Unsurprisingly, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent spike in energy prices, charging an electric car became much more expensive last year.
Back in November, the cheapest public chargers used by the ESB, the boxy kerb-side 22kW units, saw their prices jump from 33.6 cents per kWh to 56.3c per kWh. In theory, a Volkswagen ID.4 – Ireland’s best-selling EV – will average 17kWh/100km of electricity use, which means that travelling each 100km, and charging from a 22kW charger, will cost you €9.57 at current prices. Previously, it would have cost as little as €5.
If you want to use the ESB’s rapid public chargers, the news is just as bad. The cost of charging from a 50kW charger (which can only barely be described as “fast” these days) went up from 39.4c per kWh to 64.7c per kWh. For the very fast 150kW and 350kW chargers, the cost per kWh grew from 42.3c to 68.2c.
However, in the background, electricity prices – as well as the cost of natural gas, which fuels the majority of Ireland’s electricity generation – has been falling rapidly. According to the Central Statistics Office, the wholesale cost of electricity has fallen by 42 per cent compared with the peaks in prices seen last April. Of course, while that percentage fall is large, the actual price paid is still significantly higher than it would have been in the past. Back in 2020, Irish electricity generally cost about €40 per kWh – today, even with the massive reductions from last year’s peak, it costs €126 per kWh.
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Nonetheless, that should still mean that electric car charging will become cheaper in the coming months. John Byrne, head of e-cars at ESB, told The Irish Times that: “We purchase our electricity in blocks, so as the wholesale price has come down, and as we roll over our contracts and buy our next blocks of energy, then we hope to avail of those lower wholesale costs and pass those savings on to consumers. We always try to keep a good delta of pricing between us and petrol and diesel, because we know that cost helps to drive more people into electric motoring. The price of petrol and diesel has remained fairly constant, so the price of electricity will have to drop, and I’m hopeful that we’re going to be able to pass on those reductions in the near future.”
That “near future” should, hopefully, mean by the autumn of this year, and the plan is that prices will be reduced if not on the actual day of the new energy supply contracts being signed, then certainly within a matter of days.
It can’t come soon enough, really. With the price of diesel and petrol having fallen back from their own peaks, the cost of charging an electric car from public rapid chargers has become almost prohibitive, when compared to using fossil fuels.
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While the cost of charging should reduce in line with wholesale prices as a matter of course, ESB is also starting to roll out new high-speed charging points to try and at least make it easier and less of a hassle to find one when you need it. A new high-speed charging hub is opening at the Barack Obama Plaza filling station on the M7 motorway this week, which will allow up to eight electric cars to charge simultaneously, and make it possible – depending very much on which model of electric car you’re driving – to add as much as 100km of range in as little as six minutes, all running on renewable energy.
However, it’s undeniable that the continuing lack of public charging points remains an issue. A decade on from the first introduction of EVs to the Irish market, we still seem to be eons behind the likes of Sweden, which doesn’t even bother marking out parking spaces next to kerbside chargers as “EV-only” simply because there are so many kerbside chargers that there’s no point.
Byrne defends Ireland’s position when it comes to the charging rollout, saying: “It’s actually an aggressive rollout, but these things take time. We’ve built 29 new locations with high-speed charging under the Climate Action Fund, and we’re going to build 27 more. The good news is that the majority of those, 16 of them, will be high-powered charging hubs, like the one at Barack Obama Plaza. It takes time to ramp up to this sort of level of capability.”
According to Byrne, the ESB tries to extrapolate the data from the charging network to ensure that it’s always working at a capacity of 100,000 potential EV customers ahead of where things currently stand. The timeline for simply installing a charging point can be lengthy, though. It starts with initial consultations with local businesses and land owners, a process that has no set schedule. “In fact, many of the people we initially speak to about charging points say at first that they’ve no interest in one” says Byrne. “It’s later, maybe when they see the increasing popularity of EVs, or if they see that a local rival business has installed charging, that they then come back to us.”
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What follows is then the lengthiest part of the process – the legal wrangling over where and how to install charging points, who has ownership, access, maintenance responsibility and so on. This part of the chain actually takes much longer than the parts you’d assume would take the longest – getting any extra transformers or substations built, and getting planning permission. In fact, says Byrne, those last two take very little time and generally run side-by-side in the timeline of charger installation.
The next steps, beyond installing vast multicar hubs like that at Barack Obama Plaza (which can draw the same amount of energy as up to 1,000 homes) is to install chargers at a more local level. This week, the Government announced a new round of EU-backed funding for local communities to apply for fast-charging points, and the Department of Transport says that the next steps in funding will be for further destination schemes for commercial and public sector locations, as well as by a neighbourhood charging scheme which will support local authorities to provide charging for areas where home charging is not possible.
