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.
I find that layout infuriating, mixing the AC socket and DC connections on the 50kW is a terrible idea. Especially when they then share the 50kW and 150kW+ charging spots. I assume it's due to them squeezing the chargers into the space of 4 parking spaces.
I wonder if there's also a significant price increase when the grid connection goes above 200kW
Looking at the ESBN connection fees there's only €3k in the difference (presuming everything else stays the same) but I know things like PSO levy increase dramatically
I wish they'd use the Tuam layout for smaller sites, 2x 200kW units with 4 spaces. Basically it's Obama plaza cut in half, much smarter layout
EDIT: Nevermind, the PSO levy is €0 for commercial customers as well from October
I guess it's just Ecars being stingy with the number of spaces they're renting
Let's hope for a significant cut in their charging rates soon as energy prices start to come down. With petrol and diesel prices heading back up, we can get back to a point where EV driving is significantly less costly for long journeys, even when dependent on public chargers. Every incentive to move to electric is really important.
To be fair I was talking about the site as a whole. 4 plugs can be used simultaneously. However the Tesla shown in the pic, or say my Ioniq 5 can only use 2 of those chargers. If both of the compatible bays are in use, or ICE'd, then I simply have to wait. Typically there's a wall / tyre stop / kerb or even bollard in the way meaning I cant just drive further forward to get the plug to reach.
The problem is that you can adjust the location of the charger to better facilitate those with side-rear charge socket location, but you then have problems with front charging cars (Leaf / Zoe /Niro / Kona). You could make the cables longer, but they weigh more and need inertial reel support. I've seen that recently with Applegreen and the reel pulled the CCS plug so much it stopped charging whilst we were eating lunch. Seen the exact same thing happen a few weeks later at the IEVA meet at Castlebellingham.
I wouldn't want to navigate to a site knowing it was a total gamble if the spaces that were free were the right ones. Makes Ionity even more irresistible with 1 charger per space.
You'll be waiting, private companies profits are at stake if they drop what you and I pay... I hope I'm wrong mind
Energia announced a 20% price cut today. Electric Ireland won’t be too far behind. So hopefully we’ll see a reduction, although I doubt it’ll be 20%
Electric Ireland and ecars change prices at different times despite being the same company
How are you still getting the structure of ESB group companies wrong? eCars is not part of Electric Ireland, it's from a different ESB Group Company and will have it's own contract with a supplier such as Electric Ireland.
They're all part of the umbrella corporation of "Them"
It makes finding someone to blame easy, just blame "Them" 😂
Honestly charging in ireland is nothing compared to chargers in the UK and US, its so annoying
What am I getting wrong?
Do ESB group not own ESB networks, ESB ecars and ESB Electric Ireland?
That doesn't mean they're the same company. Do you see TodayFM as the same company as RedFM?
IAG owns Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia and Vueling. Do you pay the same fare with them or get the same service offering?
Same ownership - Different companies.
This is one of the weirder parts of having multiple companies owned by a single umbrella company
You'd think they'd just be able to give stuff to each other for free, or offer extremely large discounts, but they don't
If Electric Ireland agrees a contract to sell electricity to Ecars, then something of value is leaving EI and has to be accounted for. Similarly Ecars has to record an expense for that electricity in their accounting books
So Ecars is paying EI actual real money for electricity, it isn't just made up monopoly money*
*I'm assuming that Ecars are actually buying electricity from EI, they aren't bound to doing that and can seek better deals elsewhere
Okay, so why doesn't EI sell electricity at an extreme discount to Ecars, say 0.01c/kWh?
Well why would they? They're a profit driven enterprise, their executives bonuses are typically linked to how the business performs so I doubt they'll sell electricity to Ecars at a loss just because they're buddies
I also suspect they'd fall foul of the CRU and some fairly serious competition laws if they did that
Now, sometimes a big company will tolerate some subbrands not making money (e.g. any major streaming service except Netflix). This happened last year when EI elected to return all its profits to customers, ESB Group made money elsewhere
However, this isn't the norm, so don't expect Ecars prices to automatically follow EI prices
All understood but that's not my point.
