We’ve heard from our users that utility fees can be complex and difficult to understand. Utility bills may have dozens of components and may not break down the source of fees, making costs very difficult to predict without the right reporting tools.
That’s why we’ve revamped utility reporting in Flipturn to make charging costs easier to understand and more actionable. By applying your utility provider’s rates to your charging session data, we can estimate charging costs, identify the source of different fees, and identify optimization opportunities.
Utilities often charge you by the maximum amount of power used at any single time over the course of a month. This means that if your power usage spikes to 500kW just one time, you’ll still get charged a fee for that one-off 500 kW peak. These extra fees can be in the thousands of dollars, depending on the utility rate. To learn more about power demand, read this Flipturn blog post.
On your power bill, these fees are called “demand charges” and “facilities charges.” Predicting demand charges is difficult, especially since maximum power is often read by the meter over a period of 15 minutes, and some demand charges can look back over a period longer than a month.
Flipturn calculates demand charges under the hood, automatically surfacing the time window and day the maximum amount of power was used and estimating the resulting demand charges. View the maximum power across each day to understand whether this spike was an anomaly for that day, or a normal occurrence.
Once you identify a day with high power usage, you can dive into the power used over the course of that day, visualizing how each charging session contributed to this cost curve. This single day view can help you understand how peak shaving or shifting charging to off-peak times can help decrease charging costs.
Utilities charge more for energy used during certain hours, such as 4-9pm in Southern California. Flipturn shows how much you’re paying for electricity across each Time of Use rate, as well as how much energy was used in each time period. Our usage analytics lets you spot days in which your organization charged suboptimally and incurred higher per-kilowatt hour energy fees.
Using detailed charging session data and your utility rates, Flipturn can estimate the energy cost of each charging session, even if it spans multiple time of use rates.
Understanding charging costs is just the first step to reduce utility costs, the next step is taking action. Whether you’re looking to minimize demand charges or avoid high time of use rates, Flipturn’s charger management capabilities can help. Our site power limits and load balancing features allow you to shift charging to off-peak times, while making sure that vehicles are charged on time.
Interested in learning more? Contact hello@getflipturn.com or request a demo.
