Electrify America "Congestion Reduction Pilot" - July 8, 2024

[Jonathan S.]

"10 EA stations are effected for now… I can accept this but this is a test case which could later be expanded.'
Agreed that this could very well happen.
Especially since the test will work to some extent in relieving congestion, since it will encourage drivers to charge at EA competitors.
And EA won't care, b/c its $2b in funding is required by the consent decree.
But EA will be relieved of many complaints about it:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-board-blasts-ev-charger-110058517.html

This latest move just make EA even more the Nigerian railway system of the U.S.:

https://davidlabaree.com/2021/08/30/albert-hirschman-exit-voice-and-loyalty/

When exit, voice, and loyalty work as advertised, organizations fix themselves; but often the system doesn’t work. A case in point is the consulting gig that first gave Hirschman the insight about exit and voice. He was called in to deal with a problem in the Nigerian national railway system. The system was working fine until it had to face increasing competition with trucking for moving goods around the country. Somehow this competition made the railways less efficient, even though in theory it’s supposed to increase efficiency. Why? Because when business exited from the trains to trucks, this served not as a wakeup call but a safety valve. The most demanding customers moved their business, which took away the angry voices that had afflicted the railways, while at the same time the railways, as a government agency, did not lose a corresponding amount of public funding. The result was a win-win for the railway operators — less work for the same money.​

​

As a state organization, the railway was vulnerable to voice, but its failures provoked customers to exit instead. The latter solved their problem with no muss, no fuss. It was the railway that suffered instead. Hirschman calls this phenomenon a “lazy public monopoly.” Public schools can find themselves in the same situation. They’re political organizations that are vulnerable to voice but they provoke exit in their most demanding customers. The latter move to another district or send their kids to private schools, which solves their problem. But the district they left doesn’t necessarily lose funding in proportion to the loss of students, since the state appropriations are supplying the funding rather than student tuition. And the bonus is that they got rid of the loudest complainers. Another dysfunctional win-win for the organization.​

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[Gino]

What EA more fundamentally seems to be ignoring is the role of pricing.
All of these complications could be eliminated by charging for both kWh and time spent charging.
(Plus of course time spent plugged in yet not charging. And obviously towing vehicles that are blocking chargers.)

Yesterday I stopped to charge from ~87% to 98%.
Yes, I know that doesn't make sense, but I was on an unfamiliar itinerary for range, and I was driving right by one of eight NEVI-funded stations in the U.S., so I also wanted to check it out in general.
My peak speed was 75kW. At 98% I was still at 17kW, so ~3X typical public L2.

(I had meant to unplug earlier, but I got caught up in providing advice to a Quebecois couple traveling to NYC, who were at one of the two slower state-funded pairs of 50kW chargers instead of one of the 180kW NEVI-funded chargers, none with any labels of course. I hope my advice to stop at the Brewster NY Magic Docks worked out for them!)

Even at such an absurdly high SoC, my avg speed was 43kW.
So almost the same as a Bolt.
As with any paid product/service offered to the public by a for-profit company, just increase the price instead of imposing rationing that will be hopelessly out of sync with what is really scarce, i.e., time spent at chargers in this case.
(For anyone who objects that supermarkets often impose restrictions on how many sale items you can buy, that's actually the reverse: the goal is to sell as much as possible, and seeing those quantity restrictions just encourages people to buy more -- I still fall for that every time, i.e., wow, this must be a good deal if I can't buy any more than that, so I'll buy the max amount allowed!)

You make some very good points. If all the chargers at a station are occupied and people are waiting then I’m surprised EA doesn’t institute “surge” pricing like Uber & Lyft do. This would piss off everybody if the kWh charge rate would go up & down dynamically based on demand. Great excuse to maximize profits… I do think charging a higher price/KWH from 85% to 100% makes much more sense. If you need as much range as possible then you get to decide if paying the premium is worth it.
This is the decision I make currently under my 3 year free 30 minute charging plan from Porsche on my Taycan. I have to pay for every KWh beyond 30 minutes which I only do when I’m on a long trip once a month or every few months when I recalibrate my battery by running it below 5% and then charging to 100% which can take as much as an hour from 5%SOC.
This seems to make the most sense. Maybe the pricing for going beyond 85% would be at a higher rate.
Unfortunately I don’t think most people would care about this difference to impact their behavior.

 

[Jonathan S.]

The scarcity at issue here is not kWh, but rather time spent charging.

Basing a cut-off on 85% SoC does not match up with decreased charging speed:
A Taycan still pulls in the upper double digits kW into the mid 90s SoC.
So that is above the max Bolt speed.
By contrast, some other EV models drops off below that far lower in their SoC.
How is that fair?

