Another month down and no real surprises. My battery stats are continuing their rather predictable trend. The LEAF is still rock solid reliable and yeah, in a fit of impatience, I spun the tires twice in the past 30 days for the first time in my 2018. I quickly found out, its quite an easy thing to do!
For the month, I traveled 1480.3 miles at a personal cost of $4.45 supported with 296.145 kwh from NCTC. Without that benefit, my cost would have ballooned to $31.91 pushing the last few kwh into tier 2 rates or about 2.1 cents per mile. This is an increase in efficiency probably brought on by a few trips where I challenged the range of the LEAF which meant driving conservatively AKA "24 kwh LEAF mode."
This month, my rates were a bit cheaper at 8.5 cents per kwh over the more normal 8.9 cents per kwh. This will change soon as we get into the more expensive Winter rates but should go no higher than 9.3 or so.
As always, I minimized full charges only doing two for the month adding only 3 L2 sessions. Charge count is currently 94 L2's and 121 L3 sessions. Ahr is 110.97, SOH; 96.13 and Hx is 114.59 with total miles at 10,703. This a loss of 4.08 ahr, 3.53% SOH. Extrapolated to 100,000 miles I am on pace to be down about 33% (the difference between loss of ahr and SOH is less than .03%) which means I would just miss a warranty claim.
Now as the pack degrades, its rate of degradation should increase if all else remains equal. This makes sense as degraded pack means more cycling to travel the same distances. I am on a lease which means in 2½ years, I need to make the decision to buy it or give it back. I did lease the car with the intent of buying it "if" everything worked out. Based on my experience with my 2016 S30, I was expecting a degradation rate that would be no more than 10% over 100,000 miles. My 2016 had degradation of 1-3% over nearly 30,000 miles. Granted its a guess since the 30 kwh LEAF battery stats bounced all over the place so nailing down specifics was impossible. Only looking at long term trends was I able to get any kind of picture and normally, I would have gone with the low water mark recorded but a week to the day of my accident, I did drive over 116 miles on a charge in January which pretty much told me that my LEAF hadn't lost much.
The other thing to consider is that I blog about the LEAF in order to show people how cheap a LEAF "can" be. So yeah that means using what resources I have and that means taking as much advantage of the free charging period as I can. I can say with HIGH certainty that when my free 2 year NCTC ends, my public charging rates will drop. They will drop simply because charging at home will become the cheapest option. How this affects my rate of degradation? I guess I will find out.
Greenlots Announces DCFC Rates for Central WA
Starting Sept 1st, the new Greenlots stations (partially paid for with $50 of our EV tab fees) in Central WA will begin billing at the rate of 35 cents per minute for DCFCs and $1.50 an hour for AC. TBH, when I first read the email received, I thought it was 35 cents per kwh which is ok pricing considering the Central WA stations in question enjoy power at half the cost we Puget Sounders pay. But it was not to be. This equates to $21 an hour but because its a per minute cost, the speed of charging is also a major concern.
Using a recent example (from last night) I received 21.4 kwh in a 30 min charging session. This is near the best I can do in my LEAF. The charger only ran at 118 amps which is a bit lower than some but close enough for this comparison. This pencils out to 49 cents per kwh which matches what Blink charges. But that is a best case scenario which would get me no more than 60% SOC.
A warm pack would yield even worse results. Charging at the "common" rate of 30 KW would yield 70 cents per kwh. For anyone wanting or needing a charge over 60% SOC in a 2018 LEAF, the costs become astronomical.
Webasto the new owner of the AV stations is still maintaining the $20 per month unlimited charging plan and does cover a bit of Central WA (mostly along Highway 2 and a bit of I-90) but is lacking presence in the Southern part of the region. Also as new owners, I am not sure I would want to count on the $20 plan remaining especially if the greatly needed expansion hopes come to fruition.
EVGO is expanding and offers a decent plan which is also per minute based but at a much lower cost. Their best deal would even be good for a moderate user. Its 9.99 a month with a per minute rate of 18 cents per minute so half the cost of Central WA. The best part is the $9.99 month subscription cost covers the first $9.99 of per minute billing. So basically charge twice for 30 minutes and you have covered your minimum monthly cost. Even at 30 KW, EVGO runs to 36 cents per kwh, a VERY good deal!
Because of all this, I see the brand new stations in Central WA getting minimal use and that would be a shame. Greenlots; Maybe you should consider a subscription plan to at least give locals a reasonable option for use?
Electrify America
EA is expanding rapidly now mostly because they have to. The settlement requires them to complete phase 1 of 5 by July 2019 so they have 10 months left. New ground broken in Albany, OR and Vancouver, WA plus new announcements for TWO in Everett, WA (a place that is pretty thin for QC options) but strangely just down the street from each other?? Oh well, better than nothing. The two Everett stations along with both Albany and Vancouver will continue the trend with a Walmart Supercenter host. Pricing is currently 30 cents a minute so not cheap but still cheaper than Central WA and they do promise higher charging speeds sometime in the distant future.
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