If you are thinking of switching to an electric car, then one non-negotiable factor in your decision should be whether you have a driveway, garage, or some other form of off-street parking at home where you can charge up.
Charging up an EV from public chargers – assuming you can find one handy, as the network is still far too patchy in places – is way too expensive, and can make your electric car more expensive to run than sticking with a conventional petrol or diesel model.
So charging at home is the critical factor, from a cost point of view. Charging on cheaper night-rate electricity is also a great idea, as not only does that further reduce your motoring costs, it also soaks up a lot of renewable wind-derived energy that would otherwise go to waste, making your EV even more saintly in the process.
To help with that, SSE Airtricity has just introduced a tariff which offers EV drivers more overnight hours at a cheap rate. Until now, the cheapest rate electricity – sometimes as low as 7c per kWh – has been available only for a couple of hours per night, usually between 3am and 5am.
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SSE’s new Smart EV Max tariff doesn’t quite dip as low as 7c, but it offers six hours of overnight charging, from 11pm to 5am, at 12.1c per kWh, compared to the daytime rate of 33.7c per kWh.
Those prices include an introductory 30 per cent discount, which lasts for 12 months, after which the prices revert to 17.3c per kWh overnight, and 48.2c per kWh during the day and up to 11pm. SSE told The Irish Times that it has retention offers after 12 months “if the customer engages with us”, so there’s scope to hold on to the cheaper rates for longer.
In theory, assuming you have a Volkswagen ID.4 electric SUV, with a 77kWh battery (the bestselling EV in Ireland), you could add 44kWh of energy in that six hours (assuming your home EV charger runs at a steady 7.4kW, which most do) for the princely sum of €5.30.
Assuming that the ID.4 can return an average energy use figure of 19kWh/100km – which seems about right, according to our observed figures when testing the ID.4 – then that means you can get 230km of driving for that €5.30.
For €5.30 you could buy around three litres of petrol or diesel, on average, which even in the most frugal of conventional cars would struggle to carry you for 80km.
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Stephen Gallagher, managing director of SSE Airtricity, said: “Irish households are increasingly looking for smart energy tariffs that support the shift to electric vehicles and smart technologies.
“With Smart EV Max, we’re delivering a more affordable and innovative solution that reflects how people actually live, drive and power their homes. It’s shaped by real customer behaviour and underscores our drive to help more people make the switch to EVs and adopt smarter energy solutions.”
How does that compare to other providers? Well, Electric Ireland has a ‘Night Boost’ rate that gives you electricity for as little as 8.84c per kWh. However that’s only for two hours, between 2am and 4am, while the rest of the overnight rate is charged at 15.05c per kWh from 11pm to 8am. The standard daytime rate is 30.53c per kWh.
Charging the same ID.4 for the same six hours overnight, assuming two of those hours are at the cheapest possible rate, means that you’ll pay ever so slightly more for the same notional 230km of driving, at €5.75, although clearly the Electric Ireland rate is going to be considerably cheaper if you need to charge during the day.
Bord Gáis Energy’s Smart EV plan gets you an extra hour at the cheapest possible 8.45c per kWh rate, between 2am and 5am, but it’s more expensive between 11pm and 8am overall, at 25.01c per kWh. So the same 230km charge is going to cost you €7.42, assuming you charge for the same six hours.
These figures illustrate the kind of bewildering homework a new EV owner will have to do when figuring out the best possible home energy tariff.
EVs still save money overall, saving around €768 a year compared to an equivalent petrol car, but Irish drivers are paying a clear premium
— Paddy Comyn, DoneDeal Cars
The calculation may be made more difficult next year, as the price of petrol and diesel at the pumps is potentially going to fall.
The World Bank is predicting a daily surplus of oil on the global market in 2026, possibly as much as an extra four million barrels per day over the current levels of demand for oil and its derived fuels.
Part of that surplus is being driven by electric cars, as the World Bank notes that “the growth in demand for oil is expected to moderate in China, due to the accelerated adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles”.
That could push the price of Brent Crude Oil – upon which Irish pump prices are based – to $60 per barrel, down from around $68 per barrel now. A good, but imperfect, rule of thumb is that petrol pump prices reduce by 2c for every $2 a barrel of oil goes down, so that could well add up to an 8c per litre reduction in petrol prices, assuming no geopolitical effects change the direction of oil prices in the meantime (which is rarely a safe bet to make).
A falling price of oil will make the running costs of a petrol or hybrid-engined car that much cheaper, and so may affect the take-up of electric cars with Irish buyers who are focusing on the potential fuel savings, rather than the environmental aspect.
Already, the cost of using public charging – the only option available to those without a home driveway or other off-street parking who may wish to buy an EV – is often making electric motoring as expensive as running a diesel or petrol car for a given mileage.
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The fact is that in Ireland we’re still paying considerably over the odds when it comes to charging up our electric cars.
If you’re charging up an electric car on your home electricity supply, and paying the headline average energy price, then you’re paying €398 more a year to run your car than you would do in Spain. Or €306 more than in the Netherlands. Or €249 more than in France – and even €230 more than in the UK.
That’s according to data from car sales website DoneDeal.ie, which has looked at the average price per kWh of domestic electricity, according to Eurostat.
Those figures show that Ireland’s higher prices for electricity mean that not only are EV owners here paying more for their electricity, the gap between the cost here and in Spain is actually larger than the gap between petrol costs in the two countries.
In fact, while it would cost you on average €332 extra to run a petrol-engined car in the EU countries most expensive for fuel, compared to the cheapest, the difference when it comes to charging is a whopping €472 – so there’s a bigger difference in electric car running costs across Europe than petrol costs.
This comes on foot of a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which found that energy retail prices in Ireland are three times higher than wholesale prices – one of the highest gaps in the world. And while EV drivers enjoy the lowest fuelling costs in Ireland when it comes to running a car, they are paying a lot more to charge at home than many of their European neighbours.
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According to DoneDeal’s calculations, going by the IEA’s average electricity price for Ireland and on typical energy use, it will cost you €1,132 to run the bestselling EV in the country, the VW ID.4, for the average Irish annual mileage of 17,000km, based on average energy consumption of 18kWh/100km (which is a slightly optimistic figure), and needing 3,060kWh of energy over the course of the year.
“EVs still save money overall, saving around €768 a year compared to an equivalent petrol car, but Irish drivers are paying a clear premium,” said Paddy Comyn, head of automotive content at DoneDeal Cars.
“The extra cost of charging an EV in Ireland compared with Spain is about €400 a year – more than double the extra cost petrol drivers face. Electricity prices, not fuel prices, are now driving the real cost gap.
“Of course, if you avail of night rates or other special offers there would be additional savings, but comparing averages across Europe, Irish EV owners are paying significantly more, as much as 35 per cent more.”
Take Eurostat’s figures, based on the average household electricity price (including taxes and network charges) on a standard tariff in the second half of 2024.
They show that the headline household electricity price in Spain is 24c per kWh, compared to 36.9c per kWh in Ireland.
Only Germany, at 39.4c per kWh, has a higher average energy cost than us. Actually, Germany is also the only country in the comparison list with higher fuel prices: €1.77 per litre there, compared to €1.72 per litre here at the moment. Spain, once again, is the cheapest, at just €1.52 per litre.
