Am I better off with EV tariff or stay with standard tariff in-light of energy Price Guarantee

Jsmith88

I am getting an EV shortly and I usually cover 10k miles a year and will be charging at home 95% of the time. How do I calculate if I am better off being in a fixed EV tariff vs the new government-backed standard tariff?

My current annual usage is 2,100 electric and gas: 15,000. The quote from Octopus Go is, 40.13p/kWh day rate and 7.5p/kWh at night.

The new standard tariff is 34p/kWh. I am so hopeless at this sort of stuff, would love to get feedback from a more knowledgeable person as to which one works out cheaper long term.

[Deleted User]

How many kWh will you use for charging your car?  I don't have one, and they vary a lot.  I'll pick a random number to show you the calculation.

So lets say you put 5000 kWh in your car, all at the cheap rate, and you use all of your 'normal' 2100 kWh at the expensive rate:

Total cost = 5000*0.075 + 2100*0.4013 = £1220 ish

Or all 7100 kWh at the standard rate:

Total cost = 7100*0.34 = £2400 ish

niktheguru

If you are doing 10k miles per year in an electric car and you will charge 95% at home its a complete no brainer you should be on octopus go and use the off peak rate to charge your car. Using standard rate is 5x higher (and charging on public chargers will be up to 10x higher) than the octopus go rate. 

The only caveat would be if you are an extremely extremely high electricity user otherwise, so the 5p per unit offset of peak rate compared to SV rate would then add up, but i doubt it.

Keep_pedalling

As you are using gas for heating this is really a no brainier. In a similar situation, 8000 miles pa 98% low rate charging which works out that I an using 60% at the low rate.

mumf

I don’t see why electric cars should be cheap to charge….they pay no vehicle tax anyway! My electricity gets dearer to heat my house,why should a car be cheaper? 

Steve_79_P

Generally get between 3 and 4 miles per kwh of charge for our EV. So 10000 miles would be 3250 kWh when you allow for 15% efficiency loss during charging. So you would be looking at:

3250 X 7.5p = around £250
Plus

2100 at 40p = around £850
Total £1100

Or 5350 at 34p = around £1825

Plus remember some of your normal 2100 kWh will be used at the off peak time too, saving more - especially if you can use some of your high drain appliances at the off peak time.

As others have said, no brainer.

born_again

mumf said:

I don’t see why electric cars should be cheap to charge….they pay no vehicle tax anyway! My electricity gets dearer to heat my house,why should a car be cheaper? 

it's only the same as someone running Economy 7 tariff.

Don't forget some older ICE also pay no VED