An interesting side note… As well as the gas prices increasing, electricity is also increasing.
As fate would have it, my fixed term energy contract ended this week, right at the peak of the energy prices. My provider has helpfully doubled the prices of both gas and electricity compared to my previous fixed tariff (including per day charge, which seems a bit off).
I have an early hybrid car with a small battery, and when I bought it 5 years ago, it cost about 80p to charge up to about 20 miles real-world range. Now, it’s about £2.50. In that same time, the price of petrol, has gone up from about 120p per litre to 133p per litre where I live.
So for me, at least, electric which was previously the clear winner at about 1/3 the cost per mile, is now approximately the same. I think there’s still a very marginal cost advantage using electric, but it’s relatively more hassle (given the limited range from a charge) and if the domestic energy prices continue to rise far quicker than the cost of fuel, I can easily see petrol becoming cheaper to use than electricity, which seems like a crazy situation to have ended up in.
Whilst fixed tariffs will be priced incredibly high, worth looking at moving to SVT (standard variable tariff) as this is capped by the government (and IMO the reason we’re seeing a lot of energy firms going bust).
Hopefully you can find a better deal than SVT but always always always shop around (appreciate that’s tricky atm with PCWs being unhelpful, but worth also trying energy suppliers websites directly too).
Once all of this has died down, you should also consider a time of use (TOU) tariff, similar to Economy 7, where you pay a reduced rate for electricity at night with EV charging in mind.
Haha, ironically Octopus is the company that’s stiffing me with the rises!
Such a shame, they’ve been my favourite provider since I switched to them about 3 years ago, but this stunt seems excessive especially as one of the selling points of Octopus is their investment in green energy. Even more galling is they have a EV friendly tariff where you can get electricity for 5p/kWh over night, but despite clicking the button “I’m interested, please send me the information about switching” every few months for about 2 years, they’ve never once replied to me to let me switch.
I’m in the south east and drove past 3 stations with fuel and a queue that didn’t leave the forecourt. This is all dying down as predicted - providing you’re delivering more than is being used the irrational buying will look after itself.
No problems with petrol from where we are in Telford.
That hasn’t swayed me though. I’ll be going electric as soon as I can. The car I drive only does 30mpg and I drive 120 miles a day to and from the office.
Government need to start spending a hell of alot more money on infrastructure to charge all these electric vehicles that will be hitting are roads over the next decade. Supermarkets and other car parks only have around 10 charges at each carpark at most.
This is old-fuel mentality though. Most newer EVs have a decent enough range that unless you’re doing an extremely long journey, when you’d probably want a fast charge at a motorway services, most people are better suited to charging overnight with the car outside their house, and also it’s better for the infrastructure as a whole as we have lots of energy sources (wind, nuclear, etc) pushing electricity onto the grid 24x7 but there’s much less demand at night time. Overnight charging is probably the most efficient way of storing this excess energy for later use, even more so if the car is going to be charged anyway.
Motorway services are better location for charging than supermarkets as well because people usually want to charge quickly and get on with their journey, so fewer users will hog the available resources when they don’t really need it. People who charge at supermarkets are largely opportunistic chargers taking advantage of possibly free charging, but if they’re doing a food shop, they’re probably close enough to home to charge there anyway.
Obviously, not everybody has a drive to park on and charge, but this will hopefully change on new builds, and an increasing number of councils are providing EV charging bays in residential areas and working with companies who own the charging infrastructure and maintain them, so the cost to the council is basically just painting the boxes.
Well I know 3 or 4 people that own one and haven’t got a drive so they charge it when there out shopping in a local supermarket or car park.
Although there ranges have improved they still need to be improved. They need to match what a full tank of fuel can do before they out sell petrol and diesels cars.
I actually strongly disagree with this. Most car fuel tanks hold 400 miles worth of fuel. Most EVs are charged every day. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I did 400 miles in one day. In the last 10 years, there have only been a couple of times when I’ve got away for the weekend and needed 300 miles over the weekend.
Basic EVs now have a range of ~150 miles on a charge, the more expensive ones are ~250. Some like Tesla are over 300 miles. And with most of them, a 30 minute fast charge can get over half that range back, so I think it’s already in the range where it’s compatible with the breaks people like to take on long journeys anyway.
To be fair, many supermarkets here in London have many empty shelves. In some cases 40% of vegetables aren’t available or you can’t buy super specific items like sponges or trash bags. Actually a nuisance to me personally.
It’s a real thing, not made up
I think I blame this more on Brexit than the fuel crisis. In the Midlands, my local supermarkets have had gaps on quite a few product lines for weeks, but everything else gets replenished regularly, so it doesn’t seem like a transportation issue.
Yeah for some people that will work but for people without drives to charge overnight is impossible at the moment. So if the range was 400 or more most people would only need to charge it once a week then I could see them starting to out sell petrol and diesel cars.