Based a cut-off on 85% SoC also does not match up with kWh delivered:
Starting from 0%, a Hummer EV takes 180kWh to reach 85%.
By contrast, an older Bolt takes only 51kWh.
So a Hummer under this rationing is allowed to charge for ~3.5x longer than an old Bolt.
How is that fair?

What does match up with the scarce good/service of timing spent charge is ...
... time spent charging!
Could be something like $X/min for the first half-hour block, then increasing to $Y/min for the next half-hour block, and finally $Z/min after that. (Plus the usual per-kWh charge.)

 

[Gino]

The scarcity at issue here is not kWh, but rather time spent charging.

Basing a cut-off on 85% SoC does not match up with decreased charging speed:
A Taycan still pulls in the upper double digits kW into the mid 90s SoC.
So that is above the max Bolt speed.
By contrast, some other EV models drops off below that far lower in their SoC.
How is that fair?

Based a cut-off on 85% SoC also does not match up with kWh delivered:
Starting from 0%, a Hummer EV takes 180kWh to reach 85%.
By contrast, an older Bolt takes only 51kWh.
So a Hummer under this rationing is allowed to charge for ~3.5x longer than an old Bolt.
How is that fair?

What does match up with the scarce good/service of timing spent charge is ...
... time spent charging!
Could be something like $X/min for the first half-hour block, then increasing to $Y/min for the next half-hour block, and finally $Z/min after that. (Plus the usual per-kWh charge.)

That’s not a bad idea. For Bolt owners they would likely think twice the additional cost per KWh after 30 minutes but I’m not sure what percentage of vehicles are the slow charging types. Where I charge in Newport Beach almost all vehicles are luxury vehicles of some type.
Most of the time people are conscientious to others waiting but vehicles with larger battery packs will take longer to charge and it wouldn’t be fair to allow them to charge from 30% to 85% which could be 120KWH on a Ford Lightning while my Taycan would only be 50KWH to get from 30% to 85%.
This would give a discounted price/KWH advantage to vehicles with the biggest battery packs not the more efficient EVs.
If a vehicle with a smaller battery pack like a bolt which cannot charge at the higher rates for 800V or 400V charging then they should not be allowed to charge past 30 minutes when others are waiting. This would require vehicles login when they arrive at a station so EA knows how many are actually waiting.
I actually had to wait for a homeless person on a bike who had an adapter which allowed him to charge his cell phone, a battery pack & some rechargeable batteries. This was in a Target parking lot and this guy sat on the grass while he waited well over 2 hours to get everything charged. He obviously had a credit card to charge the session but he took over one of only 3 chargers for several hours while at least 5 or 6 people in vehicles waited patiently.
I would say that cost/kwh could increase over time when their are vehicles waiting. During heavy use/waiting charging 1X the KWH price up to 30 minutes, 2X the KWH price from 31-60 minutes & 4X from 61 minutes and longer would be understandable. This would get people’s attention and curb people with slow charge rate vehicles from charging for an hour or more.

 

[Jonathan S.]

A homeless person used a DCFC EV charger for devices like cell phones?
That just doesn't seem technologically feasible.

Anyway, in this context, as in many others, fairness is in the eye of the beholder.
And how does the definition of empathy go? Something like, recognizing that another person's existence is just as real as yours?
I think that another person's charging needs are just as valid as mine.
(Although idling or blocking a charge, no, zero tolerance for that!)

So whether a charger is in use forever ... by a rideshare Bolt charging at a painfully slow rate, or ... by a monster pickup or SUV with a battery ~2x size mine, whatever, it's a commercially provided product/service, who am I to judge another driver's needs?
(All the internet chatter -- especially on the EA FB group -- about "charging etiquette" is just a selfish version of Why my charging session is more valuable than yours.)

But if they're using up a scarce resource, then from the viewpoint of the resource owner and also fellow consumers, they should pay for it.
And the scarcity is charger availability, not kWh (which is already charged for anyway, and other drivers' kWh doesn't come at the expense of my kWh).

So add a time-based payment component (on top of the existing kWh charge), with an increasing block structure.
Solves so many problems with one easy fix.

 

[Gino]

A homeless person used a DCFC EV charger for devices like cell phones?
That just doesn't seem technologically feasible.

Anyway, in this context, as in many others, fairness is in the eye of the beholder.
And how does the definition of empathy go? Something like, recognizing that another person's existence is just as real as yours?
I think that another person's charging needs are just as valid as mine.
(Although idling or blocking a charge, no, zero tolerance for that!)

So whether a charger is in use forever ... by a rideshare Bolt charging at a painfully slow rate, or ... by a monster pickup or SUV with a battery ~2x size mine, whatever, it's a commercially provided product/service, who am I to judge another driver's needs?
(All the internet chatter -- especially on the EA FB group -- about "charging etiquette" is just a selfish version of Why my charging session is more valuable than yours.)

