Our Stories: Con Edison’s SmartCharge Program Goes into Overdrive

With electric vehicle adoption growing in the Con Edison service territory and across the state, Joe Morreale and Joe Yanowitz were given a charge of their own: to rev up one of the company’s most popular customer programs.

“At the beginning of last year, Con Edison had 12 percent of the registered electric vehicle market in our service territory enrolled in the SmartCharge New York program,” says Morreale, the section manager who spearheaded E-Mobility Residential Managed Charging and Demonstration Projects. “It’s already grown to 19 percent. The goal is to be in the ballpark of 25 percent by year end.”

It’s an ambitious goal for a program that’s been rolling along since 2017. Back then, with Teslas, especially, becoming more and more popular, Con Edison foresaw what increased electrical demand could mean for the grid long term. The company’s E-Mobility team devised a program that would promote “managed charging”—basically, the practice of charging at set off-peak times—to customers. The idea was that the company would help instill behavior that would protect the grid as demand grew by offering incentives. The assumption was that otherwise most people would return home and plug in, most often at peak times.

Fast forward to July 2022, and the Public Service Commission, which regulates Con Edison’s SmartCharge program and others across the state, issued a directive to each utility to either implement or augment its managed charging program.

For Con Edison’s established program—one of the largest in the country, according to industry estimates—“We wanted to kick it up to the next level,” Morreale says. Since the beginning, Con Edison’s participants had been sent cellular-enabled devices that plugged into the universal ports in their cars. As participants charged their cars, the device would report that activity to the company.

But with new goals on the horizon, some rethinking was in order. “It became evident that if we were to continue to support a physical device, it was not a particularly cost-effective way to scale,” Morreale says.

Purchasing the devices, shipping them to participants, tracking inventory, troubleshooting their issues—it all had become unnecessarily labor intensive. Meanwhile, technology inside the cars has advanced so that cars can report data directly to the company’s E-Mobility team with the participants’ authorization.

Morreale and Yanowitz, the program manager for SmartCharge New York, also considered customer feedback they had collected over the course of the program, including customers' desire to watch their charging behavior, track their incentives, and receive payments electronically.

After months of planning and preparation, the revamped SmartCharge program now meets the new state requirements with easier ways for participants to manage their accounts and up to $70 million for incentives it could pay out by the end of next year.

“I like to tell people the hardest part about participating is remembering your password,” Yanowitz says. “We've completely redesigned the program.”

Now, 60 EV models and five internet-connected home chargers—which pull data from vehicles without an embedded internet connection—are eligible, and no physical device is needed. An app allows participants to manage their accounts from their phones in addition to their computers.

Incentives work two ways: From June through September, participants who avoid charging during peak hours—2 to 6 p.m.—earn $35 each month with an additional $35 bonus for those who comply for all four consecutive months. In addition, participants who charge during the year-round off-peak hours—midnight to 8 a.m.—receive 10 cents per kilowatt-hour without limits. While the program is designed to target at-home charging behavior, any charging in the Con Edison service territory qualifies toward earnings. Monthly payouts are now issued via Venmo or Paypal.

“Depending upon the size of your battery and how much driving you do, your [earnings] can range from the average of $400 and even up to $1000 with off-peak charging,” Yanowitz says.

To help drive greater participation, Con Edison’s E-Mobility team offers frequent one-off incentives, such as for completing a survey or referring a friend. The company also markets through an aggressive customer email campaign.

“It took a lot of work,” Morreale says, “but we were able to transition our program to meet the new requirements the state put on while continuing to offer the same high level of service and incentives that we know make a difference to our customers.”