Howdy team!
Long time wisher, first time poster (just got my unit installed today, car due in three weeks winning).
In Australia we have time of use that follows peak, off peak, and shoulder. I have been able to map that successfully in the app to Peak, Off-peak and Night.
The challenge I have however is the app assumes there is a morning peak, however in Aus we don’t have a morning peak the hours at least for Ausgrid here in NSW are listed at Time of use pricing - Ausgrid
This comes with some complexities as there is differences from Summer, to Winter, to other seasons, but particularly with Summer and Winter, there is no morning peak. The app however forces a morning peak and I am unable to override this. Hence, for 30 mins of the day, (7am - 7:30am) I have had to list an incorrect peak which would skew the dollar values. Reason this is important is because my novated leasing company will rely on accurate information (that the Australian Tax Office would recognise) to reimburse me for power used to charge my EV.
Is it possible to have an ‘NA’ option for the morning peak pretty please?
Also, can I assume that (based on the seasonal differences we have in pricing), if I charge for 3 months, then change the power pricing configuration, the historical data would remain static at the correct pricing for the time it was recorded, and not update to the new pricing configuration?
Thanks,
Stuart
Hi Stuart.
Firstly, yes the values calculated at the time of charging remain fixed as we expect drivers to occasionally switch power providers and get new prices.
We are aware of a couple of tariff types that we don’t currently support, and will be making changes to the app to allow those to be set up. I would guess that this will be available in Q1/Q2 2024.
Regards,
Tom
Eggsellent thank you @TomRose on both accounts that is good to know.
If you need a beta tester more than happy to put my hand up (live and breathe IT all day every day, so happy to be a guinea pig).
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Hi Tom,
Now that I have spent more time with the charger and some newly available plans I thought I would add additional information for what I would love to see in an update to the Tarrif Types.
In addition to the use case I mentioned originally (i.e. three time periods where the morning peak does not exist in our tarrif types), I am now also seeing EV charging plans in Australia that now offer a fourth tarrif type (so we would have peak, off-peak, night, and ‘EV special night’ rate (which is a subset such as 12am - 6am, but then 10pm - 12am and 6am - 7am revert back to the standard ‘night’ rate.
If at all possible, it would be AMAZING to have an ‘override cost configuration’ for 1 day, particular use case here is all the public holidays throughout the year, on those days (at least here in NSW) we get weekend pricing, hence, the recorded prices are incorrect unless you change the configuration, charge, and revert.
To throw additional confusion in some providers in Aus are also now toying with free charging only on certain hours on one or both days of the weekend.
I have come up mentally with a kinda cool concept that I think would be a relatively straightforward user-facing way to configure ultimate flexibility with this, would be happy to discuss it directly.
Cheers,
Stuart
We’ve already got support for zero-charge hours as those have been common in NZ for a while now (you can tick the ‘My tariff includes free hours’ button to get an extra section where you enter what those hours are). Not sure if that will cover the new tariffs you are seeing in Aus or not - perhaps not because it’s weekend only?
Public holiday pricing is a real curve-ball that is either very manual for the driver, or else requires a good way to electronically source the data. Do you happen to know whether there are any awkward exceptions (like some holidays it doesn’t apply) that would require us to get information from the electricity retailer rather than a more generic source of public holiday data?
We’ve had a play with some UI concepts that allow drivers to enter anything they like, but historically tariff structures were similar enough that we could boil it down to just a few patterns that covered all (or very nearly all) the options and kept it simpler for the average user. However with retailers starting to experiment again we may need to include a ‘none of the above’ option that lets drivers configure their own from scratch. The Tesla app has quite a good one for doing this. When we get closer to deciding on whether a universal option is needed I’ll be in touch with our proposed approach to see how it aligns with your thinking.
Regards,
Tom
Hi Tom,
Correct, our zero charge hours (for some plans) are only on weekends, other plans are every day of the week, so it appears the Australian market is doing one additional scenario above current functionality.
I will openly say, I personally am not using such a plan (yet) but envisage once the prices stabilise I (and others) very well could.
Ahh public holiday pricing 
I am sure this has given the development team more than a handful of headaches. For all the plans I have seen in NSW (not sure about other states) there are no weird exceptions, it is just ‘public holidays revert to weekend pricing’ across the board, so I think public data would suffice.
The UI concepts sound good, and I can certainly see the benefits of the simplified approach, as you mentioned, with the experimentation, more options are likely needed. More than happy to be contacted when you are closer to deciding (thank you)!
Cheers,
Stuart
Hi Ryan and @TomRose
In case it helps with planning, a NZ distributor intends to introduce new Time of Use pricing on 1 April 2024 for residential and small business customers with the following time slots. This was refined based on feedback from electricity retailers - but that doesn’t mean they will pass it on to customers from April (maybe some wont use it at all). But it does indicate the sort of change possible.
Peak (Mon to Fri, 7:00am to 11:00am and 5:00pm to 10:00pm)
Shoulder (Mon to Fri, 5:00am to 7:00am and 11:00am to 5:00pm)
Off Peak (Mon to Fri, 10:00pm to 3:00am)
Super Off Peak (Anytime between 3:00am to 5:00am)
Weekend (all trading periods except for Super Off Peak between 3am -5am)
The extra low 3am-5am price is designed to attract load such as battery charging into the trough of lowest network loading.
Regards
Richard
Thanks for that Richard. It will be interesting to see what the retailers do with this!
Tom