Smart electric car chargers on streets could save drivers £600 a year

It hasn’t been the best week for news if you’re an electric car owner, with the chancellor on Thursday outlining how he will make drivers of zero-emission vehicles pay road tax from 2025.

But while current electric car owners will have to pay £165 in vehicle excise duty each year by the middle of the decade, some could save hundreds of pounds a year on charging costs thanks to new technology being trialled in the UK.

‘Agile Streets’ is a project aimed at residential streets where properties cannot park on the street. It then installs a number of intelligent measuring devices that only charge an electric car if it is cheap.

An initial trial of the technology in Britain has just been completed and has shown it can reduce the cost of charging over the public network by more than £600 a year.

Motorists who live in flats and houses without parking facilities cannot have a charging point for electric cars installed at home.

This means that they cannot benefit from cheaper domestic electricity, but have to rely on the more expensive public network, which can cost more than three times as much.

This is also a kind of postcode lottery, according to figures from the municipalities that have added the most and least electric charging points for cars.

However, Agile Streets seems to solve this problem.

The government-backed project sees 100 smart charging points deployed on residential roads at 17 sites across four local authorities: Shropshire, Hackney, Glasgow and East Lothian.

The devices schedule charging at times when energy prices are cheapest, such as at night when demand is low, or on sunny and windy days when there is an abundance of cheap solar and wind energy.

One of the groups behind the Connected Curb project claims that peak energy demand can be dramatically reduced using these devices, which can reduce electricity consumption during peak periods by as much as 240 megawatts – the equivalent of boiling over 1.4 million boilers .

“This reduces emissions, takes pressure off the grid at peak times and keeps costs down for drivers,” said Connected Curb.

“By using the Agile Streets app and scheduling when a car needs to be fully charged, drivers have enough power to drive off when needed.”

During the six-month trial period, 2,451 charging sessions took place and 51,618 kWh of energy were consumed.

These charging sessions were performed by 368 test participants.

Drivers had a choice of an ‘Eco’ smart charging mode for 19 p/kWh – which allows charging to be scheduled at the most economical times of the day – or a ‘boost’ mode for 33 p/kWh, which immediately delivers like a normal non-smart public charger.

Charging an average 62kW Nissan Leaf from 20 per cent to 100 per cent in Eco mode saves drivers £6.95 per session, equating to a cost saving of 42 per cent.

Annually this resulted in savings of £604.65 compared to the average cost of using a public device today.

Across the UK, this could mean collective savings of more than £4.1bn a year by 2030, the report said.

Chris Pateman-Jones, CEO of Connected Kerb, said: ‘Now is the time to turn our attention to smart charging technologies that allow those who rely on public charging infrastructure to benefit from cheaper prices when electricity demand is at its lowest.

‘The use of smart charging in public charging – to both reduce costs for consumers and minimize the impact of charging on the grid – is groundbreaking.

“The Agile Streets trial gives us the opportunity to make sure we are applying smart charging in the right way so that we can take all the lessons from the trial and get ready to roll out this revolutionary infrastructure.”

Changes to the VED rule will cost EV drivers £169.5 million a year

The technology will be applauded by EV owners, especially given rising operating costs by the middle of the decade.

Jeremy Hunt’s announcement last week in the Autumn Statement that EV drivers will start paying VED by 2025 is expected to earn motorists at least £80 million a year – and possibly up to £169.5 million, according to calculations by Forbes Advisor.

If Britain’s 550,000 all-electric vehicles are taxed at the same rate as petrol and diesel engines – £165 a year at VED’s standard rate for all models registered after 1 April 2017 – it will cost their owners £89.5 annually million.

The £355 VED surcharge for all cars over £40,000 – paid on top of the standard rate for five years – will also bring significant resources to the Treasury, while straining the bank balances of motorists switching to greener vehicles.

Forbes Advisor’s analysis found that there are at least 226,000 all-electric cars on the road with a list price of more than £40,000 – equivalent to more than £80 million a year in VED premium tax, or more than £400 million calculated over a five-year charging period.

Combined with road tax at the top levy of £165, that’s a potential additional annual cost of £169.5m for all-electric vehicle owners in the UK.

Kevin Pratt, auto insurance spokesperson at Forbes Advisor, said: “Broadening the VED grid to include electric vehicles is a logical step for a revenue-hungry administration, even if it will come as a shock to affected drivers.”

However, he has a caveat: “Hitting vehicles already on the road – indeed, those bought since 2017 – is a surprising move. It remains to be seen whether the recent upward trends in EV sales will continue now that buyers know the road tax is coming.”