Ultimately this is irrelevant to the taxpayer in this case as it's a national public project (not a private network operator project). And the result is a waste of money due to lack of futureproofing of the network being rolled out. It must be a primary factor in projects like these. Most current car models take 150 kW easily, this will only keep increasing in next few years. Installing 150 kW (75x2 really) is just a maintenance patch-up operation and not building a strategic first class network. My opinion.
So what you're saying is they won't give sweet deals because profit would be affected? That's my point!
I posit that it would be a bigger waste of money to roll out a lower number of chargers that only decrease the charging time for an extremely limited number of users. I don't think eCars have been given the remit to build a world class network, they need to build a functional network that has good geographic spread and enables EV adoption.
Did you read the article from osprey, there aren't many cars on that market that take over 150kW, and of those that do the average charge power is often well below that mark and the difference in charging time by limiting the max speed to 150kW is a single digit number of minutes. The current 200kW unit of choice deployed by eCars appears to match the market requirements quite well and is a good basis for a functional rather than gold plated network.
They are not the same company. It’s very complex.
I also said it would probably violate anti competition laws in a heavily regulated market
ESB group could probably just charge customers 1c/kWh and take the loss for a while. Meanwhile all their competitors would go out of business leaving ESB group with a monopoly
And we know from the last time they had a monopoly that nothing ever went wrong and we didn't have artificially low prices and an utter shambles of a power grid due to lack of investment
I'm not saying the current market solution is the best one, but I've yet to see anyone propose any better ideas
The company that operate the toll plaza and the company that operate the services have zero to do with each other, why would one be directly subsidising the other? Completely daft suggestion.
And the revenue from the tolls goes to repay the hundreds of millions in loans still outstanding from building the motorway....
Has it been fixed?
Help please, I'm signing up with ecar connect as PAYG account, but when I get to the pay page (20€ and below 5€ top up) my revolut app says pay 1€ ,I should be paying 20€ to get a ecar card. Am I doing something wrong.
Usually 1€ is used to verify the credit card. The transaction gets reverted afterwards.
I think the point is that if the top companies incentivise the service station to get more chargers in that more people would then use the road and more toll income would come in
In theory it's a good idea but the toll operator has an agreement with the govt that if they don't get a minimum traffic flow they get paid for the missed revenue so they have no real incentive to raise traffic flow
"Probably" mentioned twice there so let's assume it wouldn't be anti-cometitive?
The last time we had a monopoly we had some of the the cheapest rates in the EU and as you say the grid was far from being a shambles
All privatisation has done is create a handful of of private for-profit companies ripping us off where there was previously one state owned one
I suspect ecars is a supplier rather than customer, so they would buy from ESBn as a supplier and not from EI as a customer but could be wrong on that one. If they were buying from EI, EU/state aid/anti competition laws would force market opening and tenders. I know from my time in large energy company supply years ago, extremely large companies were free to either contract with a supply company or buy from the network operator directly.
I though the CRU decided they weren't a supplier a few years back and that eCars (and other EV CPO's) would not be subject to regulation as an energy supply company.
I guess that goes into the second part of ELM's discussion about how a large customer can interact directly with the market, Ecars is probably big enough to fall into that category
I do think there's some creative accounting going on there. For example I've noticed that the planning applications for charging hubs are from "ESB Innovations Inc" and not Ecars
My guess is Ecars is a subsidiary of that company which is a research arm of ESB group (probably so they can claim the R&D tax credits)
So it's possible Ecars power purchases are similarly being bundled in with other stuff
I wonder how that may affect the prices they're getting
Strictly speaking what they decided was that the network was not supplying end users and that ecars were the customers themselves. I think that feeds into what I said earlier. A lot of large companies would employ energy consultants and price up going with a supply company vs doing it internally. You have lots more flexibility (eg hedging) as a sole user vs as part of a supply company. I would suspect that is how ecars is set up, a standalone end user and billed by networks.
I know easygo operate differently, they dont have a separate MPRN for the charger and just piggyback on the existing setup and pay the site owner for the consumed electricity. Not sure what Tesla or Ionity do, but as they have large connections and probably high demand charges etc I wouldnt be surprised to see if they had a similar setup to ecars. I am sure of one thing, ecars do not receive a monthly bill from EI anyway.
Ecars isn’t an extremely large energy user and not a supplier.
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