From Thursday 5th of May, ESB ecars will change it’s pricing across the network in the Republic of Ireland. The new pricing scheme is below, alongside the old pricing for comparison:

Further to these changes, ESB is increasing the overstay fee to €8 after 45 minutes on fast & high power chargers. A new overstay fee of €8 on standard chargers will apply after 10 hours on standard chargers. The subscription fee is increasing from €4.60 to €4.99, which allows you to avail from cheaper per-kWh rates above.

Full details are available via the ecars statement.

This represents almost a 45% increase in fees. But it is also the first time since fees were introduced that ecars has made any change. As outlined on their statement, this is largely as a result of overall wholesale costs of electricity in Ireland, and as such are unavoidable.

IEVOA welcomes the change in overstay fees, as we’ve seen in prior surveys to members, this has been a bone of contention with public infrastructure. And while there’s a certain level of inevitability with a price increase as a result of wholesale electricity costs and energy demand in the grid, this is a large increase for consumers to absorb.

While most EV charging is done at home, the likelihood of this increase impacting those who need it the most (EV drivers who are not home owners, don’t have appropriate infrastructure in their home or apartment owners with no carpark access to chargers) is concerning.

More concerning to the association is the lack of intervention from the government on a national level to ease the cost of EV charging. It took the government a few hours to absorb excise on fossils when the cost spiked recently. It stands to reason that the climate crisis deserves similar action.

IEVOA will share our thoughts and member input to ecars and official representatives from relevant government departments.