Electric vehicles and dynamic energy tariffs were made for each other. It is one of the cleanest value propositions in the entire energy transition: a large, flexible, deferrable load, combined with a tariff structure that rewards you for choosing when to charge. The potential savings are meaningful. The user experience — with the right setup — is entirely seamless.
Why EVs Are Ideal Flexible Loads
Your EV battery is, in energy terms, a significant demand asset. Depending on your vehicle, charging from low to full might require 40-80kWh of electricity. Done on a fixed tariff at a random time, that is a straightforward cost. Done on a dynamic tariff at the right moment, it can cost a fraction of what it would have at peak time.
Crucially, for most drivers, there is no operational requirement to charge at any particular time. You plug in when you get home. You need the car charged by morning. Everything in between is flexibility — and flexibility on a dynamic tariff has a direct monetary value.
What the Savings Look Like
Consider a 60kWh charge. At a typical peak price of €200/MWh, that costs €12. At an overnight off-peak price of €30/MWh — entirely realistic during high-wind periods in Belgium — it costs €1.80. If you charge your car four times a week, 50 weeks a year, the difference between undirected peak charging and smart overnight charging can easily exceed €400 annually for a single vehicle. For a company managing a fleet, the numbers scale accordingly.
Smart Charging: How It Works in Practice
Modern EV chargers — and an increasing number of vehicles — support scheduled or smart charging. You set a departure time and a target state of charge. The charger, informed by the day-ahead price curve, finds the cheapest available hours before that deadline and charges accordingly.
More sophisticated implementations use two-way communication: the vehicle management system or home energy management platform monitors real-time prices and adjusts charging rate dynamically, ramping up when prices are very low and pausing or slowing when prices rise above a threshold.
This requires a dynamic tariff (meaningless with a flat rate), a compatible charger, and ideally an energy management system that interfaces with price data. 10s Energy provides the tariff layer and supports integration with leading smart charging platforms.
V2G: The Next Frontier
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology takes this one step further: bidirectional chargers allow your EV battery to not just draw from the grid but feed back into it during expensive peak periods. You charge cheap, discharge expensive, effectively arbitraging the price spread with your car battery.
V2G is available on a limited number of vehicle and charger combinations today, but it is developing rapidly. Customers on dynamic tariffs are positioned to take advantage of it as hardware availability increases — because the tariff infrastructure is already in place.