Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Mandrake wrote: 25 May 2021, 23:48 Not entirely unexpected but HMRC have just clarified that electricity sold at EV public chargers is to be taxed at the full 20% VAT rate not the 5% VAT applicable to household electricity which some (but not all apparently!) public charging networks were previously able to charge.
Never pay that much attention to the "receipt" details after a session, but maybe Instavolt were out on a limb incorporating 5% VAT at on the road chargers, and all the others have 20% already within their prices.

BP Pulse charge me 20% VAT in my subscription to their service, and Genie Point (Morrisons) also charge 20% VAT

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Last edited by NewcastleFalcon on 26 May 2021, 10:27, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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Totally obvious innovations are now being incorporated into many charging infrastructure developments, one of them being on site local generation of electricity.

AMPLY Power to electrify fleets with solar overhead charging

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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Nissan Washington propose building huge batteries in new plant

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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It is probably the best time for running an electric car. Taxation hasn't caught up yet, and incentives are in place, and in spite of a perceived "infrastructure problem" most of the time certainly round here there are plenty charging up options for the volume of EV's on the road. With the Leaf we probably rely on on-the-road charging more than the Larger capacity battery vehicles available now.

The multi charge point charging hubs, although developing are the exception. Most places its a single charger or 2 chargers so a bit of common sense charge point etiquette is required. The most often transgression is...
The Charging Point Hogger. For example Yesterday. Both the VW and The Merc had finished Charging but were left connected up, blocking the charger from use by others. The VW had been on that rapid charger slot without returning for at least 2.5 hours.
Pure co-incidence they are both German Cars
Pure co-incidence they are both German Cars
Wouldn't be so bad if there were multiple chargepoints in many locations, but that is not quite there yet.

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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A clear case of overinflated tyres. Let the air out. All of it.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

...and if and when you run out of electricity, certainly the recovery organisation I'm aware of having mobile electric chargers on their vehicles is the good old Royal Automobile Club.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Dormouse »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 27 May 2021, 10:58 It is probably the best time for running an electric car. Taxation hasn't caught up yet, and incentives are in place, and in spite of a perceived "infrastructure problem" most of the time certainly round here there are plenty charging up options for the volume of EV's on the road. With the Leaf we probably rely on on-the-road charging more than the Larger capacity battery vehicles available now.

The multi charge point charging hubs, although developing are the exception. Most places its a single charger or 2 chargers so a bit of common sense charge point etiquette is required. The most often transgression is...
The Charging Point Hogger. For example Yesterday. Both the VW and The Merc had finished Charging but were left connected up, blocking the charger from use by others. The VW had been on that rapid charger slot without returning for at least 2.5 hours.

Image
Wouldn't be so bad if there were multiple chargepoints in many locations, but that is not quite there yet.

REgards Neil
The library car park in Coldstream is a good example of this Hogging phenomenon. We stayed at Hirsel for a week and noticed the same two cars parked in the charging spaces all day 9-5, 5 days of the week. If you wanted to charge up you needed to come in the evenings or weekend. Isn't human nature a wonderful thing!
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Mandrake »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 07 Jun 2021, 22:01 ...and if and when you run out of electricity, certainly the recovery organisation I'm aware of having mobile electric chargers on their vehicles is the good old Royal Automobile Club.
Regards Neil
Surprised to see that it is only 3.5kW and more recently 7kW AC charging - as I'm sure you're familiar with, charging a dead EV at that speed so it has enough charge to safely reach a charger that is maybe 10+ miles away can take quite a while. (3.5kW adds about 12 miles per hour, 7kW about 24 miles per hour as a rough rule of thumb but it's of course affected directly by the miles/kWh the car can do)

Also quite a few EV's can't charge at 7kW AC (only 3.5kW) but can charge at up to 50kW using Chademo/CCS. Time is of course money for someone like the RAC, unless they want to sit around for half an hour to an hour for an impromptu tea break and chat with the broken down customer... :lol:

It makes a lot more sense for their mobile boost unit to support CCS/Chademo so they can give you enough range to make it to another charger in 5 minutes or so. At 45kW charging on my Leaf 5 minutes would add about 15 miles - which would take 40 minutes or so at 7kW or 80 minutes at 3.5kW... (that's a long tea break...) And 10 minutes at 45kW would add a healthy 30 miles of range which should be enough to get you out of trouble in most areas.

While the onboard battery in the RAC van would need to handle higher instantaneous power it doesn't fundamentally need more storage in kWh terms - it's just delivering it faster to the car.

I think/hope we will see these mobile recovery vans boosted to rapid charging speeds in the future. At the moment they're probably just trying to suss out if there is a market for this service or not so have done the minimum required to get it working.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Mandrake »

So the other shoe dropped:

https://www.gridserve.com/2021/06/08/ec ... gridserve/

Gridserve (backed by Hitachi) took a 25% stake in Ecotricity's "Electric Highway" back in March, at the time I opined on SpeakEV that this was likely phase one of a stealth full buyout strategy and an exit plan for Ecotricity's Dale Vince who has clearly not had the money or interest to sort out the Electric Highway in the last few years. I didn't expect the other shoe to drop in only 3 months though!

