week 12: that old chicken & egg thing
Enviado: 25 ago 2011, 14:06
week 12: that old chicken & egg thing
"Robert looks at the number of charging points and electric vehicles in the UK
By Robert Llewellyn on July 15, 2011 2:07 PM
One area that pretty much everyone can agree upon in the electric vehicle debate is that we need a comprehensive charging infrastructure before these cars can have any real chance of catching on.
Now I’m no old-school commie, but some aspects of Soviet-style top-down imposition were rather positive. If someone was now in a position of supreme power and they said ‘All chargers will be 30 amps with the same connector’ then that’s the end of the argument.
So, do we need more electric cars on the road so that more chargers will be installed, or is it the other way around?
My greenwash antennae are always on heightened alert when it comes to local councils shoving a handful of charge posts on some random street and then standing next to them for publicity shots. Very nice, but are they really useful?
To explain part of the problem, if you charge an electric car at home, (60% of UK households have somewhere off the street to park) you’ll probably use a 13 amp outlet and the car will charge overnight. Easy.
If you use the same source from a street-side charge post, in about an hour you’ll only get 15 or 20 miles worth of juice into the battery.
Not much to get excited about. If, however, the charging point and the car could take a 30 amp charge you’d get 50 plus miles in the same time.
These higher amp levels of charge are coming, they are built into some of the charging posts already installed, but the cars need to be able to accept this rate of charge.
The Nissan LEAF has two charge inputs, one for your regular 13 to 16 amp charger and one for a fast charge, 440 volts at 70 amps. I used one yesterday when I drove the LEAF from my home in Gloucestershire to London.
I stopped off at a Nissan dealership outside Oxford that’s on my normal route into London. I plugged in the big chunky connector and 15 minutes later my batteries were at 100% and ready to take on the M40. It only took 15 minutes because the battery was 2/3rds full when I arrived. The journey took maybe 20 minutes longer than it would have in a petrol car if I didn’t stop to fill the tank.
The cost comparison is so absurd it doesn’t bear mentioning – at present Nissan doesn’t charge LEAF drivers anything for using the facility. There was a cost involved in charging the LEAF in London, but I’ll come to that in a moment.
Now, if these fast chargers were located at every motorway services in the country, I really could drive to Scotland in a day. I’d have to do it in 100-mile jumps but it’s perfectly feasible. Go 100 miles, stop for a wee and a re-charge, 30 minutes, off we go again.
Clearly the more electric cars there are, the more charge points such locations would need. Sure, it only takes 30 minutes to re-charge, but imagine the scene if there’s one charger and 40 cars waiting to use it. You’d be there all day. Imagine how many cars stop at motorway service stations for petrol on any given day, tens of thousands.
It’s hopeless, it won’t work, electric cars = #massivefail as we like to say on Twitter.
Okay, but what if every car park space had a charge point, a 30 amp charge plug (installation costs about £100 per outlet, Zero Carbon World are helping install this type of system) and you plugged in while you had a widdle, wash your hands, buy a Costa Coffee and a slightly stale pain aux chocolate and back to your car. In that time you’ve added 40 or 50 miles to your range.
That is very easily achievable.
If every commercial outlet, hotel, restaurant, café, shopping centre fitted these outlets in every public car park space they had, then as long as you had somewhere to park, you’d have somewhere to charge.
They do exist here and there. When I got to London yesterday I drove to an NCP car park near Paddington that has two ChargeMaster Source London parking spaces. One space had a battered Chrysler Voyager parked at an awkward angle, the other was thankfully empty. I pulled in, plugged in using my ChargeMaster card (£100 a year, no charge for the volts, use it as much as you want) and left the car while I went about my business. I didn’t have to pay for the electricity, but I did have to pay for the parking. Only fair. £15 blinking quid (less than 3 gallons of fossil stuff). 6 hours later I went back, what had been a near empty battery was full again and off I went.
I wasn’t inconvenienced in any way, it was all very normal.
It’s also very important to point out that this is unusual for me. I would say over 90% of the power I use is fed in when I’m at home. The vast majority of the time you won’t need to use a plug anywhere else, so the charging infrastructure needs to be really carefully thought about. We don’t need millions of fast chargers with their own nuclear power station next to the Watford Gap. We charge at night, using off peak electricity, helping level out demand on the grid. When we get in our cars in the morning, the ‘tank’ is always full.
Every now and then, and much less than I would have thought, you need to charge up while you’re away, in which case I want to charge quick, easy and relatively cheaply.
