Overcrowded electric car charging points to introduce hourly price

Nuon will soon be charging an hourly rate for charging your car at one of the 1,240 charging points the company will be installing in Brabant and Limburg over the next two years. The company hopes that this will help solve the problem of overcrowded charging points, the Volkskrant reports.

The current practice of letting electric cars charge at a charging point for an unlimited time for free is frustrating for other electric car owners, who can't find an available charging point, as well as for the operator of the charging station, who can not charge for the use of its expensive investment.

Nuon wil charge 22 cents per hour for using its charging station. The company did a trial run in which this amount proved to be effective. The availability of the charging points increased by 27 percent. Without the charging price 10 percent of cars were hooked up to a point for over 24 hours, with a charging price that dropped to 0 percent. If charging an hourly rate for using electric car charging points works ini Limburg and Brabant, Nuon will do the same in other areas.

Other operators are also implementing hourly rates. PitPoint will soon charge 1 euro per hour.

Tesla recently introduced a fee of $0.40 per minute for remaining plugged into their super chargers. At the end of last year, Elon Musk, the head of electric car manufacturer Tesla, announced his firm's charging locations would financially penalize drivers who stay connected even when their car batteries are full.