This is big news because Electric Highway has a semi-monopoly of motorway services in England and is continually ranked last in charging network survey's for reliability, usability, number of chargers at a site etc. In short they are so bad that they've been seriously holding back adoption of EV's in parts of England due to the (somewhat justified) perception that charging EV's on long journey's is too difficult and unreliable - which in the case of the Electric Highway has been true!

Gridserve seem really on the ball and enthusiastic with financial backing from Hitachi, and have already replaced many of the Electric Highway chargers in the 3 month period where they owned 25% of the company. So things are about to get a lot better for long distance EV driving in England over the next year that it's likely to take them to renovate the entire Electric Highway network.

Meanwhile in Scotland we're one month away from Swarco (based in Dundee) taking over backend services and helpdesk for the ChargePlace Scotland network from CYC, (Charge Your Car) also Transport Scotland is apparently now pushing a lot harder for improved KPI's for reliability and performance on the CPS network and has actually installed quite a lot of new chargers in the last year.

So while parts of the CPS network are still a bit ropey, I think it is also going to improve a lot over the next year. Things are finally looking up a bit on the public charging front. :)
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

VW and Tesco.....free 7kWh chargers at certain TESCo stores. The Headline catches this offer.

Tesco and VW plan free electric car charging points

Reality is the Rapid chargers (50 kW) will not be free, just like anywhere else, and only to be expected. If you caught the advert from VW after the footy, or just read the headline of the BBC story, the message VW/Tesco...free leccy would probably have come across, and its not entirely misleading.
https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/electric/p ... hips/tesco
Volkswagen and Tesco want to make it easier for you to charge your electric car while you’re out, no matter what brand of Electric Vehicle you drive. That’s why by the end of July 2021 there will be free 7kW EV charging bays at 400 Tesco stores. At selected stores there are free 22kW chargers and (chargeable) 50kW rapid chargers. All of the chargers are installed by Pod Point, the UK’s largest independent public charging network operator, and all use renewable/green energy.
latest Locations
https://pod-point.com/rollout/tesco-ev-charging


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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by mickthemaverick »

Looking at the plan it looks as though Hertford is going to get a free 7kW charger in Tesco. It is a 2 mile drive from home so I reckon I should be able to get 4 miles range back into the battery while I do the weekly shop in Tesco 30-40 mins. Would that be reasonable? :)
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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mickthemaverick wrote: 15 Jun 2021, 17:11 Looking at the plan it looks as though Hertford is going to get a free 7kW charger in Tesco. It is a 2 mile drive from home so I reckon I should be able to get 4 miles range back into the battery while I do the weekly shop in Tesco 30-40 mins. Would that be reasonable? :)
If we assume that a typical electric car may do around 4miles/KWh there or thereabouts, and you have an onboard charger in the vehicle charging at 6.6 kWh like my Leaf, 30 minutes would get me about about 13 miles.

If you drive in and someone else is plugged in, you will have to wait or more likely abandon the charge up, and the person plugged in may be using all of the free time allowed in the car park to remain plugged in.

No you might as well just charge up overnight at home and use the TESCO when you can on an opportunist basis :-D .

Currently I am operating the most primitive system available a 3 pin plug "granny charger" on a dedicated circuit and it takes about 4 to 5 hrs to charge at a rate of about 3kW/hr. I run my battery from 20% state of charge to 80% state of charge (60% of the 22kWh available (13.2kWH typical recharge required).


Here's an example of a 7kW charging post being unnecessarily hogged, it will happen at Tesco!

Image

Regards Neil
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by mickthemaverick »

Thanks Neil. when I do go electric it is highly likely to be with a 30kW Leaf if all goes to plan with my finances. Thus from what you say I should be able to execute my plan given that the one thing I didn't mention is that I usually go to Tesco at 04.30-05.00 ish in order to take advantage of the overnight shelf stacking and general lack of crowds. There is usually only 4 or 5 cars in the car park so I would expect to find the charger vacant more often than not. Our idea will be to replace SWMBO's Celerio with the Leaf and keep my car for longer journeys. Thus the Leaf will be a town car, in fact we may go for a smaller ev but we do like our comfort so probably not! :-D Whatever we do at least we will have the choice which we don't have at the moment! :)
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Looks like The Hertford Tesco has 2 Charging posts, with four available connections. and in action since January 2021. You can check out on your phone/laptop whether they are in use or not. Next time you are down there Mick have a look see how busy they are.

Yes you should be alright at those times. Good luck if you decide to give it a go Mick. Have to admit when I got the Leaf, the last time I was anywhere near as excited about a car, was when I bought a Triumph GT6 in the early 1980's.

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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I'm sure it will resolve in time but that would be a sticking point for me. Too much uncertainty. the Civic is likely to be my last car, barring catastrophic failure.
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