Originally Posted by
SamirD
I bet taxes and state incentives/tarriffs have a lot to do with this much of a discrepancy, although here in CA they used to have .28 off-peak and .41 on-peak and now everything is like .48, so could also just be pricing based on supply and demand. Those 250kw chargers are nice when you get the full speed--it's crazy fast to get 10-20%.
It could also be that electric rates are cheaper in PA vs NJ. PA gives consumers the ability to choose their generation provider, which has led to a fairly competitive market and relatively lower generation costs compared to many other states. According to one site, current PA residential rates (for generation, not including distribution) are around 8c/kWh and around 16c/kWh in NJ. Large commercial customers generally get even better rates than residential consumers, although for very spiky users (which DCFC stations definitely are), demand charges can affect the price dramatically (electric utilities reward consumers who use a consistent, predictable amount of electricity and penalize ones that have large spikes of demand, since they can't amortize the cost of the infrastructure over a larger number of kWh served). But then yes, as you mentioned, state incentives can also play a part, too. It's all quite complicated.
Peak/off-peak pricing at Superchargers was definitely a thing when I was in CA in February, but it was pretty much only in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The SCs between Morgan Hill and Ventura were all fixed at IIRC 38c/kWh. (And if you're really flexible and want the very cheapest power...find one of the older 76kW chargers in the Bay Area and use it off-peak...I think those were close to 20c/kWh!)
Originally Posted by
SBYGUY
here in Quebec I’d have to check our DCFC prices. Prob cheapest in NA
Some of the cheapest electric rates in the US are in the Pacific Northwest (OR/WA), thanks to the huge hydroelectric generation capacity of the Bonneville Power Administration (similar to your situation in Quebec). Yet curiously, when I scrolled around on the Tesla in-car nav system and checked rates at Superchargers in Washington and Oregon, they were the same rate (32c/kWh, IIRC) as SCs in most other states. So for whatever reason, Tesla doesn't seem to vary SC rates based on local electric costs except in a couple of high-cost locales (CA being one, of course) or where they have to charge per-minute instead of per-kWh.
...Which I realize directly contradicts what I supposed just above about NJ vs PA pricing.
