The key elements include six high speed charging hubs on motorways capable of charging eight vehicles simultaneously; 16 high speed charging hubs capable of charging four vehicles simultaneously; additional high power chargers at 34 current 50 kW locations; upgrading over 50 22 kW chargers to 50 kW, and replacing up to 264 locations with 528 charge points at the pre-existing pilot grade of 22 kW to next generation high reliability models.
It only takes about an 1.5 hours for those to charge, there fairly economical, I am on 170 mpg.
Seen on Saturday a Taxi charging at a AC, check the app after it was there since 4 am, I presumed he finished his work Friday night and plugged in, still there at 2 pm.
He moved later on and a phev parked up and did not charge he was gone after 30 minutes.
Thanks! This gave me the keywords.
Feet under the table? More like bent over a barrel I'd say
Like I've said before, if IEOVA rocks the boat with Ecars then they'll just get the door slammed on their face and another EV owners group will get the airtime with Ecars
Personally I'm just holding out hope for the Ionity expansion and maybe Elon opening up the SuC network in Ireland. If those two go ahead then that'll be more or less game over for Ecars
“The company (ESB) added that charging in Northern Ireland will continue to be free to use in the short term while it continues its network upgrade programme.”
didn’t realise ESB charge different prices in the UK depending on where the charger is located. Would they ever introduce that here ? Hope not
The demise of eCars might be a bit premature. It’s hard to see a big expansion of Ionity here, their focus is on busy inter-city routes and their capital costs are huge. Tesla will almost definitely open to the public over the next year but their network is relatively small in Ireland so it will be positive for people who use those routes but that still leaves a lot of the country needing another network.
Ecars in the Uk is a very different business, over there transport for London or the council etc identify the charger requirements and put out open tenders to companies to provide them. Ecars have won a number of these
I robbed this from the Ionity thread, apparently this is going to be the network by 2025, black markers are new sites
We'll see what happens of course, if ESBN are going to sandbag the whole process 😏
You're right that they're interested in mainly intercity routes, but those are the main money makers for ESB outside of the handful of DC chargers in Dublin
If the competition start eating into that revenue stream then there won't be much money making potential for Ecars, so it'll receive even less attention from ESB
As I've said before, Ecars should mainly be focusing on enabling charging in places where commercial operators won't touch, like providing AC chargers to people without driveways
^^ Which makes their statement that they are not rolling out any new AC charger sites all the more bizarre....
So if they are not rolling out any new AC sites, and their DC 'hub' roll out is slower than molasses, what in the actual fcuk are they doing??????
The busiest aspect of eCars is Anna with their Facebook account constantly posting articles about all the new supercar/aeroplane EV's being developed!
Kind Regards,
There’s every possibility that eCars consists of nothing more than one or two ESBN staff with no fixed budget managing an outsourced operation of engineers, call centre and PR agency. I’ve seen more than a few times where public sector staff are busy doing their job and suddenly a second role is landed on them because it looks like a small piece of additional work and some government minister wants the work done quickly and without guaranteed funding.
I did see the famous eCars Hyundai Ionic last weekend, out for what looked like a family drive (unless it was bring your kids to work over the weekend day).
They start training them young in ESB
That's a job for local authorities and not something a commercial operator should be involved with beyond picking up the contracts from councils.
we do have a good grad program….
NI and ROI were all part of the same 99% government rollout in approx 2010. ROI got a lot of upgrades in 2020+ and went from free to pay. NI is still free using mostly 2010 equipment. The said in 2022 NI will get most old chargers upgraded/replaced to new models but maybe no new sites and once my nar completion they will introduce fees. Some 50kW chargers in NI are ChaDeMo only, no CCS and some are broken for 1+ years.
Mainland UK, is a totally different set up & app, but it's actually run by the same Irish team and seems to have delivered more, but probably received better funds.
Actually rollouts if ecars seems to be mostly based on matching funds or similar and they don't seem keen to capture the market possibly because it's unprofitable. Until recently it was not possible to charge for charging in NI but the law was changed to allow fees. Connection fees in NI are apparently much higher, and may be the reason Tesla, Ionity etc are slower/reluctant to deliver hubs. There is talk of changes to connection fees etc in NI but the NI network is a total disaster. See plugshare app for real status of the chargers.
'Grad' being short for Grandfathered yeah. Psych.
I gave up on eCars when kept getting cut off trying to charge my Leaf a good few years back, onto the helpline and they asked had I anything charging in the car and I said yeah, my phone was charging off the USB, that's it they said, the chargers can sense that and will cut out, you can't have anything charging in the car whilst charging, I kid you not
????