It’s not that big a leap. It could be done."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... thing.html
"Robert looks at the number of charging points and electric vehicles in the UK
By Robert Llewellyn on July 15, 2011 2:07 PM
One area that pretty much everyone can agree upon in the electric vehicle debate is that we need a comprehensive charging infrastructure before these cars can have any real chance of catching on.
Now I’m no old-school commie, but some aspects of Soviet-style top-down imposition were rather positive. If someone was now in a position of supreme power and they said ‘All chargers will be 30 amps with the same connector’ then that’s the end of the argument.
So, do we need more electric cars on the road so that more chargers will be installed, or is it the other way around?
My greenwash antennae are always on heightened alert when it comes to local councils shoving a handful of charge posts on some random street and then standing next to them for publicity shots. Very nice, but are they really useful?
To explain part of the problem, if you charge an electric car at home, (60% of UK households have somewhere off the street to park) you’ll probably use a 13 amp outlet and the car will charge overnight. Easy.
If you use the same source from a street-side charge post, in about an hour you’ll only get 15 or 20 miles worth of juice into the battery.
Not much to get excited about. If, however, the charging point and the car could take a 30 amp charge you’d get 50 plus miles in the same time.
These higher amp levels of charge are coming, they are built into some of the charging posts already installed, but the cars need to be able to accept this rate of charge.
The Nissan LEAF has two charge inputs, one for your regular 13 to 16 amp charger and one for a fast charge, 440 volts at 70 amps. I used one yesterday when I drove the LEAF from my home in Gloucestershire to London.
I stopped off at a Nissan dealership outside Oxford that’s on my normal route into London. I plugged in the big chunky connector and 15 minutes later my batteries were at 100% and ready to take on the M40. It only took 15 minutes because the battery was 2/3rds full when I arrived. The journey took maybe 20 minutes longer than it would have in a petrol car if I didn’t stop to fill the tank.
The cost comparison is so absurd it doesn’t bear mentioning – at present Nissan doesn’t charge LEAF drivers anything for using the facility. There was a cost involved in charging the LEAF in London, but I’ll come to that in a moment.
Now, if these fast chargers were located at every motorway services in the country, I really could drive to Scotland in a day. I’d have to do it in 100-mile jumps but it’s perfectly feasible. Go 100 miles, stop for a wee and a re-charge, 30 minutes, off we go again.
Clearly the more electric cars there are, the more charge points such locations would need. Sure, it only takes 30 minutes to re-charge, but imagine the scene if there’s one charger and 40 cars waiting to use it. You’d be there all day. Imagine how many cars stop at motorway service stations for petrol on any given day, tens of thousands.
It’s hopeless, it won’t work, electric cars = #massivefail as we like to say on Twitter.
Okay, but what if every car park space had a charge point, a 30 amp charge plug (installation costs about £100 per outlet, Zero Carbon World are helping install this type of system) and you plugged in while you had a widdle, wash your hands, buy a Costa Coffee and a slightly stale pain aux chocolate and back to your car. In that time you’ve added 40 or 50 miles to your range.
That is very easily achievable.
If every commercial outlet, hotel, restaurant, café, shopping centre fitted these outlets in every public car park space they had, then as long as you had somewhere to park, you’d have somewhere to charge.
They do exist here and there. When I got to London yesterday I drove to an NCP car park near Paddington that has two ChargeMaster Source London parking spaces. One space had a battered Chrysler Voyager parked at an awkward angle, the other was thankfully empty. I pulled in, plugged in using my ChargeMaster card (£100 a year, no charge for the volts, use it as much as you want) and left the car while I went about my business. I didn’t have to pay for the electricity, but I did have to pay for the parking. Only fair. £15 blinking quid (less than 3 gallons of fossil stuff). 6 hours later I went back, what had been a near empty battery was full again and off I went.
I wasn’t inconvenienced in any way, it was all very normal.
It’s also very important to point out that this is unusual for me. I would say over 90% of the power I use is fed in when I’m at home. The vast majority of the time you won’t need to use a plug anywhere else, so the charging infrastructure needs to be really carefully thought about. We don’t need millions of fast chargers with their own nuclear power station next to the Watford Gap. We charge at night, using off peak electricity, helping level out demand on the grid. When we get in our cars in the morning, the ‘tank’ is always full.
Every now and then, and much less than I would have thought, you need to charge up while you’re away, in which case I want to charge quick, easy and relatively cheaply.
It’s not that big a leap. It could be done."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... thing.html