Location of public charge points

goz83

I've seen all ages from 30ish to 60ish driving EVs. I'm mid 30's myself.

I don't think people will want to visit any dedicated super chargers unless they are as common as the petrol station. People need access to on street SCPs where they have no off street parking.

Evd-Burner

KCross wrote:

Seriously though, I wouldn't say the typical buyer is young professional at all. If anything its the 40-60 bracket (just my anecdotal experience).

Well I've not even hit my 30s yet 😂... I've also convinced 1 other sub 30s to buy an EV and to in their mid 50s.

bp_me

KCross wrote: »

Does anyone have figures for GDA and the rest of the country for how many households have off-street parking.

We have a lot of debates on here about off-street parking/charging but how big a problem is it really as an overall %?

Unfortunately the census doesn't ask this particular question. The data might be out there but someone would have to go back through an awful lot of planning applications to figure it out (I think). There might be an outside chance the local authorities already have the data in summary form.

BoatMad

samih wrote: »

In UK, which has more electric cars than us per capita, I had to wait once in 2 weeks for 30 minutes before I could charge. On both legs to and from the harbour in Ireland I had to wait both ways.

They key is to charge for charging at higher rate (like at twice or more) than it would cost to charge at home.

I hear this viewpoint from time to time and its a very strange one

to requote it

" I should be able to use my wealth to reserve access points so I can have exclusive use of them " !!!!


the actually solution to queuing is more chargers , not making them expensive

we want mass ev adoption, not Teslas for the rich

BoatMad

bp_me wrote: »

Unfortunately the census doesn't ask this particular question. The data might be out there but someone would have to go back through an awful lot of planning applications to figure it out (I think). There might be an outside chance the local authorities already have the data in summary form.

what we do know is Ireland and the UK have the highest percentage of off-street parking in Europe , due to the semi-D configuration

The solution to on street parking , and charging is longer range and access to multi charger fast charging parks. hence the low mileage urban commuter that uses an EV might only charge once per week

By definition , almost a high mileage urban user , will pass fast chargers on their journeys

What isnt scalable is on-street charging , thats clear

liamog

I think this an important point, a combination tariff where we pay a reasonable rate per kWh, with a per minute minimum of x% would do wonders to cover both the profitability of chargers and encourage smart utilisation.

The goal of any EV driver should be for a commercially viable infrastructure to be in place, this is what you will need to rely on when you are away from your home base.
When levying a fee is viable, the numbers of available chargers will increase to supply the demand, multi chargers in a single location will provide energy to drivers.

unkel

This is it exactly. The chargers must make business sense. Like FastNed can install all those thousands of chargers, not because they immediately make a profit from them, but because it makes business sense in the longer run (and that's why they got financial backing.). No subsidies for FastNed (like our subsidies for the ESB)

KCross

The question is how many yearly sessions per charger would you need and at what price point so as to make business sense.

And then look at the island of Ireland and make that work when coast to coast is only measured in hundreds of km's and our EV numbers are so small and EV batteries are getting bigger.... you'd want a lot of money and no business sense to make it work at the moment.

Even looking out 10yrs its hard to see more than 10% of cars being EV on our roads, so how/why would anyone invest here? We are stuck with eCars and Tesla and other private operators like Lidl and car dealerships. Better than nothing but not exactly strategically placed locations.


The cost of the chargers and their installation needs to drop. Then maybe it would be more viable. Maybe the govt could do something there to ensure ESB Networks dont make it difficult for new operators to come in by charging them ridiculous money.

liamog

I've previously estimated that you need around 194kW per charger per day to provide a profit of €27.40 to cover long term costs.
From commercial rates of 11.28c/kWh inc. VAT, you'd charge the public 25.40c/kWh (2.25x). An average 24kWh charge would be around €6 for the end user.

If 20% of drivers need to regularly use FCPs, then we'd need to get to 15,000 vehicles to cover our current network.

It's early days yet, and your correct in saying the current network would be nowhere near commercialisation.
50% year on year on growth would mean we'd need till 2021(5% total sales that year) to fund what we already have.

Part of my argument has been that if we remove the funding of home chargers and redirect it to the public network (est. €500 per install), we'd be able to fund the same network somewhere near the beginning of 2019.
That's not including any increase in the percentage who would regularly use the network due to the lack of home charger.
You'd be more than welcome to install one privately, we'd just reallocate the grant to better reflect the public benefit of a stronger network.

unkel

liamog wrote: »

Part of my argument has been that if we remove the funding of home chargers and redirect it to the public network (est. €500 per install), we'd be able to fund the same network somewhere near the beginning of 2019.