Often accusations of nepotism in the ESB so wedging in grandfather even though it doesn't make sense.
So, If I understand correctly. Local authorities in the UK picked locations that they believed would be useful for EV chargers and put the process of installation out to tender. Then companies, including eCars, vied for tha opportunity and install the chargers where they're needed in a possibly timely manner.
Here, neither the local authorities or eCars can be bothered doing either.
Or is that a gross oversimplification.
Well , you seem to be encouraging the accusations. Which from my experience isn’t true
That about sums it up, in most of Europe councils are involved in the provision of charging infrastructure and tender out the actual running to private operators. Here the councils have largely been happy to stick fingers in ears and scream somebody else's problem.
Yes, see an example here; https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/20988/electrical_vehicle_charging_strategy.pdf
I agree but local authorities don't have a clue about it , whereas ESB (theoretically) have the expertise. So it should be a case of councils saying they want, for example, some 50kW chargers in every town plus kerbside chargers for all council run street parking, and tendering out the contract to a provider like Ecars
Similar to how Ecars currently operates in the UK
It's probably also better that every council doesn't use a different provider, otherwise you'd need a different app or card for every county (like our current situation, but 26 times worse)
I don't believe eCars have any expertise in delivering an adequate public AC charging infrastructure to meet local residential needs. I'd be completely ok with a council tendering out such a project and attracting one of the many EU operators who do it in other cites.
I don't really see the problem with having many operators but maybe that's because I can't afford to live in many council areas at once. Visitor and out of town charging is a different scope, and is something that eCars are equipped for with their 50kW/150kW mini hubs.
Councils (the few here that have any interest in charging points) seem to be having more luck with Easygo than ESB, see what’s happened in Carlow recently.
Maybe they come across the same lack of interest from ESB as Joe public, but imho I think it’s more like when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object and they both double down and cancel each other out.
Whatever way you look at it ESB is falling way short of it’s role in the national strategy, especially given how successful they’ve been in the UK.
The 2 markets are different, in the Uk they are responding to public tenders that have roadmaps, budgets and in many cases grid connections.
True, I did say ESB theoretically have the expertise to design a charging network, I've yet to see any evidence of this
My comment around having multiple providers was more around ensuring some level of interoperability between different councils
If you look at the situation with paid public parking, it's fairly dire. If I'm parking in county Dublin, I need one app. If I park in a train station, I need a different app. If I need to go to Connolly hospital, I need another app again
Evidently nobody in any of the councils said that all paid parking providers need to provide a payment API to allow 3rd party providers. Frankly I doubt anyone in the council understands what an API is
Now imagine the same situation with public charging overlaid on top and a bunch of different charging providers
I know a bit of forward planning and research can alleviate this. But really, should I have to download a bunch of different apps and register new accounts to travel from Swords to Dundalk for an afternoon?
Apparently easygo offered the chargers to Carlow at zero cost to the council except for using some public parking spaces at presumably no rent. For businesses easygo offered a profit share model, where they pay the site say a hotel a cut of the profits while easygo don't pay rent to the site. It's a good offer for council's where they don't have 1/10 the funding similar council's in the UK have. ESB ecars seem to want payment in terms of free money, but they do put some money in themselves.
In terms of interoperability in the UK all new chargers need to have touch to pay by credit card as an option and all 50+kW easygo units seem to have that option, but it is more expensive than paying by app, probably due to single payment card fees.
ESB has touch to pay by credit card on their UK units as it was a requirement, so they could easily retrofit Irish 50+kW units.
On some 22kW private units there is touch to pay, but typically it's one reader for multiple posts, probably due to cost of card machine and that it would need a phone sim card, and presumably monthly bank and usage fees.
In terms of a proper rollout the council's simply don't have the funding beyond trials, easygo seem to be able to self fund and deliver, but only where they get free land to place chargers. ESB also seems to want free land as typically they have kept most of the same sites up to now preferring to replace chargers with a new model than roll out new sites.
I think in general AC charging is not profitable in general which presents a big challenge to rollout and ongoing repairs.
So apparently I was on RTE radio this morning...
Unsurprising how this conversation went.
Ordinary EV driver - the network is miles behind where it should be. ECars are not delivering on their promises.
IEVOA rep - the network isn't that bad, all is well.
EasyGo - we're working hard but the Irish network IS behind whelat it should be.
ECars - the network isn't that bad, all is well.
