Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Neat little charging points pioneered in Oxford

by urban-electric



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Last edited by NewcastleFalcon on 02 Dec 2019, 11:39, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by white exec »

Hopefully the cheap and unattractive tarmac won't be the norm for these, after decorative pavements have been dug up.
At a 7kW/overnight charge, could those points end up serving just one household each?
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Mandrake »

Personally I don't think pop up curb side chargers or curb side chargers in general will scale to everyone driving EV's... just too many issues around access, maintenance and the fact that the piece of road outside your house doesn't belong to you...

So while they're an interesting idea I think ultimately those who can't install home charging of their own will be stuck charging at work, or rapid charging when they buy the weekly groceries etc...
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by myglaren »

It seemed to me that they were intended for anyone to use, not just the residents of the house they were placed in front of.
The cost of installing that stuff would hardly be trivial so shared usage would be a reasonable expectation.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

This id from MoneySavingExpert and is described as "ongoing". Never tried it out as being a non-smartphone user I do not have the App for ecotricity who operate the chargers. Lidl originally offerred free charging with their Pod-Point partner but they are chargeable now.

Zap-Map still has the IKEA Ecotricity chargepoint at Gateshead costing 39p/kWh, which is........very expensive.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Mandrake »

myglaren wrote: 02 Dec 2019, 13:35 It seemed to me that they were intended for anyone to use, not just the residents of the house they were placed in front of.
Exactly, and that is one of the problems. You can't rely on a charger on the public street unless every "parking space" on the street has one.

If you come home from work late and other drivers have already snagged all the nearby charge points for the night including the one directly outside your house, where does that leave you ?

Who do you call when they're broken and how quickly will they be repaired ? Will anyone busy themselves to actually come out and repair them ? A lot of current public charger infrastructure is broken and slow being repaired as it is...

If the post goes down into the ground when unused, what is to prevent someone parking over top of it so it can't come up, or driving into it when it is extended ? What prevents salt water and grit getting down into the socket when it is below ground, let alone flood waters ? In recent flooding the Virgin Media cable box under the pavement that supplies our house was completely under flood water with water coming up through the manhole cover...resulting in some cabling needing replacing.

If it malfunctions and is no longer able to extend itself, how the heck do you get into it to repair it ? The ones I've seen on video seem to be embedded in the paving material so it looks like if it wont extend you'd have to dig up the pavement to repair it... How long until vandals or Anti-EV nuts start going around damaging them to make a point ? All it takes is a bit of glue or other muck pushed into the socket to put it out of action.

If there are rows of these along a residential street each one with a cable going to a car, will you even be able to cross the road without tripping over a cable ?

I can think of a dozen practical implementation problems of the charging post coming up out of the street idea. Nice tech demo, but not scaleable to wide scale adoption IMHO. OK for opportunistic charging but not adequate for reliable day in day out use like your own home charger on your driveway or in your garage.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Gibbo2286 »

My good friend J is a kindly old lady who would do anything to help anyone but park a car outside her house and she has a bloody fit, I firmly believe that there are thousands like her around the country so I'd say it's non starter, or a turf war starter.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »


https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/electric/ ... tric-cars/

May be a touch misleading but this is the state of play of the "on the road" network of charging points and developments in place according to the article.

"According to Zapmap, there are around 15,500 public charging points in the UK – five times more than in 2011. And many of those chargers have more than one connector, meaning there are 26,500 plugs to use as of autumn 2019.

Compare that with the number of petrol stations scattered across the UK, and you quickly see the direction of travel. There are just 8400 fuel stations in Britain, according to the Petrol Retailers' Association - with 68,000 pumps to use. The gap between fossil fuels and electric car chargers is narrowing at a dramatic rate..."
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Mandrake »

The comparison between number of chargers and petrol pumps is an interesting one, especially when you consider that there are more public chargers than service stations already.

