers than if the stations were just free. The municipal utility here is the only one allowed to charge by the kwh, but could allow the charging stations to do it. Right now its a test program. All chargers in this program are 100% renewable electricity.

 

i use Chargepoint along with Blink, EV Connect, SemaConnect, OpConnect and probably a few others i cant think of right now. they are all currently free. around here, SemaConnect is the Walgreens option.

 

that is a best case scenario. charging rates are not linear. the higher the SOC, the lower the charging rate. there has been a pretty LARGE discussion about charging rates and what can and cannot be done. most people were under the assumption that one could not charge by the Kwh due to some archaic PUD regs. seems to me, that thought was shot down in the case of EV charging stations. if not, these stations will not fly until the fee structure is changed to properly reflect current market conditions.

in some area, parking by time will always be the case so that is unavoidable and i understand the Walgreens position if there is actually someone parked there during off business hours. but all this is done by computer and its probably a VERY simple task to regulate the rates based on several different parameters.

 

Apparently 350 Green has not received this memo.

 

Down in the far southwest corner of the USA, BLINK chargers seem to have the market controlled. There are a few of the ChargePoint stations, and a few SEMA connects, but the ChargePoint I tried out was just an outlet. With a PHEV, there's no real necessity to plug-in when you're away from home unless the charge is: 1)free, and 2) at the end of your EV range. So far, BLINK network is the only free option here, and they say it's only free for a little while longer. At that point, it won't really be worth even $1/hour to charge up, even to save a little gas. What these companies will need to do is get some kind of subscription in place. Even then, unless one has access to one of their chargers - and uses it regularly - the cost/kWh will still be higher than home charging.

Paying for the convenience is fair enough, but in the case of Prius PHEV, where you'll only save about .25gal of fuel by charging anyway, it doesn't make sense.

 

I don't think it is good practice to give away the power for free, simply to encourage prii to park at chargers. I can see some paying to use renewables instead of gasoline. There are low cost monthly subscriptions here, but that varies from place to place. I thought the idea of the chargers was to get rid of range anxiety for BEVs and to allow PHEVs to use less gas. Putting out a large network with public funds simply to get power to things like the prius phv at a lower cost doesn't make much sense to me.

 

(sigh) I wish -
I was trying to bite my tongue. No - the idea is NOT to get chargers out there so Plugin's can get rid of range anxiety. The idea is to get chargers out there too make lots of money. This ain't charity work. It's cut throat dog eat dog business. That means you "F" your compitition at all cost. 350green are in a business venture. They deal with ecotality/CoulumIb (sp?) who are currently suing NRG - over territorial EVSE rights here in california. As a result of another slimy power deal NRG was ordered by the courts to spend millions on charger installs. The lawsuit effectively brought their court ordered settlement/charger infrastructure build out to a grinding halt.
So you see ( even tho these facts are very abbreviated) - in our case, ( largest population - CA) this (ecotality) joint venture's goals have been to STOP Plug-in infrastructure. Better to kill it in the womb, than let the competition get a toe hold. Very slimy. As the OP says, happy 'driving'. Maybe the Amish got it right, with their barn raisings. Communities' citizens coming together to donate their time build a barn. If only we could have a community EVSE raising - it might cut out the back stabbing and we could get actual progress. I know - that's just wacky talk.

SGH-I717R ? 2

 

Well, you and I and everyone else who pays taxes are part owners of these chargers. None of them went in without government subsidy via green energy tax-breaks and federal loans and grants…

 

How are they going to make lots of money if they kill it in the womb? I do not know 350green, but the people that seem to be making electricity for plug-ins expensive in california are the regulators in california. We have quite a different situation here. California seems to want to make charging require extra expenses which make no sense to me. NRG probably wanted to be compelled to install chargers, they are doing it in texas because they want residential customers, not because of a lawsuit. Ecotality seems to have failed to do it in a timely manner, and does not seem to be acting in the public interest at all, which means competition and good regulation are needed. There are definitely bad actors in california, but this is a failure of government regulation or rather a result of corrupt state government agencies. I don't trust NRG, the mega New Jersey Based utility, but they seem to be better behaved than SCE or PG&E.

The utilities here want electric cars to sell power to at night. The chargers actually cost these utilities money, but they want the cars. They expect to make the money on night charging. Fake demand during the day because of free power screws up the grid. NRG and city of austin utilities, and other locals allow unlimited charging on the public network for a reasonable monthly fee, but want to discourage people from just parking and charging because its "free".

 

Locally its even more so. The bulk were installed by the city owned utility with the help of federal and state dollars. They are 100% public, and we can go to the city council meetings and ask that they be free. I think its a good move to encourage EVs, but they should not be free. $25/6 months or $2/hr seems like quite a small price for those that want to use them. We will add more if cars are using them, but don't want to add them just because cars are charging during the day for free instead of at night at home. Everyone that signs up for 6 months knows that peak demand is 3-7pm, and we hope they will avoid using them during the peaks.

 

Agree with you totally, the attraction of the plug in station, or just a simple outlet is miniiscule and far cheaper than what the large corporations are paying for advertising. In our case charging ing is only worth it if it is free. It is really the dealers that should be informing us of charging availability in our locale and encouraginging retailers to install.