Random EV thoughts.....

Yes but it's useless because of the shocking inefficiency.

That Hummer really is a shocking waste of the Earth’s resources. They’re selling on the grey market for twice the actual price too.

Random thought that popped into my head last night...

Firstly, let me preface this by saying that I know almost nothing about how my EV charger works (or electricity for that matter) so the following idea could be absolutely insane...

Would it be possible to have a high speed charger at home by having a battery installed at home that could charge the battery in your EV.

i.e. I'm thinking that it would work like this

1. charge the home battery overnight at the usual night time charging rate and charging speed
2. once the home battery is charged, plug the car into it and it could deliver a charging speed higher than the normal 7kWh of your home charger.

So, am I a simpleton or a genius? (I suspect the former)

Dammit, I thought I was going to be the next Elon Musk there for a minute!

No surprise you can't buy it. While in theory sounds good it has no commercial value added to compel purchase. 7.2 kW *9 hours night tariff gives you some 64kWh or about 400km of driving range every day.

Standing charges on a 3 Phase are over 100 euro a month before you use any power, 3 phase to the home install at least 10k. Not a practical solution for the average home user.

Lots of people charge their battery system on night rate (myself included) to deal with the morning household load. Problem is cars can draw such massive ammounts of power that it will empty 10kw of batteries in a hour or less. The simple solution is just set the car to charge at night, you are using the cars battery to to the storage, introducing another battery in the middle seems unnecessary.

In USA normal homes can charge EVs at higher rates than 7kW. Even now most home chargers are 32 amp and most houses have a 60 amp supply so most homes without supply modification could supply 14kW to a car, if the charger, cable and car could handle 14kW single phase. (None can that I am aware)

In the USA many cars can charge faster than in Ireland. In mainland Europe houses being able to charge at 22kW AC is common.

In terms of fast charging using a battery combination the equipment exists but you are looking at 20,000 euro + maybe double this. Taxi companies ( in UK) have installed private 50kW chargers and some companies here too like an post for heavy lorries EV. There are some dedicated taxi only EV chargers here as it's determined that taxis need specific infrastructure such as at Dublin airport taxi only waiting queue.

What is better value for money is no house battery, and using the battery in the car to supply power to house at peak price times. This already exists in ID4 but the house side equipment and software does not exist. It's likely this will be rolled out in Germany first, car to house and later car to grid to create a massive nationwide network of batteries in cars that can help the grid at peak times. As the batteries already exist there is less cost involved and the cars would tend to be plugged in at home during peak 4-7pm hours. Off peak the car can recharge back up. It's not essential tech and lots of possible delays and regulations problems.

EV Rapunzel!

Article published in Aus about the challenges facing EV owners in existing apartments and getting local charging facilities.

Probably even more challenges here where folk have no on-site parking access in townhouses & estates.

I don't think there's any rule on how they have to do it, they're still giving you the grant amount

It is pretty cheeky since it increases the purchase price, and therefore the loan amount

I guess it might be worth ringing around a few other Kia dealerships. As far as I can tell they've a pretty free hand in how they do things, so the situation might be different elsewhere

Yes the trend is for newer estates to only have parking away from house in shared areas. Even brand new estates being built today with no plans for on street charging with zero driveways. This is more common in cities and council estates. Really every new house with a driveway should come with an Ev charger and 100% of new on street parking. In the plan for national rollout they said they don't want on street charging to happen in housing estates which is crazy.

But how do we go from that to having chargers in place? There is often no designated spaces and so all spaces would need a charger for this to work. As a result if it did happen it would probably be an expensive to use solution using shared power and shared maintenance so costs per kWh would be higher than possibly diesel. Like apartments, great in theory but in practice hardly any places will get a reasonable number of chargers any time soon. Many of these shared parking spaces for houses may now be handed over to the council for public lighting and road resurfacing etc, so it's now a job of council to roll out charging solution, and in reality council has no money, no desire, a policy against this, and in reality nothing will happen. If it does happen it will be expensive to use and not drive change to EV. I am all for ducting but we also need to start rolling out real world street charging.