EV Charging Hubs - The antithesis of moving the Electric Vehicle Agenda forward.
Alan MacLeod CEng MEI FIES FRSA FICRS
Entrepreneur, CEO, Technical Specialist | MBA, Sustainable Energy
Convenient and affordable charging infrastructure is crucial in our desired switch to electric vehicles usage. Both national and local government have an important role to play in facilitating access across the nation.
The UK Government’s ambition is to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Based on this ambition, current forecasts confirm that by 2030 there could be 8-11 million hybrid or electric cars on the UK’s roads and over 25 million hybrid or electric cars by 2040. To compare, there were 31.2 million cars in the UK in 2017.
EV drivers primarily require both convenient and smart (contactless payment) charging facilities: we also know that approximately one third of UK households do not have a driveway or garage restricting home charging facilities, and drivers will also want to ‘top-up’ their battery while away from home on leisure or business journeys.
Currently, significant funds disbursed to Local authorities help meet this (predicted) growing need from residents and local businesses by installing grant-funded charge points, in areas usually restricted to Local Authority sites, on bypasses or council unused land. These charging sites stand mostly in stark relief to site locations, out of place, and for most with low numbers of electric vehicles in sight. The model chosen has been to replicate traditional filling stations, with a charging station model. This completely removes the most important advantage of electric vehicle mobility – charging flexibility, and critically, EV charging convenience.
Our daily lives are grounded in consumerism, based on ever higher levels of convenience, whether Amazon Prime or Deliveroo or UBER, whatever choices we make we generally love the convenience aspect on which our purchasing decisions are made, we see real value in this time saving feature.
But strangely when choices, through large investments, are made available for EV charging, we apparently see no value in the key aspect that drives our decisions in all other facets of our lives, a convenience factor.
Additionally our work/life balance has been rapidly adjusting to life after COVID-19, as a result of the tangible benefits seen of homeworking; managing our lives more effectively than as a population we adjusted to the term “commuter”. In this context both renewable energy infrastructure as well as EV charging should be focused directly on customers’ needs not local Authorities limited decision making processes.
EV charging only makes real sense when you maximise the benefits of owning an electric vehicle by providing options to charge when and where convenient; at home, office, leisure, at the Mall, Garden Centre, how and where you live your life EV charging needs to be available to support your lifestyle, principally because it can.
We need to think local, act national if we are truly serious about electric vehicles forming part of a nations transportation strategy, and forget simply replacing current fuel pump configurations with replica EV charging configuration as a primary energy supply means to our communities.
It’s the wrong path, at the wrong time.
NED and strategic commercial and digital advisor
4 年So much coming down the track on terms of battery life, software, actual vehicle usage, CAV, changing vehicle ownership models, fast charging/chargers, standardisation, commute choices and distance that range anxiety will diminish, #MaaS PAYG #CAV vehicles (and even those that are owned) will take themselves off to get charged, 2 and 3 wheel e-transport will surge. We’ve been coping with diminishing number of forecourts for decades and while “hubs” won’t work for all scenarios, extending charging to “longer stay” locations (typically larger and episodically busy) could cater for those 28% with no off-road charging (many of whom won’t have their own vehicles anyway)? #netzero #mobility #ev
Group Chief Commercial & Operating Officer at The Ultimate Battery Company
4 年Alan... Thanks for the post, however we need batteries which can charge at a benchmark level of 20 miles per minute and an infrastructure which can reliably deliver this
SF Market, 光伏供应链与安装商对接，议价，交易平台
4 年Interesting article! Thank you for posting.
Hands-on engineer, outdoorsman, and father helping to build our Sustainable Energy Future.
4 年From my perspective as an EV owner with an at-home charger, I feel that plugging in at a level 2 (7.2kW) charger is hardly worth it when visiting the grocery store or making other stops that typically take 30 minutes or less. That is only about 10-15 miles of range from an unknown energy source, which would cost about 40 cents to pull from my home system - one that uses rooftop PV and purchased wind credits to offset the carbon impact. Level 1 chargers at airports and other multi-day venues? YES! Level 2 chargers at work, shopping malls, movie theaters, and other multi-hour venues? YES! Level 3 chargers you need to drive out of town to utilize? NO. Establishing an appropriately-dense network of Level 3 chargers at more of our common 30-minute-stop locations is the most logical solution to addressing the average person's EV range anxiety. We clearly need more EV chargers to support further growth; however, if EV charging equipment is actually to drive faster adoption, the network will need to be thoughtfully built-out to provide meaningful value to the average consumer living his and her average daily life. In
Sole Proprietor at 'The Future is not Set'
4 年Wouldn't bus recharging be the better option with fewer cars on the road?