But if they're using up a scarce resource, then from the viewpoint of the resource owner and also fellow consumers, they should pay for it.
And the scarcity is charger availability, not kWh (which is already charged for anyway, and other drivers' kWh doesn't come at the expense of my kWh).

So add a time-based payment component (on top of the existing kWh charge), with an increasing block structure.
Solves so many problems with one easy fix.

It surprised me too. He had some type of adapter plugged into the charger cable. I wish I had looked closer. All I know is that he was plugged in for a while and he was less than a KWH in total…

 

[Jonathan S.]

^ So essentially this person set the new all-time world record for slowest DCFC kW rate!

 

[Gino]

A homeless person used a DCFC EV charger for devices like cell phones?
That just doesn't seem technologically feasible.

Anyway, in this context, as in many others, fairness is in the eye of the beholder.
And how does the definition of empathy go? Something like, recognizing that another person's existence is just as real as yours?
I think that another person's charging needs are just as valid as mine.
(Although idling or blocking a charge, no, zero tolerance for that!)

So whether a charger is in use forever ... by a rideshare Bolt charging at a painfully slow rate, or ... by a monster pickup or SUV with a battery ~2x size mine, whatever, it's a commercially provided product/service, who am I to judge another driver's needs?
(All the internet chatter -- especially on the EA FB group -- about "charging etiquette" is just a selfish version of Why my charging session is more valuable than yours.)

But if they're using up a scarce resource, then from the viewpoint of the resource owner and also fellow consumers, they should pay for it.
And the scarcity is charger availability, not kWh (which is already charged for anyway, and other drivers' kWh doesn't come at the expense of my kWh).

So add a time-based payment component (on top of the existing kWh charge), with an increasing block structure.
Solves so many problems with one easy fix.

Time based charges would be the most fair since slow charging vehicles take up more time than a faster charging vehicle. The first 30 minutes could be the same charge cost per KWH but that only works when chargers can supply a high enough charging rate to all vehicles. Otherwise low output chargers would be able to charge higher rates after 30 minutes without delivering as much energy as they should have.
Sometimes the reason there is a longer line at EA stations is because the EA chargers are not outputting as much as they should so you don’t get as much charge as you should.

 

[bsclywilly]

Wouldn’t a kWh based rate be more fair than time based? Aside from some differences in efficiency, allowing all drivers to get a certain mileage to get where they’re going would be more fair for the fast and slow charging vehicles. The value each user gets is directly related to the energy received and roughly the distance you can travel. For example it could be a fixed $/kwh rate for the first 50kwh and ramping up after that.

This would deter people from charging to high SOC but not penalize those with slower charging vehicles.

That said, I feel like my EA experiences over the last 3 years has been something like this: 2022 little congestion and almost 100% success. 2023 was the year of maintenance issues, and 2024 it seems less frequently I see downed chargers but have frequently had to wait in lines.

 

[Gino]

Wouldn’t a kWh based rate be more fair than time based? Aside from some differences in efficiency, allowing all drivers to get a certain mileage to get where they’re going would be more fair for the fast and slow charging vehicles. The value each user gets is directly related to the energy received and roughly the distance you can travel. For example it could be a fixed $/kwh rate for the first 50kwh and ramping up after that.

Yes, but it’s like taking a seat a full bar and only ordering a single drink and water sitting there taking up a spot for a real paying customer. This person needs to tip the bartender for his lost opportunity. It’s only right not to waist the bartender’s time.
When charging stations are backed up and someone takes up a charging spot with a vehicle which takes forever to charge then this user should pay a premium for the excessive time spent charging.
Maybe the answer is to charge for the time in the charger spot which goes up the longer you use the charger as well as the charging cost per KWH that goes up the more energy to get.
This way slow charging vehicles will stop charging when the cost per minute gets too high for them incentivizing them to not charge as long. The others that charge very large batteries will pay the lowest time of use cost but pay the increasing cost per KWH to charge huge batteries once they get beyond 30 minutes. These owners would be incentivized to do the majority of their charging in 30 minutes and get to decide if it’s worth it to charge longer to get more energy after 30 minutes to get to 100% knowing they will be paying a significant enough premium on the cost/KWH when they need to charge to 100%.

 

[bsclywilly]

Yes, but it’s like taking a seat a full bar and only ordering a single drink and water sitting there taking up a spot for a real paying customer. This person needs to tip the bartender for his lost opportunity. It’s only right not to waist the bartender’s time.
When charging stations are backed up and someone takes up a charging spot with a vehicle which takes forever to charge then this user should pay a premium for the excessive time spent charging.
Maybe the answer is to charge for the time in the charger spot which goes up the longer you use the charger as well as the charging cost per KWH that goes up the more energy to get.
This way slow charging vehicles will stop charging when the cost per minute gets too high for them incentivizing them to not charge as long. The others that charge very large batteries will pay the lowest time of use cost but pay the increasing cost per KWH to charge huge batteries once they get beyond 30 minutes. These owners would be incentivized to do the majority of their charging in 30 minutes and get to decide if it’s worth it to charge longer to get more energy after 30 minutes to get to 100% knowing they will be paying a significant enough premium on the cost/KWH when they need to charge to 100%.