However the numbers also show that the average number of pumps per service station is eight, which is certainly not the case with rapid chargers where most sites still have one, two or perhaps three rapid chargers at a site, with very few sites with more than that.

That needs to change for a couple of reasons. One is for queuing and utilisation. To make their money back before the installed charger is old and obsolete rapid charger operators need a high percentage of utilisation for each individual charger. If you're only charging 35p/kWh and it costs >£20k to install one that's a long payback time...

If you only have one or two per site then you'll start seeing queues form even when the utilisation is low, say 20%. People don't like to arrive at a rapid charger and find the only one there is already in use! With a petrol pump you might wait 5 minutes or 10 at the most, on a charger you could be waiting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour for someone to finish and get off the charger.

If you have say 8 chargers per site and one queue to access them you only have to wait until ANY one of them becomes available, which statistically will happen a lot more frequently when 8 different cars arriving at random times for different length charging sessions are present. Furthermore there's a high chance that at least one of them won't be in use and you won't have to wait at all.

The second reason is redundancy. When you have only one unit on site and you arrive there with a short range EV with not many (or no) other options to charge and find that the unit is out of order that can easily ruin your day and end up with a call to the AA. Hasn't happened to me but I've been close on a couple of occasions. After you've been bitten a couple of times you end up not trusting single charger sites and tend avoid them in favour of sites with more than one unit.

This is a major reason that I tend to use Instavolt sites which usually have two units per site (and are also very reliable) over free ChargePlace Scotland units which often have a single unit at a site and are not nearly as reliable! On the other hand I would have no problems with driving to a rapid charging site with 8 units on site because I know that the chances of all of them being down is virtually zero.

When I do make a longer trip that requires rapid charging the two things I dread seeing when I arrive are the charger(s) are already busy (how long will I wait ?) or worse, are they out of order. Multiple units per site solves both issues.

At the moment some networks have single rapid charger units spread out widely, ultimately I think their money would be better spent building rapid charger "clusters" where the distance between sites is greater, but there are many chargers at the same site. For less capital outlay (the same number of charger units, but less ground works at less sites to get power etc) they will get a higher average utilisation of the units (once there is enough demand) as the chargers can be kept busy without people queuing for long, and the redundancy of many chargers will give people the confidence to trust the site and make it a part of their journey plans.

One thing to keep in mind when comparing number of service stations with number of public charging stations is that all cars that run on petrol or diesel ultimately have to fuel up or get their fuel from service stations or depots in some fashion. So the service station network is sized for the entire fleet of ICE vehicles. Nobody has a petrol or diesel pump installed at their house.

However thanks to home charging the percentage of "fuelling up" done by EV's at public charging stations will be a lot less than the 100% for petrol and diesel.

I've seen estimates that around 60% of UK houses have off street parking which could potentially have home charging installed. Of the 40% of households that don't have off street parking a significant percentage don't have a car anyway - for example a lot of housing in London doesn't have off street parking but those residents don't drive cars anyway.

When you take into account car owning households, off street parking is more like 70-80%. In any case, those that can charge at home will choose to do so as it is much cheaper, and much more convenient. (charge while you sleep instead of while you wait, a full charge available every morning etc) Those cars that charge at home most of the time reduce the burden on the public charging network so it won't need to be nearly as big or busy as it would if everyone had to use it all the time.

So while the typical stay at a rapid charging station is going to be 20-60 minutes vs 5-10 minutes for a service station, a lot lower percentage of cars will need to actually make use of rapid charging stations - essentially only those people without home charging or those making occasional long out of range trips.

So I suspect the longer occupancy time at rapid chargers will be balanced out by the fact that only a relatively low proportion, maybe 1/4 of total EV charging nationwide will be done at public chargers with the rest done using home charging.

