Random EV thoughts.....

I see Smacs has finally received approval for the Ennis plaza. I wonder how many chargers will be installed? I remember the initial planning application specifically mentioned a large number of charging points.

It will be great to have a decent location to charge on that stretch of the motorway.

Sponsored by Toyota, or any of the big companies thus far left behind in the EV race 😀

Can foam not be used to extinguish an EV fire? So install something similar to the fire suppressant system installed in aircraft hangers over EV parking spots?

For fires in the open is there like a massive fire blanket that can be pulled over the top of the vehicle?

Everyone recommends huge amounts of water but no one recommends foam. I assume water cools the battery and stops thermal runaway as well as cutting off the supply of oxygen.

This is a potentially interesting product and very suited to underground car parks if it works: https://insideevs.com/news/429647/giant-fire-blanket-cuts-reignition-ev-blazes/

This

I know that LiFePo cells don't have the same performance as NCM cells in cold weather, but with better battery care is that really an issue anymore?

Personally I'd happily trade having to wait 5 mins to get full power from the battery some days for a 0% fire risk

Ennis would be a great shout for a hub of some sort for the Wild Atlantic Way traffic.

I just really really hope that's not a bank of AC chargers..... (though 16 spaces like that tells me they will be AC)

Dont forget they also have Kiltullagh - 150kW ecars and a separate 50kW.

Kinnegad plaza is Easygo, Tuam plaza has ecars so debatable who they’ll use for Ennis.

Easygo argue that because they dont have the capital to buy multiple 150kW units and the connections needed for them

Okay, robots are cool and all, but am I the only one thinking this is dumb?

They could literally install 4 changers in the space needed by this thing

One thing it does seem good for is accessibility, but there's easier ways to make chargers more accessible surely?

Yes, and you book the charger in 1 hour time slots, so can book the slot closest to your arrival home...

What other cars have auto opening flaps like the Model 3/Y?

Or does this device have a finger for pressing, then opening flaps? edit: No, I see the guy still had to get out of his ID.3 and manually open the flap... showing how utterly pointless this robot is!!

'Flaps'

Yeah, but is that better than just having several dozen low powered chargers?

I get there's a queueing theory part to it where as cars finish charging they'll move on and free up spaces, which you don't have with slower chargers

But, people will do that themselves anyway for free, so why get an expensive robot to do it?

I think the cigar is for you, Sir!

Yes, it’s about throughput, but there’s also the utilisation of the charging equipment to consider. Ignore the gimmicky robot arm - that’s not really important. The idea here is that you move a smaller number of very expensive high-power chargers to where they are needed rather than fixing them in place and having them blocked or unused for long periods of time. For something like park+ride, putting even twenty chargers into a parking yard of five hundred spaces isn't going to provide much benefit - the first cars to arrive in the morning will be fully recharged by mid-morning, and then they will block use of a valuable resource for another five hours until their owners return. If you instead move the chargers between the cars that need to be serviced, you can provide much higher utilisation of the equipment, and a much fairer distribution of the benefits (e.g., you could book your P+R ticket to include however many kWh of recharging you need).

That said, I’d personally implement something like this differently: give each parking stall a "cold" charging port (basically a cable-joiner), and bring the mechanical charger “robot” to the other side of those ports: this has the advantage of standardising the interface that the mechanical system sees, which would make the whole thing far, far cheaper to implement. The cost of the moving “robot” is offset by not having to electrically wire each station back to a supply.

I agree to an extent, but I think it's important to match a charging point to it's intended use. If we take the example of a park and ride, throughput doesn't really matter if most cars are going to be there for 8 hours or longer

You're correct that charging is a resource that must be managed, but let me offer a counter proposal. Instead of viewing the charger as the resource, take the grid connection as the thing to be managed instead

So you can decide how best you "spend" your kilowatts of your connection

Taking your park and ride example, let's say the owners are looking to install chargers. Now they could install 2x 150kW chargers, with some method of queueing multiple cars (could be a robot, could just be a guy to drive the cars around). 150kW chargers seem to cost something like €100k in this country, from what I've heard. So maybe €200k total cost including a 300kW grid connection

Assuming a 20mins charging session per car, you can clear 6 cars per hour or 48 cars in an 8 hour period

Now, maybe instead of using those 300kW for 2 chargers, what if we used it for 40x 7kW AC chargers? AC chargers seem to cost around €1k these days. You'd need a lot more ground works, but I imagine you can also get a bulk discount on chargers, so let's say €40k total, plus the grid connection costs which seem to be around €15k. Let's call it €65k total to cover any extra costs

So for the half the price you can charge almost the same number of cars in the same 8 hour period. It doesn't make much difference to the end user since they're gone for the full day and their car gets charged anyway

If we take the idea of cold plugging (I really like that concept) then you could install more AC chargers than your grid supports and operate on a first come first served basis

Let say we increased to 80x chargers, and limit the session time to 4 hours. You'd deliver a bit less energy than our earlier example, but 28kWh is probably enough to get most people home (probably enough to get a lot of them back to the park and ride too) and it doubles your throughput