In this conversation Kerim Baran of SolarAcademy looks at an SDG&E EV charger program to drive home the point that high fluctuations in EV charger pricing from some charger networks leave plenty of room for improvement and opportunities for vendors to provide alternatives to expensive rates. The video is below.

Here is the video transcription:

Kerim Baran of SolarAcademy: Hi everyone. This is Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. I am on a call today with John Bonano of Strategic Operating Partners, as well as Venus Jenkins of ChargeNet Stations. And we were talking about the market of storage, batteries, EV chargers and what is to come in the near future in Southern California and beyond.

And I was just telling them about this program that I’m a part of through the building that I live in in San Diego. The building that I live in, which is a high rise, has EV chargers at the garage through a program that’s a joint program between ChargePoint and SDG&E. When you sign up for this program you get your bill separately from SDG&E, a separate EV charger bill every month.

In that program, they also provide you with the daily rates, the kilowatt hour rates of electricity on an hour by hour basis every day. And they do this by sending you a text the prior day, around 7:30 PM. These rates can also be seen at this URL: SDGE.com/pyd-map.

And if you go there, you will see all these various different locations where there are chargers. And if you click on any one of these locations, this is not mine, but I’m just going to show you the pricing, the hourly and the daily pricing. So you can see that the pricing ranges anywhere from these days, these hot summer days the rate can vary between 26 cents all the way up to $1.93 per kwh, depending on the hour slot that you are charging. That’s for today and, come 8:00 PM, we will be able to see the rates for tomorrow.

And that’s how this program works and how they share information about the day before. So quite interesting. Thank you for listening guys.