On Tuesday, the standard price of electricity at home drops to 25.73p pence per kWh meaning that EV drivers will be able to charge for less when filling up their cars. But that’s not the only way that you can save when driving an electric vehicle.
The good news is that if you’re driving an EV then you’re already saving money. A typical driver running a petrol or diesel car and doing an average annual mileage will spend more than £1000 a year, while someone driving an EV for the same distance would spend less than half that.
Here are our top five ways to save money when driving an EV.
Tip 1 – Charge at home
Unless you have access to free workplace charging, then the cheapest place to charge your car will always be at home. With a petrol or diesel car, a supermarket filling station is usually the cheapest place to fill up – and if you lived next door to one then you’d never fill up anywhere else. That’s the equivalent of charging your EV at home. Ohme is the UK’s largest home EV charging company.
“When driving an EV, as much as possible your main focus should be on aiming to charge at home where it’s cheapest,” explains David Watson, Ohme CEO. “Even on those occasions where you have to top up at public chargers, then only do so to cover the remainder of your journey home, otherwise you’ll be overpaying. Even the standard price of electricity is a fraction of what you pay on a public charger.”
Underlining Watson’s point is that the new lower standard electricity rate could be a third of what you could pay for an ultra rapid public charger where rates can often be as high as 80p/kWh or more.
If you don’t have off-street parking then look at the cross-pavement solutions from the likes of Kerbo-charge or charging overnight at a slower charging point which will be cheaper.
Running an EV at home, a typical driver could run an EV for £437.41 a year – that’s less than half the price of running a petrol or diesel car.
Tip 2 – Choose an EV-focussed smart electricity tariff
How would you like to run your car for less than £10 a month? No need to check the calendar, it’s not April Fool’s Day, that’s the reality if you switch to a smart electricity tariff from the likes of Octopus or E.ON Next.
We’ve already explained the savings of merely running an EV over a petrol car, but with a smart electricity tariff at home you can supercharge those savings even further. The Intelligent Octopus Go tariff is 7p/kWh (a third of even the new lower electricity tariff) which means that the same typical driver we mentioned earlier could drive an EV for less than £10 a month. Yes, really.
“Charging at home will always be the most affordable place for EV drivers to charge their cars,” said Ohme CEO David Watson. “However, any EV driver charging at home should really look at switching to one of the wide range of energy tariffs that drop those costs still further to help save them even more money.”
Tip 3 – Get cheaper household electricity
One added benefit of many of those EV-focussed home electricity tariffs is that all of the power coming into your home is at that cheaper reduced rate at certain times – usually overnight.
That means if you use any other household appliances during those times, then they will be running on cheap electricity too. So if you have a timer delay function on your washing machine or dishwasher and can delay their programmes so that they are also used in those hours, then you can reduce the running costs of those too.
Tip 4 – Get free household electricity
Some energy companies such as Octopus feature regular saving sessions for their customers. This means that they will alert you by email or via the app when there’s a period particularly high level of renewable energy coming up the next day.
Usually they will give you a time window of one or two hours, when either your household electricity is completely free or free for whatever you use over and above your usual usage rate for that time of day. Either way though, you’ll be saving money
Tip 5 – Get flexible
Not yoga lessons at your local gym, we’re talking about energy flexibility. More specifically, energy flexibility trials.
Put simply energy flexibility is to do with charging your car when wholesale energy prices are at their lowest and saving energy when the cost is at its highest. The good news is that you don’t need to constantly watch the price yourself because Ohme does it for you – and rewards you at the same time.
All you do is use the Ohme app as usual, stating that you want your car to be charged by a certain time and Ohme takes care of the rest. By encouraging drivers to plug in their EVs whenever they are parked at home enables them to earn rewards as result.
“Ohme continues to participate in flexibility trials, showing discernible progress and strengthening our belief in the material impact that domestic customers can have in providing grid flexibility services,” said David Watson, Ohme CEO. “Our ongoing energy flexibility trials have seen Ohme reward drivers with more than £400,000 in the past year.”
Grid flexibility services are estimated to save consumers a whopping £10bn a year in energy costs by 2050 according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
