I've had this discussion with someone recently. I don't think it's excessively expensive, I think it's expensive for the same reason that food is significantly more expensive from a restaurant, drinks are significantly more expensive at a bar, and T-shirts are much more expensive at a gift shop.

You're paying for the convenience, not the power. Chargenet has a charging station within 75km of everywhere in NZ. Some of those will be hardly used at all, but the fact the network covers everywhere is very important, so the cost of the hardly used stations is borne by the ones people actually use. Then you have the staff cost of running the company, developing the app, customer support, advertising, and maintenance. And you have the cost of replacing the cables every time someone takes to them with bolt cutters and scraps the copper (which apparently happens a lot). You've also got to pay for (or lease) the land for the charger, manage contracts with malls, supermarkets, etc where you are using their land, and presumably there is a connection cost for having 1, 2, or 6 chargers each pulling 300kW at peak (admittedly many chargenet chargers are 50 or 75) and that cost might be higher than your average single phase residential connection.

All those costs over the whole country need to be split between the people who actually use the service, and TBH I don't think that number is particularly high.

Given the low number of EVs in the country, the huge network covering a mostly empty country, and the ongoing costs of expanding their network, honestly it seems pretty reasonable to charge 3x what I'd pay at home.

A selling point of EVs is that you hardly ever use a paid charging service, you wake up every morning with a fully charged battery so outside of trips away you don't have to think about fuel at all.

With all that said, I don't think I've ever seen $0.99/kWH, but $0.85-0.95 is pretty typical where I go. We are talking about $60 of fast charging to get from Wellington to New Plymouth and back again, assuming leaving home fully charged and charging at home on arrival, compared to what, $200 of petrol or something, so it's a pretty good deal still I reckon.

Since chargenet is owned by Genesis Energy, if your home power is with them then you only pay what you pay at home: https://www.genesisenergy.co.nz/for-home/products/electric-vehicles/everywhere

But yeah it's a bit shit since the government owns 51% of Genesis Energy, you'd think they could make it more useful for everyone...

Before I was with Genesis I primarily used Z chargers, as I found them slightly cheaper and less busy, and can get a pie and a v while you charge 😂.

It would be cheaper running a small petrol car rather than an EV using public charging.

That's true, if you don't charge at home at all. Means there's less incentive to get an EV if you live in an apartment with no power points in the carpark. Still some incentive though, as most EVs have performance similar to a less efficient, more powerful petrol car (e.g. my old car was about the same size and slightly faster than my current EV; was a 3l hatchback and got about 10l/100km, and needed 95, which would work out to about 37c/km at the moment).

5.5km/kWh ~20c/km

*18c/km

Interesting that you round up for the EV, but not your ute 😂