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.
As expected;
LFP batteries do not like cold. If you drove there without a 2 hour motorway or yolo drive beforehand, or without setting preheating, I'd expect a max of 50-70kW. I get 70kW on ionity with no preheating up to a max of about 130-140 if I preheat. Even with an hour of motorway before, 70kW is possible in cold. These are not like li-ion standard, li-ion lfp is a different chemistry
Ive charged there a few times and gotten 135kw out of it.
eCars always blame the car. To be fair, that’s probably the correct answer a lot of the time but it’s no help when it’s definitely not the right answer.
I've used that one before and gotten slow speeds on it. I emailed them and they said it's a high powered charger and it was the cars fault. I don't believe that as I had a low state of charge and had preheated around 15 minutes before arriving there.
I used the supercharger yesterday at Sandyford with around 5 minutes of preheating and got 172kw almost immediately at 30%.
About 8.30 this morning, no other chargers in use. SOC around 40%.
We're other chargers next to it in use? What time of the day was it? Chargers with limited grid supply can be set to a lower maximum and possibly newer ones can vary depending on the power available. Those chargers with 4 cables also load share across sides. Sometimes modules inside the charger can be broken and this can impact speed too. Often there are 4+ separate modules any of which could break.
Was the SoC high? Although I'd expect more even above 80% SoC
Definitely sounds like a site limit, although it could be temporary.
I get the feeling ESBN can quietly throttle the chargers, possibly to the site's grid limit
Tried to charge at the HPC in Kimmage and only getting 26kW. Is there a site limit there? car had preheated but even with a cold battery should have gotten more. Even with a cold battery it should be more. Model 3 RWD LFP 60kWh.
You'll need to check your Audi charging card because they might apply their own overstay fee
In general, you should move your car if it's charged and free it up for someone else
Noob question. Charging at an ecars AC point. The e-tron has reached the 80% set limit. Do I keep getting charged while the car is plugged in or does the billing stop once the charge limit on the car has been reached? I also started the charge with the Audi charging card.
I expect they had hundreds of failed charges where people gave up due to incorrect minimum credit. It looks like you need to manually top up and change settings in app.yourself to charge without issue, at least that was my experience.
Anecdotally i've noticed Ionity busier than ever before (I guess Ionity have deals with dealerships, and the price difference isn't as jarring anymore).
Applegreen also ramping up:
EasyGo ramping up too (don't ask me where those tethered AC units are):
I was just wondering if that was partly because of the letter
Nice to finally get a win for once 😁
Also wrote to them asking about the minimum balance. Ecars reverted it
Following our previous correspondence regarding a change to the minimum account balance required to start a charge, a number of drivers experienced difficulties charging due to the minimum balance increasing from €/£5 to €/£20. In response to customer feedback, this will revert to €/£5.
E cars even listening to the grumps about min balances.
+++
Dear EV Driver,
This change will come into effect immediately. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
To reflect this, the pricing terms are available at https://esb.ie/what-we-do/ecars/price-plans.
Minimum balance is back to €5
"In response to customer feedback"
Customer complaints more like 😂
Just got an email to say the minimum balance is reverting back to €5!!
They have been listening to customer feedback.
I see your point and agree to an extent, but, still I think the vast majority of new cars will rarely need to dc charge whereas folks driving ev even 5 years ago would be more likely than not to have a fast charging session in a couple of weeks say.
What’s up with the 22kW AC usage, those charts are not what I would have expected at all. That massive drop in usage around July last year seems odd, is that when they increased the charges? It’s happening again in the last few months, maybe it’s cyclical?
True, but we're a long way from full EV adoption so even if the rate of usage per car drops off, there'll still be an overall increase in usage
If you look at the up and coming EVs, there's a big push for the cheaper and smaller segment EVs. I don't think they'll be sold with 100kWh batteries, and I still think they'll be used for regular long trips as well
So I don't think we've hit "peak midpoint charging" just yet
I disagreed with you on ubiquity of DC charging in the past. I'm readjusting my position on this a bit.
I still think AC will totally dominate, as evidenced from NO/SV/NL. But I think legacy DC (50 kW) will be redeployed to cities and towns to places you mentioned.
Once 350 kW charging becomes the norm, which will be the case very soon, the 50 kW chargers on motorways and in some other settings will need to be upgraded and reallocated. This is already ongoing with 150 kW chargers even with eCars.
That's kind of the point I made above. If current usage patterns of DC charging are based on X number of EVs requiring Y amount of DC kWh where Y is equivalent to 20% of the total number of kWh spent driving EVs as a whole, I expect the ratio of X to Y to move further lower over time, where more EVs are needed to require the same number of kWh. Compare 2023 to 2013 for instance, every EV back then was under 150km range. Now everything is pretty much in the 300's or close to it.
It would be interesting to see if we're seeing a move charging time, the en-route DC charge usage may drop with longer range cars, I'd expect chargers in Supermarkets to increase in popularity for us driveway deficient people
Most competitors except Tesla charge similar rates. Most new EVs dont need fast charging in their day to day use. Fast charging will become less and less common with newer EVs as range gets longer.
Looks like I got some life back into the old Ecars debate after all 😂
Interesting observation, DC usage at the moment is around the same level as this time last year, despite there being thousands more EVs on the road (it's possible I read the graph wrong though)
Kinda puts the screws on Ecars pricing, they'll obviously make more money from the same usage, but you want to be growing users at around the same pace as EV sales otherwise your network will stagnate
I think the competition is starting to bite
Yes, you're right. I had Galway stuck in my head because I was searching planning applications to try and find the new Ionity site around Athenry 😅
I don't think the IEVA letter was misguided. It's pretty obvious that the only thing keeping prices high at this point is suppliers. Gas market is down substantially, even on the futures contracts
There's always been a quality factor to the price of EV charging. Ionity got away with charging 73c/kWh because they could argue they provided a much better service than others
Ecars can't really make the same argument since they're effectively the worst provider
It bites particularly deep considering that Ecars have historically gotten a lot more funding than any other providers
Their first point seems like pandering to those who don't understand how electricity markets work in the EU, I'm surprised that a person who would be on a EV owners committee wouldn't be aware of the concept of last/kWh pricing and the separation between a state owned operators generation and commercial arms.
Points 2&3 I'd agree with, I'd prefer eCars to have flexible market pricing instead of the long term fix. In transport we're used to fuel prices changing regularly, I'd be in favour of charging prices being similarly flexible (ideally including time of use pricing).
Point 4 is a subtle one, I wouldn't be looking for reduced pricing due to a site limit, but something does need to be reviewed re overstay fee's. Where a charger is operating at full capacity the overstay is down to bad planning by the vehicle owner. If the time to charge is extended due to load sharing or reduced site capacity then I feel its a bit unfair to penalise them. Closest I got to an overstay fee was at a 50kW charger that was reduced to 25kW because of another car using the AC cable. Turned my required 25 minute charge into a 50 minute one.
eCars are a corporate partner of IEVA though aren't they?
Anyway it was sent on May 25th.... so the fact that it's July and nothing has changed says it all really...
