EV Charging Network

Herzlos

Sea_Shell said:

Another thought...

Charging at home could be tricky in multi car households.

Especially if they don't have chargers at their place of work.

2 cars is probably going to be fine, but 3+ car households, where some cars need to park on the street, is going to be a logistical nightmare.

Of course, given most cars will need charged once a week, they just need to rotate which one gets the driveway and hope they don't all need a long charge on the same day.

Sea_Shell

NBLondon said:

ComicGeek said:

Not everyone is going to be travelling between towns, what about local delivery drivers, carers, driving instructors, taxis, tradesmen etc who might not be passing by out of town charging stations very often but can still clock up the miles each day? 

There's probably an assumption that fleets will charge at a depot but you're right - a peripatetic carer, a Hermes Evri driver, a driving instructor could well do over 100 miles a day.  If they can't charge at home each night - planning becomes burdensome; and they may well be running to a tight timescale so long charging stops are not convenient.   Before anyone chunters about new EVs having much longer ranges - these can be self-employed folk on quite low wages - they are looking in the sub £10K range not the over £40K.

With second hand EVs currently, is there a "rule of thumb" equation between £££ and range?

300 miles = £x
200 ?
100?

MikeJXE

LOL so all in all things are going the wrong way for EVs,

Too many EVs  being bought with an inadequate charging network

What could possibly go wrong ?

The government will have enough capacity when it's all too late as usual 

I will stick to my ice, might even invest in a tow bar to make a few quid 

JKenH

Herzlos said:

JKenH said:

Like most current EV drivers who can charge at home, I don’t need rapid chargers where I live but anyone visiting the area might. To give an idea of just how bad provision can be in some areas (not all), here is a Zap-Map image showing rapid chargers in Scunthorpe (population 81,000). There are just 3 rapids in the town. All are single devices. One is at Lidl, one at Morrisons (currently out of service) and the third, CCS only, is at a Peugeot garage. 

Of course if you zoom out a bit you'll see that you can't get to Scunthorpe from anywhere without passing rapid chargers on route, and there are other slower charges in Scunthorpe.

It also looks at a quick skim to be one of the quieter parts of the zap map.

Lincolnshire is a quiet place. There are 29 fast (7kW) chargers (devices) in Scunthorpe which added to the 3 rapids gives the opportunity for 32 people to charge at any time, very roughly one for every 2.5k people. The national average is around 1 for every 1k people. I can’t find any statistics for EV ownership rates in Scunthorpe (North Lincolnshire) but my gut feeling FWIW it is well below the national average so possibly Scunthorpe isn’t any worse for chargers than other rural areas. 

In trying to find some statistics I came across this survey undertaken by N Lincs council which revealed that 90% of the EV owners who responded to the survey parked on a private driveway overnight - but that suggests 10% didn’t. The nature of the survey was such that I don’t think one can read anything into the other statistics quoted in the report. 

https://www.northlincs.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Electric-Vehicle-EV-Survey-Summary-Paper-a.pdf

Martyn1981

Herzlos said:

ComicGeek said:

Not sure why we can't just admit that the charging network is rubbish

I don't think anyone has denied the charging network is rubbish?

It's got a long way to go to be able to keep up with the EV adoption rate.

This forum has a real problem with people cherry picking data to make EV's look bad though, for whatever reason.

Dead right. Up to now you have a lot of people who want to drive an EV, be it for the adventure, or green and ethical reasons. And of course those who have better cicumstances (such as a driveway) will tend to jump first.

But for those simply changing to a BEV, as the world moves that way, then the charging network (for non-Tesla drivers) needs to improve, but here's my biggest fear - so far the charging network has been behind the curve, and the move to BEV's is accelerating. So the charging curve not only needs to catch up, it also needs to accelerate to meet a growing demand, and accelerate a bit more again, to catch or get ahead of the curve.

I don't have much faith in this Gov doing enough to solve this, nor in the charging companies who seem to be using expensive kit, from different suppliers, and poorly managing it when installed.