That's not a very green argument, liamog

It is far better of course for the greater good if as many people as possible charge their EVs at home, at night, at the cheaper night rate, when electricity is the most renewable and the most available and the least needed by anybody else.

Now I'm the first to acknowledge that this is not possible for a sizeable group of EV owners. But the few hundred quid that ESB throw at the contractor for installing a free EV charger at people's home is imho a good and efficient way of spending tax payers money towards promoting EVs. Far better than the €10k subsidy on EV cars.

KCross

liamog wrote: »

I've previously estimated that you need around 194kW per charger per day to provide a profit of €27.40 to cover long term costs.
From commercial rates of 11.28c/kWh inc. VAT, you'd charge the public 25.40c/kWh (2.25x). An average 24kWh charge would be around €6 for the end user.

If 20% of drivers need to regularly use FCPs, then we'd need to get to 15,000 vehicles to cover our current network.

It's early days yet, and your correct in saying the current network would be nowhere near commercialisation.
50% year on year on growth would mean we'd need till 2021(5% total sales that year) to fund what we already have.

I haven't seen the breakdown of your figures but is it just CapEx you are covering or does it include OpEx as well? Can you share the breakdown if you haven't posted it somewhere else.

eCars say it costs them, I think, €4-6m per year just for OpEx.

Any commercialisation would have to cover CapEx as there are a lot of new chargers required and the existing ones won't last forever so they will need to be replaced as well.

samih

BoatMad wrote: »

I hear this viewpoint from time to time and its a very strange one

to requote it

" I should be able to use my wealth to reserve access points so I can have exclusive use of them " !!!!


the actually solution to queuing is more chargers , not making them expensive

we want mass ev adoption, not Teslas for the rich

I agree with you that more charging points are needed and somebody has to pay for them. I don't know about your circumstances but personally I would have no objection paying €5 per 100 km worth of electricity as that ensured freeloaders were not hogging the network. Definitely I do not classify that as "wealth".

liamog

The numbers I calculated only covered the CapEx and energy costs per charger.

It's hard to find operating costs, Fastned had an OpEx of €4,500,000 for 2016 with approximately 57 locations with 2 points each. That's at the same time as an international and domestic expansion, and costs for business development. I question ESBs claim of €6,000,000.

FCP charger installation was reported as €80,000 via the RCN report including the costs of grid connections.
Both the RCN report, and Fastned use 8 years as the operational lifetime of a given charger.
My no-doubt over simplification calculated €80,000/8/365 to give a cost of €27.40 to cover.

KCross

liamog wrote: »

The numbers I calculated only covered the CapEx and energy costs per charger.

It's hard to find operating costs, Fastned had an OpEx of €4,500,000 for 2016 with approximately 57 locations with 2 points each. That's at the same time as an international and domestic expansion, and costs for business development. I question ESBs claim of €6,000,000.

FCP charger installation was reported as €80,000 via the RCN report including the costs of grid connections.
Both the RCN report, and Fastned use 8 years as the operational lifetime of a given charger.
My no-doubt over simplification calculated €80,000/8/365 to give a cost of €27.40 to cover.

eCars Opex is in the same ballpark as Fastned then. eCars mentioned €4m in their CER submission for one year of operational support.

I suspect most of that cost is in back office systems and staff and not directly related to the number of charge points (70 FCP's and 900 SCP's in eCars case).

Bottomline, its in the millions so you need to account for it and THEN make profit.

I guess an existing operator in another country would have economy of scale and existing system they could utilise so maybe they could do it for less than €4m but I bet it would still be in the millions.

I hope other operators come in and see it as a worthwhile investment but its hard to see how the numbers stack up in the next 5-10yrs and usually investors dont invest on new tech with a payback in that timeframe.

Its a classic chicken and egg issue.... you need more EV's to make the network viable and you need the network to encourage EV uptake. Which one comes first and how.

unkel

KCross wrote: »

Its a classic chicken and egg issue.... you need more EV's to make the network viable and you need the network to encourage EV uptake. Which one comes first and how.

It is classic chicken and egg. The positive thing is that FastNed was able to start build a high quality network commercially (without subsidies), funded from the private sector. A long time before there is any chance of making a profit. Maybe we should invite them here too with the guarantee that ESB is not allowed to charge a cent less per kWh than what they charge?

