If you’re buying an EV, most of your charging is likely to be done at home, with fast charging reserved for longer road trips. Charging at home will grow your power bill, by how much depends on a number of factors.
The biggest factor in the cost of recharging at home is definitely how much you drive, with each km consuming kW of power from the battery, which got there from drawing kW from the 240v outlet in your garage.
Another big contributor is the specific electric vehicle that you purchase, with each having different capacities and different efficiency in their battery, motor and inverter components.
The final contributor is the price you pay for power. Being in Australia, its a fairly safe bet you’ll be paying a lot for power, so adding to that consumption with 1 or possibly 2 EVs in the garage needs to be done thoughtfully.
Previously AGL was considered the best provider for EV owners, with their A$1 per day EV plan. This required you to have a separate electrical circuit so the power consumed could be attributed to the car. Given most people would draw a few dollars worth of power per night, this would be a significant saving.
Unfortunately, AGL decided to end the $1 per day plan for EV owners on October 22nd, 2018 and since then we’ve been waiting to see what replaced it.
Now we know.
Unfortunately there’s no $2 per day plan which I actually think would still be a great deal, but clearly AGL didn’t think they’d make money on it, given the growth trajectory of EV sales in Australia.
Instead, we now have the details of the new AGL EV plan which are as follows:
- Up to $480 in bonus credits over two years*
- Free household carbon emissions offsetting with Future Forests**
- Low rates that won’t go up for two years
- No lock-in contract
- Monthly e-billing
- 24/7 customer support
- Flexible payment options
- Collect flybuys points when you link your accounts
So there we have it, far less generous, but still fairly flexible in that you can charge any time of the day, from any powerpoint. The plan goes for 2 years, and over that time you could get almost $500 off your power bills. At around $240 per year, you have to do the maths on your EV usage (or projected usage).
You may be thinking the benchmark price was $365 per year, but that’s not exactly the case. EVs don’t need to be charged every day, by rather some people may get away with a charge once a week. Of course, if you deplete the battery all week, the weekend charge would consume more kW and therefore cost more, so the actual numbers need to be averaged.
With a credit of up to $240 per year, it means you could charge just 65.75% as often as the previous plan that had a max price of $365 per year. Another way to express that is this plan is 34.25% less generous.
In the Q&A and fine print sections at the bottom of the site, we learn a couple more important aspects of this new EV plan.
Perhaps the biggest point to understand is that the credit amount will be applied to your electricity account as a $60 credit every 3 months and will appear on your next bill after the credit is applied.
You have to own at least one EV to qualify and need to provide your registration number to prove it. You’ll also have no exit fees should you choose to leave, you are not locked into the plan, so if it doesn’t work, you can change which is great.
A smart meter is not required to get the plan and you don’t need a dedicated EV charger for this. If you do, AGL are also happy, as you’ll still be drawing power from the grid and paying for it, so faster chargers like Tesla’s wall charger, just means your car charges faster and you’ll burn through the credit sooner.
AGL claims their Electric Vehicle plan is 25% less than the reference price. That reference price is $1467 per year, so it is expected the average customer will have a bill of around A$91 and A$1,090 per year. Those numbers are based on an average residential customer, using 3900 kWh per year, in Sydney 2000 (Ausgrid Network), on a single rate tariff.
Given AGL’s no longer being aggressive about winning EV owners, this leaves a lot of room for other energy retailers to innovate in this space and win market share in Australia.
More information at AGL.com.au
