charlie1300 said:
From the standpoint of the EVSE bringing in additional customers, or existing customers coming more often, Well you can argue that, but how do you demonstrate it, and how many additional customer visits are required to justify the installation and maintenance cost of the EVSE? In this case COSTCO seems to be saying that past experience with the old EVSE indicates that the EVSE is not covering it's cost (think maintenance - why are all the old ones broken?). The money would probably be better spent on advertising, in terms of increasing traffic.
I wonder if gasoline (typically priced well below the surrounding market, with further discounts for using the costco credit card) is a loss leader or close to neutral for Costco, or a significant profit center in and of itself. If it was the latter, wouldn't one expect to see more direct competition on price from businesses with no warehouse store on the other side of the parking lot?
To your point about the historical evidence that Costco has - I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that there are already
way more Leafs on the road (in San Diego at least) than there ever were any and all other types of EVs at any time in the past. Lack of use of those old units should not carry much if any weight in their analysis - if it does, they are really not paying attention.
I can envision (but can't prove of course) a situation where a Costco had a bank of EV chargers for which they charged a reasonable price (eg. double their actual marginal cost per kWH - let's say .20 - or the equivalent based on time at L2, 75c per hour), which would be used frequently enough and throw off enough revenue to actually pay for the infrastructure over a reasonable period of time (few years?), while providing a slight enticement to customers. The stores are far enough apart, and the typical shopping trip long enough that it seems like it could be win-win. Yes, it's cheaper to charge at home, but charging does take time, and if an opportunity charge at a fair price allows you to take a shopping trip during the day _and_ use your car that evening, without having to recharge at home on-peak, instead delaying your recharge to super-off-peak after your second trip of the day, the utility of the car goes way up while keeping the average cost per mile reasonable. A bank of 10 EVSE's, 50% full for 10 hours a day at 75c/hour would throw off enough money beyond the electricity cost to pay off the EVSE's in 2 years (lot of assumptions in that calculation, including a low cost method to collect the money, and a protocol to manage charging activity among multiple vehicles). If there really end up being as many EVs as there should be, it seems at least plausible.
Regardless, places with a large customer base but only 1 or 2 EVSEs are destined to be useless if and when EVs actually take hold. It would be like a Costco gasoline station with one pump - you need to be able to entice a lot of customers to pick you, not just a lucky one or two per few hours. For it to _really_ work, they'll need a configuration that serves 4 parking spaces per EVSE, and the cart-collector workers will have to be monitoring and moving charge cables with the help of smart EVSEs that manage the transactions the drivers select. The more I think about it, the further away it all seems.
On the flip side, if installations like the one in Balboa Park actually start charging $5/hour are absolutely going to sit idle until they rot.