KCross

unkel wrote: »

It is classic chicken and egg. The positive thing is that FastNed was able to start build a high quality network commercially (without subsidies), funded from the private sector. A long time before there is any chance of making a profit. Maybe we should invite them here too with the guarantee that ESB is not allowed to charge a cent less per kWh than what they charge?

And I suppose it remains to be seen whether that was a good or bad business decision by FastNed. Just because its up and running doesn't mean it makes sense. I'll be honest and say I know nothing of their network so I dont know one way or the other.

I do think though that eCars find themselves in a unique position if they are handed the network here particularly since its such a small island it will make it less enticing for new entrants.

unkel

Not as unique a position as FastNed who already have a near complete coverage network in NL. Time for them to sit back and wait until the market penetration of EVs gets higher (it already is far higher than here in Ireland) and they have a license to print money. Their rates are reasonable which means the entry barrier of a competitor starting a competing network are almost zero.

Rinse and repeat in all other EU countries and beyond and I can see FastNed becoming the new Shell in a few decades

liamog

The difference in attitude is huge.
eCars have squeezed a few charge points into random locations.

Fastned locations are designed for an eventual 8 charge points laid out 4 in the middle and two on each side, entry similar to a petrol station. As part of their business plan they've an incentive to increase
charge rates as it allows them to supply more kWh to customers.

All Nissan e-nv200 and Leafs in the Netherlands come with a 4 year subscription (since 2016) which provides a nice manufacturer subsidy to fund the network during it's formative years.

I believe there approach will pay off when EVs become ubiquitous. Its what eCars could be if put in the hands of a more forward thinking organisation.

cros13

Many of the investors in FastNed are EV owners happy to sink money in long term. Pretty much all of the management own EVs.
At one point FastNed was offering free lifetime charging to investors putting up more than €100k.

Effectively nobody in eCars owned an EV until 2015 when the money ran out.

One network was designed by people who had to eat their own dogfood and had practical experience and one wasn't.

unkel

Too late to invest a few grand in FastNed, cros13? Presuming they are a publicly quoted company? Sorry I clearly didn't do any research

liamog

Anybody here fancy setting up our own charging company, we could throw money at BoatMad for his technical expertise?

cros13

unkel wrote: »

Too late to invest a few grand in FastNed, cros13? Presuming they are a publicly quoted company? Sorry I clearly didn't do any research

https://www.nxchange.com/venue/Fastned/Fastned

unkel

Price of €8.80 hasn't seen any significant gains or losses in the last year or so, which makes me guess it isn't overhyped and overpriced (like Tesla)?

You any money in this, cros13? If you don't want to publicly answer this, feel free to PM me

BoatMad

cros13 wrote: »

Many of the investors in FastNed are EV owners happy to sink money in long term. Pretty much all of the management own EVs.
At one point FastNed was offering free lifetime charging to investors putting up more than €100k.

Effectively nobody in eCars owned an EV until 2015 when the money ran out.

One network was designed by people who had to eat their own dogfood and had practical experience and one wasn't.

Ireland found a rather unique way to fund a " pilot programme " of public EV chargers , and justified it by explaining to the EU it was in essence a research project ( to examine the effect of EV charging on the MV network )

in that regard, the process was almost with any oversight, no gov policy , no technical standards and began with inexperienced people

Hence we had the preponderance of " slow " on street chargers initially , giving way to DC fast chargers as eCars realised the direction of the technology and ran up against issues with on street parking

We also had haphazard siting issues, largely because many filing stations refused to have chargers installed and eCars was forced to consider inappropriate venues. There was also issue with the MV capacity that limited chargers etc

With hindsight , we ( the state ) should have encouraged commercial companies to build competing systems , rathe then this strange pseudo-state approach

However compared a densely populated country like the Netherlands with Ireland is erroneous, given the spatial demographics , its likely that pure commercial development of chargers would have given huge priority to the GDA with little elsewhere , whereas at least the CER/ESB networks project could in effect operate outside direct commercial considerations


There other thing is that as, yet , no charger network in commercial , and who knows with solar PV , home charging and log range batteries, public charging may never be commercially viable

But the issue today is not commercialism , its to use a charger network to encourage EV takeup and hence the charger network needs to been as a strategic asset , am incentive , not simply a replacement fuelling system