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.
Spot on. Might try it again over the weekend just to see if it's the same.
Probably not dissimilar to other manufacturers.
They are all very different. Tesla's tend to push for very high temps on their batteries (40°C+). VW's need 20°C+ for Max rate.
The EV6 is impressive at 15°C but its also probably because the Kia is an 800V system so they can use half the amps and yet still achieve the high kW rates so they are not stressing the battery.
These are the ev6 Charging speed temperatures
40kW @ Min. battery temp <10C (50F)
60kW @ 10-15C (50-59F)
130kW @ 15-20C (59-68F)
190kW @ 20C-25C (68-77F)
240kW @ >25C (77F)
Probably not dissimilar to other manufacturers. You can see to get to the real top speeds you would need preconditioning even on a warm day.
I had 80% charge when I plugged in on the free day last week, plugged in after about 5-10 minutes of precon and got 64kW on a V2 charger so 25kW is unacceptably slow and is clearly a fault with ecars, I've also got a M3 RWD
Let me guess - RWD model Y? LFP cars like that need a lot lot more than a few minutes preheating. I have a model 3 RWD and its the same.
depends on the car, I've found the EV6 max charging power moves in jumps. I don't have an OBD dongle to verify the exact battery temperature (but can make an educated guess based on from Telsa Bjorn videos) that it can take 220kW+ when the battery is 25 Degrees, 170kW when the battery is 20 degrees, 120kW when the battery is 15 degrees. Even in 15 degree ambient weather the preconditioning is needed to get up to the mid 20s in the battery pack (and the peak charging power)
It was a Model Y. The charge rate didn't increase while I was there but I only stayed for 7 or 8 mins coz I decided my time would be better spent in the local watching the football.
It depends which brand. Tesla is heating up to around 50C so defo still needed. Having said that, these temps are required for speeds of 150kW + so 25kW is defo* some fault from the supply side.
PlugShare reports are quite positive, maybe some spurious thing. There was an interesting article on electrive about a reliability index which shows that both chargers/cars manufacturers have some work to do in informing customers of issues during the charging session
Depending on the battery and the car, yes 15c isn't warm enough for a battery to take 150kw, especially if the car was sitting for a while before going to the charger. A 10 min drive won't warm up a car unless it's a really warm day here.
Is pre-heating a battery a requirement above 12 to 15C...? I thought it was only a thing on colder days?
10 mins of preheating is not a huge amount of time. Not sure what car you were in so that could be a factor. Did it stay at 25kw for the duration of your charge or did it ramp up as the battery warmed up?
If it stayed at 25kw, would have to assume the charger had a fault or is supply limited.
Same guess here. I would also guess that ecars is a trading name of that Innovation LTD as opposed to a separate company.
From eCars T&C
I would guess that ESB Innovation RoI Limited have a commercial supply contract with another ESB Group company.
Here are list of people who buy/ sell directly to the market.
You are giving them too much credit. Data centres, Intel etc are large energy users. Not ECars.
ESB are very risk adverse and all there accounts are above board. They would rather pay additional money than do anything considered shady
So haven't really used these chargers too much. Pulled into Ballysimon Road, Limerick on Sunday to charger (C6REJ) which is meant to be a 150kw charger. Battery was at 18% and I had entered in the navigation I was going to Dublin so it was pre-heating for about 10 mins before I arrived. I plugged in and it was pulling 25kw. There were no other cars plugged in while I was there. It was definitely the newer charger, are these just unpredictable or has anyone else that used this charge experienced something similar ?
I'm only guessing from the outside, hypothesizing if you will. I did work in the energy industry but never for ESBn/EI so I wouldnt know for sure. Interested to hear any hypothesis you have?
Ecars isn’t an extremely large energy user and not a supplier.
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.
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
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 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.
"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 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
Usually 1€ is used to verify the credit card. The transaction gets reverted afterwards.
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.
Has it been fixed?
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....
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
They are not the same company. It’s very complex.
