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.
But during those struggles I couldnt have afforded a car, let alone a new car of any sort. I had a 15 year old ford fiesta!
The people who can buy new cars are already switching and increasing the number of people buying EVs. In 3-5 years you'll see Konas, Niros, leaf62, first Teslas etc dropping to sub 15k, and the original leaf and zoe below 5k. The day of the 500 quid car would be gone. There's always intrinsic value in an EV's battery.
Relating to the ecars price increase however, most people who can afford a new car and choose an EV, will have their own driveway. I've rented a house and owned an apartment before buying my current house and was able to charge at home in both the rented house and the apartment. I wouldnt (and didnt) buy an EV before I could charge at home. That was when AC and DC public charging was free!
Like it or not, the next step to a mature market is the removal of grants and making it BAU. Look back 10 years ago to 2012 and everyone got ten grand to buy a leaf or zoe which could only do 100km. Now we are getting evs with ranges of 400-500km plus in the real world. Even with 20-25k, you can buy a car with 400km range.
I firmly believe that public charging should be self funded, otherwise it will be abandoned.
You should be able to buy an electric car and rely solely on public charging infrastructure, I get that you can't but you should. The price increase all goes back to the privatisation of the market but we know when "wholesale" prices return to normal levels the price we pay won't
There was no hesitation in governments all over Europe bringing down the cost of petrol and diesel earlier this year using public money, does that mean their forms of fuel should be abandoned? Nothing similar happened for EV charging prices
The fuel (ice fuel) subsidy is even more ridiculous IMO lets not go there
In an ideal world, youre right, you should be able to rely on public charging. This is what happens in Netherlands for instance. But if you have a cheap state run monopoly, what incentive is there for private market entrants?
Do you not see the flaw in your logic
No ted I don't as I can't bring my home charging rate with me when I'm on the road
Like the argument against privatisation of our domestic electricity network back in the 2000's... If we had a reliable cheap state run provider we wouldn't need private market entrants. Key word - Reliable
Well you can bring it with you on the first (insert your cars real world range here) km of any drive you ever go on where you start from home….
I’ve a 400km round trip down to family in Waterford and the first 250km of that is covered by my home charging rate, so I’m only concerned about the 150km I need to put in out in the wild..
Why wouldn't you want diversity in the types of plans on offer and locations available. At the end of the day selling power via a DC charger is easy. It's the locations and tariffs that are complex and are a fair place to allow market competition to decide the best way forward.
Credit to bonkers for some actual analysis of the public charging price increases
They gave examples of a trip from Dublin to Galway with home charging + a top up at Ecars (€15), an Ecars only example (€38) and a diesel comparison (€40)
I didn't fact check their figures but it looks about right
Much better to show a true example of charging costs rather than just assume everyone uses DC chargers all the time
Careful now, you'll upset the Red guy
Interesting news from RTE
The price of electricity on the wholesale market is now cheaper than at any time over the past 12 months and is 37% cheaper than October 2021.
Makes you wonder what the justification is for our current prices
Idiot
Price of supply is locked in for a period of time.
So electricity you are using today was bought in at a price set some time ago.
You won't see the reduced price until future supply bought at reduced price comes through from supplier.
Its frustrating
Provision of transport fuel, be it diesel, petrol, LPG, CNG, Electricity or dare I say it, H2 for fool cells, should not be done by the state.
Exactly. Wholesale prices rose 12 months before we even saw increases. Supply companies generally hedge future prices. The ones that didnt just went bust
Very frustrating but I guess it does give some guarantee on prices, even if it is only for a matter of weeks at a time
With that being said the Ecars increase happens on the 20th of December, According to that article prices have been coming down since September would prices from August be kicking in in December?
Few holes in that comparison but it does mean that in January that 400km trip on fast chargers alone would cost about €20, coupled with the hassle of finding a charger V finding a filling station
Interestingly €38 would get you about 60kWh on fast chargers, if that's to do 400km, are many cars capable of 15kWh/100km?
Why would you need 60kWh from a fast charger to do 400km? You start from 100%. If I needed to charge on a 400km trip I'd be adding only 100km of range, or about 18kWh.