I feel the duration pricing would be hard to implement from an equity standpoint because those slower charging vehicles are typically cheaper and have less capacity anyways. Bolt owners, for example, shouldn’t have to pay more to travel the same distance.

I think the main point everyone agrees on is limiting slow charging and that does apply to every vehicle at high SOC so maybe EAs approach to cap at 85% is the best compromise solution with the small battery cars at a bit of a disadvantage.

 

[Jonathan S.]

I feel the duration pricing would be hard to implement from an equity standpoint because those slower charging vehicles are typically cheaper and have less capacity anyways. Bolt owners, for example, shouldn’t have to pay more to travel the same distance.

I think the main point everyone agrees on is limiting slow charging and that does apply to every vehicle at high SOC so maybe EAs approach to cap at 85% is the best compromise solution with the small battery cars at a bit of a disadvantage.

Equity standpoint?
If the problem to be solved is charger availability, then the obvious solution is to charge drivers based on how long they spend charging (in addition to the kWh consumption of course).
Bolt owners are using up more charger time to travel the same distance. If EA wants its chargers to be available to more drivers (either b/c EA actually cares about charger availability, or EA wants to sell more kWh), then EA should charge on a time basis.
In all sorts of contexts, people using up more of a resource get charged more, even if their efficiency at using that resource is less.
The 85% cut-off hurts Bolt owners even worse b/c in addition to charging slowly they also have short range, so that 15% loss makes a big difference.
But of course EA doesn't care about any of this. It just wants to hear fewer complaints about charger availability. So the 85% limit will solve that problem, both by cutting off drivers at 85%, and by encouraging drivers to check out the competition.

 

[Gino]

Equity standpoint?
If the problem to be solved is charger availability, then the obvious solution is to charge drivers based on how long they spend charging (in addition to the kWh consumption of course).
Bolt owners are using up more charger time to travel the same distance. If EA wants its chargers to be available to more drivers (either b/c EA actually cares about charger availability, or EA wants to sell more kWh), then EA should charge on a time basis.
In all sorts of contexts, people using up more of a resource get charged more, even if their efficiency at using that resource is less.
The 85% cut-off hurts Bolt owners even worse b/c in addition to charging slowly they also have short range, so that 15% loss makes a big difference.
But of course EA doesn't care about any of this. It just wants to hear fewer complaints about charger availability. So the 85% limit will solve that problem, both by cutting off drivers at 85%, and by encouraging drivers to check out the competition.

Perfectly stated… Time plus KWH charges. Simple. It rewards vehicles which can charge more efficiently in the shortest time and charges everyone the same per KWH. The inefficient use of charger access time is the vehicle owner’s problem so they will pay more for more time which would be fair…

 

[Jonathan S.]

"Wouldn’t a kWh based rate be more fair than time based?"

Nobody is proposing that the per-kWh charge be eliminated.
(Except in those states where it's already prohibited, meaning that the effective per-kWh rate varies widely, depending on vehicle charging curve and charger condition.)
The bulk of the fee clearly has to be based on kWh consumption, otherwise a charging network would have no accurate way of determining what it needs to charge to recover its variable costs.

But if congestion is a problem, then a time-based rate solves all these problems, and equitably so, given that drivers are paying for the scarce resource they're consuming.

The 85% cap is trivial for a vehicle with a long range, but exacerbates problems for shorter-range models that were already in trouble for road tripping.

"For example it could be a fixed $/kwh rate for the first 50kwh and ramping up after that."
That still doesn't address the congestion problem though.
For example, a refreshed Taycan pulls in at 10% SoC at an EA 350kW charger that actually can hit the Taycan charging curve.
That Taycan driver receives ~68kWh in only 18 minutes. So a Taycan owner should be charged more per kWh for the add'l 18kWh above 50kWh? Even though the Taycan owner is taking up only a trivial amount of charging time for the entire session?
By contrast, a Bolt takes about an hour to get just 50kWh.

"This would deter people from charging to high SOC but not penalize those with slower charging vehicles. "
They're using more of a valuable resource, i.e., charger time. Their slow charging is penalizing other EV drivers who have to wait, and EA who is losing out on charging income.

 

[Jonathan S.]

Perfectly stated… Time plus KWH charges. Simple. It rewards vehicles which can charge more efficiently in the shortest time and charges everyone the same per KWH. The inefficient use of charger access time is the vehicle owner’s problem so they will pay more for more time which would be fair…

Now we just have to convince EA!
Okay, never mind, back to other matters that are potentially more tractable...

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