I'm utterly baffled how one single company, can mass produce chargers at a lower cost than others, and roll out a network across most of the world, when all other companies, put together, have done next to nothing. At least some nations like Norway, and neighbours, have pretty good networks.

ididgetwhereiamtoday

I do wonder why existing petrol stations are very slow at installing at least a couple of rapid chargers on their forecourts?

born_again

Why do people think it is up to the government to install more chargers?
If there is demand then companies will install them & make money from them. Clearly at certain times there is more demand than supply. But at other times they are stood doing nothing. Only the same as fuel pumps, where you have to wait to fill up.
Yes fuel pumps are the same, but they have been here for years & do not require infrastructure upgrades costing well into 6 figures in many cases.

JKenH

Replying to last two posts.

Maybe it boils down to economics. The number of EVs on the road can only (financially) support a certain number of chargers. I don’t know how the margins on chargers compare to petrol pumps but the throughput on a petrol pump at busy times can be much higher. I’ve not timed it but a pay at pump petrol pump could probably turn over £1000/hr at a busy time. It can always operate at its dispensing maximum rate. The rate at which electricity can be dispensed varies with the car and state of charge and in some cases how busy the charger is. With my Leaf, the maximum I ever saw was 47kW and it could go below 20kW. If the the average charging rate was (say) 75kw then at 70p/kWh the turnover would be around £50/hr after allowance for changeover time. The revenue generated might then just be one twentieth of a petrol pump. 

If one is talking about adding chargers to existing petrol filling stations the operator may think one petrol pump might bring in 20x the turnover of a rapid charger so why bother with the extra expense of the civil engineering and electrical works?

Having said that our local Jet filling station, situated on the main route over the bridge into Gainsborough does have a rapid charger. In fact Gainsborough has more rapid chargers than Scunthorpe despite being only a quarter of the size and and more rapid charging locations than filling stations. Sadly, I rarely see any of the rapid chargers in use in Gainsborough. 

Edit: replaced “revenue”with “turnover” as revenue can have different meanings to some people. I had a quick look for petrol station margins and the figures varied so much from 37p per tank full to 19p per litre that any discussion of the actual figures is probably meaninglessness on here.

Edit 2: many of you may have seen this article in the past

Could EV Fast Charging Be More Profitable Than Pumping Gas?

https://evannex.com/blogs/news/could-fast-charging-turn-out-to-be-more-profitable-than-pumping-gas

 The key to the headline is the following quote “If I think about a tank of fuel versus a fast charge, we are nearing a place where the business fundamentals on the fast charge are better than they are on the fuel,”

The margin may be higher on a fast charge than a tank of fuel but of course one can fill a lot of tanks in the time taken for a fast charge of the same value so, as I suggested above, it is down to throughput. 

Herzlos

born_again said:

Why do people think it is up to the government to install more chargers?

Because like with any other privatized utility, the investment will only go to the really profitable areas and the edges will be completely ignored.

Take internet for example, you can get gigabit internet in some cities, whilst some rural customers don't even get megabit (0.1%) of those speeds.
Or gas - lots of rural locations have no gas hookup so rely on expensive oil that is delivered and stored in tanks.

So if you don't have the Government step in, you're going to find lots of quiet places totally under supplied with chargers, and then you get the chicken and egg situation where the public won't buy EV's until the infrastructure is in place, and the private companies won't put the infrastructure in place until the public have the cars.

Government involvement would ideally lead to a single standard for chargers, to avoid each private company needing a separate account and payment method - as I understand it, that's a total nightmare at the moment. If there is a charger nearby, is it one you can actually use easily or do you need to go and download another app?

Herzlos

MikeJXE said:

LOL so all in all things are going the wrong way for EVs,

Too many EVs  being bought with an inadequate charging network

What could possibly go wrong ?

The government will have enough capacity when it's all too late as usual 

I will stick to my ice, might even invest in a tow bar to make a few quid 

You're sticking on an ICE? Why didn't you say so before?

EV ownership isn't super smooth for everyone, but there are a lot of people using them happily and saving a fortune so I don'tthink you can say it's going entirely wrong.