I know if I had an EV even with 120 miles of real range that I would never use public rapid chargers unless we went away on holiday somewhere - all my commuting, family outings and even trips to the beach would easily be covered from charging at home, let alone if I had an EV with a 200-300 mile range.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by myglaren »

There are 43 houses and eight flats in our cul-de-sac with approx 70 cars.
There is no possibility whatsoever of an electric car being able to charge from a house socket without stringing the wires through trees and in many cases even that is not an option.
The same is true for the whole of this estate and most of the others in Washington.
Three of my neighbours have paved over their back gardens and can park cars there so they are OK but that option is only open for a very few houses.
Very limiting but the on-street chargers would be a viable option as there are a fair number of parking spaces that are not directly on the road that would be suitable.
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Post by Mandrake »

It certainly varies from area to area. On the other hand I live in Motherwell in a fairly "average" area certainly not well off and every house on the street I'm on has off street parking as do most of those in neighbouring streets.

A lot of the blame lays with "new build" estates built in the last 20 years or so where no provision was made for car parking. There's a few new build areas near me as well that were only built within the last 10-15 years and there are cars parked all over the pavements as there isn't adequate parking off street.

This is something perhaps that the government should be addressing with building codes etc... they can't be trying to promote EV's on the one hand and simultaneously let construction companies building new estates today build housing that has little or no provision for car parking.

Even if you put aside charging, the mess of cars up on pavements blocking the passage of prams etc should be addressed, at least in new builds going in today.

Although I have some sympathy I do also have to question people that buy housing with no parking facilities when they already have one or even two cars in the family... its for that reason that so many streets are a mess of cars blocking pavements...

EV charging has only brought into sharp relief a problem that has been festering and getting worse for many years now and is soon going to reach a breaking point.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by myglaren »

These houses were built in the late seventies/early eighties. No pavements to park on, mainly 'car spaces' - that is 'mine', also have another round the back (through the archway on the left).

There is not a single garage on this part of the estate. A fair percentage of the residents have to park 100 yards from their home - my daughter lives over the road from me but has no parking near her house.

My son lives 1/4 mile away and he has a garage, as do about half of the houses and many of them could park right outside their house and run a charger.
I think a lot of BEV users would be dependent on publicly available chargers. There have been a few installed in public car parks around here but they are disappointingly few as yet.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Gibbo2286 »

In my Close there are just seven houses all with off road parking for at least one car and when the close was built in 1970 it was a requirement of the planning consent that there were also four parking spaces for residents or visitors.

The problem here is that even that is not enough for the number of cars occupiers and visitors need at times, this even though the seven houses are occupied by just eleven residents.

House one, one occupant (myself) and for most of the time one car, (I could park three or four comfortably off road)
House two one occupant full time one occasional, her grandson's car on the drive and her car in one of the on road spaces.
House three retired couple, one car, garaged, visiting daughter one car on the drive.
House four a 99 year old widow, son's a builder, always one of his cars and a transit on the drive.
House five retired couple two cars, one on the drive one in the on road space also daughter's car often in an on road space.
House six young couple one car on the drive.
House seven retired couple one car on the drive (Motor bike in garage) regular daily visits from two daughters with their BMW SUVs.

We have a doctor's clinic just 50 yards around the corner, when that's open we get the patients filling our close with their cars and blocking the access with idiot haphazard parking.

I guess that if all the available spaces were set up with a charger it could work for us.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by bobins »

Without wishing to re-open the old 'is the local distribution network up to it' discussion, the problem with putting charging points all over the place is that the distro companies have to plan for the fact that they might all be used in one area at the same time. Not a problem in some locations, but undoubtedly quite a headache in others.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by mickthemaverick »

Considering this issue in general, it occurred to me that local charging points could be installed using large capacity batteries and commercial wind generators. The generators are capable of producing 3-4Mwatts now so that when the wind blows power could be stored in batteries under the service station where the current tanks are, and then tapped as required for rapid charging. This method would remove the need for local network loading and also have the advantage of guiding you to a station by sight of the wind generator. Of course once the batteries were drained you would need to wait for the wind which is a failing but at least you would get a free hook-up, ie: there would be no charge!! :-D
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