Ausgrid Proposed Tariffs Could Make EVs More Expensive Than Petrol

Ausgrid wants to gold-plate the fast charger tariffs on its network…

The EV Council has warned the Australia Energy Regulator (AER) that Ausgrid’s current regulatory proposal offers a tariff structure that would push up the price of public chargers.

The AER published an issues paper covering the 2024-2029 regulatory proposal in late March.

The regulator had recently also published papers covering Essential Energy and Endeavour Energy.

The EV Council’s submission (PDF here) said:

“While all Tariff Structure Statements (TSS) have been noted as meeting AER expectations, the Ausgrid TSS differs materially from Essential and Endeavour with respect to the impact of the Tariff Structure and tariff assignment policies on high power public EV charging sites,”

The problem the council identified relates to the capacity tariff threshold, which Ausgrid sets lower than Endeavour’s or Essential’s 160MWh/annum.

The AER’s document said:

“For electric vehicle charging stations, [Ausgrid] proposed to move its capacity tariff threshold from 40 MWh to 100 MWh, over a three-year period.

Customers consuming between 40 MWh and 100 MWh, including applicable charging stations, would be assigned to default demand tariffs rather than capacity tariffs, and would be able to opt out to TOU [time of use] tariffs”.

The EV Council said in its submission:

“at the 100MWh/annum tipping point … the network cost component of a 500kVA charging location in the Ausgrid region will be approximately $70k/annum … while in the Endeavour region the network cost for the same type of site at 100MWh would be approximately $9k/annum, and in the Essential region the network cost would be approximately $14k/annum.”

This, the council argued, would make EV charging 50c per kWh more expensive than on the Essential or Endeavour networks.

The EV Council said that would make electricity more expensive than petrol, unless the charger owners spread the costs over their whole network, making electricity more expensive for all.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/ausgrid-punishes-chargers/