NHP Technical News
As an example, in an average apartment complex in South East
Queensland, body corporate fees amount to $5,000-$6,000/year.
Adding an additional $500/year for owners who routinely park
electric vehicles in the car park, where those vehicle chargers
draw power from the same supply feeding common areas, will
typically:
1) Cover the cost of the electricity supplied
(NMI) trade approved energy meter at each point where a
measurement is going to be made to determine how much
a consumer should be charged for energy consumption. The
primary intent around the meters being certified and approved
is to ensure that a sufficiently accurate measurement is made
so that the consumer is being billed accurately for energy
consumed.
2) Be perceived as ‘fair’ by other owners who drive traditional
vehicles (i.e., ‘no free lunch’)
3) Provide the fuel cost-saving that the electric vehicle owner is
looking for over petrol
4) Not require the installation of any special metering equipment
5) Not require an ongoing subscription to authentication /
monitoring / billing services
In cases where an embedded network is already being used at
the site, adding additional scope to the embedded network to
cover the EV charging equipment may offer a lower cost solution
than a dedicated cloud-based EV charging management
offering. It will also typically provide for portability in the event
that the consumer wishes to change service providers, as there
are many ENOs capable of taking on the provision of this service
once the standardised equipment is in place.
In workplaces where the employer is looking to attribute the
cost of energy supplied to the EV driving employee, a very similar
rationale can be applied, with the variation that instead of a fee
being levied, it is factored in to the employee’s contract. From
a practical standpoint, if we assume a commercial electricity
contract at ~10c/kWh and an employee with their own electric
vehicle with a ~50km round trip to work, spending ~200 days/
year at the office, the employer will be exposed to something
like $200/year in vehicle charging costs if the employee chooses
not to charge their car at home during the week. This could be
readily recovered in the form of a contribution from their pay
check on the order of $4/week, plus perhaps a small amount to
contribute to the depreciation of the AC chargers installed in the
company car park. From a practical standpoint, what this would look like would be
fitting a distribution board upstream of the EV chargers with an
NMI meter per EV charger, and then enabling an ENO to connect
to those meters and using the data for billing. As a side benefit,
the presence of individual metering will permit very granular
data reporting, either by the ENO, or by another system reading
the same data.
Direct billing via an Embedded Network 1) The EV chargers need to be smart enough to provide data
and be remotely controlled
If the models covered above are not suitable or sufficient,
consideration can be given to an embedded network.
Embedded networks are already very common in commercial
developments, where there is a single large network connection
to a traditional energy retailer, and the cost allocation to
individual energy users below that level is handled by a non-
traditional retailer, known as an Embedded Network Operator
(ENO).
The rules governing embedded networks vary by state, and
are undergoing change at present due to the recent ‘power
of choice’ reforms, but in most areas in Australia the basic
requirement is to provide a National Measurement Institute
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Transactional Cloud-based Billing
The most ‘turn-key’ of options for billing is to enable the EV
chargers to connect to the internet, where a cloud-based service
manages the authentication of the users through a smartphone
app, and handles billing to the consumer’s credit card.
The basic requirements of this approach are that:
a. Noting that most EV charging equipment vendors have
products that will meet this requirement
2) Reliable communications (typically via cellular data plans)
are required
a. Noting that this should be validated, especially in the
case of basement car parks
3) The EV driver has a smart phone and a credit card.
Assuming the box can be ticked for each of the above points,
solutions of this nature are available in the market, typically at a
cost of around $350-$400 per EV charger per year.