[wcoenen]

Perhaps it would make sense if electricity contracts came with a "roaming" option for a certain region. As in, get the same electricity price as at home when using a charging station on the go. After all, I think it shouldn't make much difference to the electricity company whether I use electricity at home or elsewhere, as long as I stay within the region where the company offers the contract.

This would also help people with dynamically priced contracts (the ones that vary hour by hour based on the day-ahead electricity market) to make optimal use of cheap or even negatively priced power, e.g. during the daily solar peak, even when at work. That would also help with grid balancing and reduce carbon intensity.

There would still have to be a roaming surcharge to pay the operator of the charging station of course. But perhaps it wouldn't have to be as expensive as a 100% premium, at least for AC chargers on parking lots. (For DC fast chargers the premium would probably still be substantial, because you're paying for the ROI on the high power infrastructure.)

[sokoloff]

I think that double cost is about the right price if you want market operators to offer AC charging. I don’t know exactly what we paid to install 8 Chargepoints at our office (and we offered market-rate electricity, no markup, but I’m also pretty sure we got grants to install the chargers), but it had to be $10K per 2 charging spots (and likely more, as the GW1 itself is $7200).

Making about a break-even return on that upfront expense means making $40 in markup per spot in a typical month. Thats $2 per workday per spot, meaning around a 100% markup on 10kWh of electricity or ~40 miles of range every day every spot.

That seems doable, but doing 80 miles of range every day every spot (to cut the markup in half) does not.