Home Charging
One of the cheapest way to charge an EV is via home charging. To do this at present you must have off road parking where you can install a charger. Octopus Energy offer an EV tariff where you can charge your EV for just 7p per kWh. This means you can easily drive for under 2p per mile.
Of course if you can't install your own EV charger or have an EV specific tariff you will need to use public charging. This costs much more than charing at home. As can be seen below the cost of slow (7kW/22kW) public charging can be as much as 50-60p/kWh.
Using connected Kerb at 53p/kWh @3.5 miles/kWh would mean a cost per mile of 15p. Thats slightly more than cost per mile of a petrol car.
Installing a Home EV charger
One thing thats not spoken about for those with off road parking is the cost of installing a home charger. I'd personally recommend anyone with an EV they charge at home gets a good quality EV charger installed by a competent and qualified electrician. Whilst a 3 pin plug 'granny charger' can used they are slower (circa 2kW power output) compared to 7kW of a dedicated EV home charger. A good quality EV home charger is also safer. The likes of the MyEnergi Zappi has built in PEN protection that protects you from electric shocks in the event of a PEN fault in the electricity network. 'Granny Chargers' can be a fire risk too as they are pulling a constant power of 2kW for several hours it can lead to fires caused by overheated plug sockets. My work has banned the use of 'granny chargers' for company vehicles because of incidents of fires occurring.
The cost of installing a dedicated EV charger can be anything from £700 to £1149 depending on the type you choose.
Whilst this is a considerable amount of money, the pay back time for installing an EV charger isn't as bad as you think. If we compare the pay back period to the equivalent cost of a petrol car of 12p per mile, the EV chargers installed by Octopus Energy would pay off the charger install cost within 9,000 to 11,500 miles.
If we also compare the cost of someone receiving a potentially fatal electric shock from an EV due to a PEN fault is obviously well worth the £899 to £1149 install cost if it saves someone from a fatal electric shock.
There is also an added benefit that some EV chargers can integrate with energy suppliers who can then offer cheaper EV charging tariffs. Intelligent Octopus Go is one example of this where all EV charging is charged at 7p/kWh and there isn't necessarily a limit to the charging hours (there is a general fair use policy).
Rapid Charging
You can get monthly subscriptions which can help reduce the cost of public charging. If you are lucky to live near a Tesla 'Open to All' Supercharger it could reduce your cost per mile down to around 8p per mile at 3.5 miles/kWh efficiency.
Cost of charging on a long distance trip