He was referring to the example Bonkers gave of a 400km trip using fast charging only
Like I said I didn't fact check it and the article didn't mention what car they used as an example
Taking my ID.4, I get around 19kWh/100km average so that's about 84kWh accounting for losses or €57 at ESBs highest rate
Using a diesel, assuming 5l/100km at €2.10 per litre, you're looking at €42
So pick the right combination of cars and charging and diesel is cheaper
Of course, if I didn't have home charging I'd be signing up to the We Charge plus plan which gives me all DC charging for 47c/kWh and Ionity for 35c/kWh, bringing the trip cost down to a more affordable €30 or so
I personally wouldn't, but that's the example above.
Breaking down the first example of that he's done 60km on DC at 15kWh/100km that assumes a consumption of 9kWh, costing €5.82. So for €9.18 he got 340km or 51kWh so he charging his very economical car with a huge battery at 18c/kWh at home
Used to be a case that even if you did only fill on DC chargers you were still greatly saving on the price of liquid fuel. Now because electricity has increased in price by much more than diesel you need a mix
15kwh/100km is just above Ioniq efficiency and is right around what I get in my Sept 22 M3. The X that it replaced would get 250-300wh/km and etrons regularly get over 300wh/km.
You can only compare prices per kWh same as you can only compare ICE fuel prices per liter/gallon.
It's very easy to cherry pick times where ICE and EV are similar or EV more expensive. But it ignores the reality, which is the majority of EV owners charge at home the majority of the time. There will always be edge cases. Same as you don't expect a 3 series BMW to do the same MPG as an X5 BMW, you dont expect the same wh/km from different classes of EV.
I'm ok with the current level of pricing. If I weren't or I needed to charge regularly I'd take out a subscription to Ionity. that makes it about 30-35c per kWh.
Very true ^^^. I am probably doing above average mileage but the number of days in a year that I would need to put much more than 10kWh into car after leaving with a full tank are few and far between. The very odd trip to London or Belfast, so cost per kWh on the road doesn't make much of a difference.
Far more important to have a good home night rate and solar pv for those of us lucky to have either or both.
I still think your logic is flawed. Yes you need to account for a certain amount of DC charging, but you need to be doing a lot for it to make a diesel car cheaper
And by a lot, I mean over 60% of your driving
And anything over 3000km of public charging makes one of those subscription plans worthwhile
At that point you can literally do 100% of your driving on public charging and still be cheaper than diesel. It isn't much I'll admit, maybe a 5% saving, but it's still there
Electricity bills to stay high despite falling prices
https://www.e-pages.dk/irishtimes/2895/article/1702937/1/3/render/?token=e175cf98ffabb6fa1dd2b51532a952f7&vl_platform=ios&vl_app_id=ie.irishtimes.ereader&vl_app_version=5.4.4
Yes, they have fallen, but there's a lag, supply companies hedge electricity forwards. There was almost a year when wholesale prices were rising but end user/supply company pricing for end users didnt rise
Yes, but energy companies are also recording record profits, to the point where governments are having to step in. That's a strong signal of a dysfunctional market
It seems that like many industries the end user prices went up more than the cost of inputs. I get that suppliers need to hedge against further cost increases, but they're also quite happy to pocket the difference when costs are dropping again
I do think the current drop in energy prices is temporary, it's largely down to a lack of available storage for more gas and a milder than expected winter. Both of those can change so prices will stay volitile
And frankly, I'd be fine if energy companies said they were holding onto any additional revenue to insure against further price spikes. But they aren't, instead they're happy to pay out dividends while complaining about high costs and raising prices to the moon
So yeah, this is where someone has to step in and force a change of the situation
No its not. There shouldnt be market interference. This silly idea of 200 euro grants is also ridiculous.
Neither are related to ecars really. But if anything, look at the prices that other companies are providing, applegreen, tesla, ionity, they are all 50-70c/kWh. That is the market rate for ev charging. If it wasnt market rate then no one would use them
I think ecars wants to solve the queueing problem once for all. They saw the data from ecars-stats showing chargers with 15h/day usage and had a brainwaxing gathering where solutions for mitigating the problem were sought. Initially they thought that by under-developing the network with randomly located SPOFs people will get the hint and use some other network. When that didn't work they introduced the poorly designed™ hubs but this didn't work either. People were adamant in using their chargers even if that meant parking on the kerb or waiting a novice to finish counting electrons. Now their single hope is that by introducing the ridiculous high prices for the ridiculous low powered chargers people would stay away from their network.
Renewable energy producers are recording record profits. , energy resellers aren’t.
And that's a fact missed by pretty much everyone.
