Official range figures useless - just give us motorway range

Official range figures useless - just give us motorway range

Author
Discussion

Murph7355

37,783 posts

257 months

Monday 22nd April
quotequote all
Nomme de Plum said:
Without knowing the cost of not only the installation of a charge point but the total cost including land acquisition, planning where required building control consultants to carry out said and procurement incoming power, arranging tendering etc etc we can't know can we. What would be a reasonable payback period for the provider?

Whilst my gut feeling is that it maybe OTT I having procured lots of engineering services stuff including incoming power the costs can easily be in the hundreds of thousands if not a millions where on site transformers are required.

It is disappointing that the government weren't a bit more interventionist to ensure an open book approach to the roll out of the charge network.
Until a few months ago, Grid Serve were happily charging 69p. Now it's 79p.

What's happened to electricity prices in that time?

Most chargers I've seen have been on existing land in unused/defunct/scabby parts of existing service stations. Stations that I will wager already have a chunky electricity supply.

And if Ionity can contend with 30p rates for an increasing number of brands....

I'm not suggesting they should be charging 7.5p. But 80p++ rates are almost certainly a piss take.

TheDeuce

21,923 posts

67 months

Monday 22nd April
quotequote all
Speed of charging is pretty much all that matters once you get an EV with 200+ miles real world range. Even on a long journey of mostly motorway miles, you won't average more than 60mph unless you get a very clear run or are pushing legal speeds considerably... So 200 miles range equates to 3.5-4 hours of driving. At that point, whenever you set off, it's either time to stop for something to eat and/or a toilet visit. If you were driving a diesel with a 700 mile range, that would still be true.

So all that really matters is charger speed and availability, because an EV driver doesn't want to stop for longer than they previously had too in their ICE car. And so long as the charger is 150kw+ then, you really don't have to. 15 minutes of charging is another 100+ miles.

How many rapid or ultra rapid chargers are there right now....



The network is at this point so good that I don't think I would opt for an EV with more range even if it were possible with future battery tech to double what we have now, I think I'd prefer the same range but half the weight of batteries tbh.

plfrench

2,406 posts

269 months

Monday 22nd April
quotequote all
Murph7355 said:
Until a few months ago, Grid Serve were happily charging 69p. Now it's 79p.

What's happened to electricity prices in that time?

Most chargers I've seen have been on existing land in unused/defunct/scabby parts of existing service stations. Stations that I will wager already have a chunky electricity supply.

And if Ionity can contend with 30p rates for an increasing number of brands....

I'm not suggesting they should be charging 7.5p. But 80p++ rates are almost certainly a piss take.
Interesting that Tesla have recently cut the cost for non-Tesla owners to become Supercharger members 47p/kWh for a £90 membership cost could be very attractive if you need to charge out and about a lot.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/consumer/tesla-...

Nomme de Plum

4,684 posts

17 months

Monday 22nd April
quotequote all
Murph7355 said:
Nomme de Plum said:
Without knowing the cost of not only the installation of a charge point but the total cost including land acquisition, planning where required building control consultants to carry out said and procurement incoming power, arranging tendering etc etc we can't know can we. What would be a reasonable payback period for the provider?

Whilst my gut feeling is that it maybe OTT I having procured lots of engineering services stuff including incoming power the costs can easily be in the hundreds of thousands if not a millions where on site transformers are required.

It is disappointing that the government weren't a bit more interventionist to ensure an open book approach to the roll out of the charge network.
Until a few months ago, Grid Serve were happily charging 69p. Now it's 79p.

What's happened to electricity prices in that time?

Most chargers I've seen have been on existing land in unused/defunct/scabby parts of existing service stations. Stations that I will wager already have a chunky electricity supply.

And if Ionity can contend with 30p rates for an increasing number of brands....

I'm not suggesting they should be charging 7.5p. But 80p++ rates are almost certainly a piss take.
Sorry but you are guessing. Lower power chargers have a rate round 50p but these tend to be just a couple so will not impact local power availability.

Multiple High power chargers are a completely different ball game.

Existing service station will have an incoming availability equal to the need. Just having spare capacity is expensive so commercial companies normally don't do it. Even the Data Center guys and banks do not reserve excess power. So they will need to purchase that additional capacity from the DNO. An additional cable may or may not be required but additional 11Kv transformers are highly likely this can be provided by the DNO on site for a cost or owner provided. The proposed Gatwick site with 30 chargers could easily be 10MVa.

I see Gridserve have an additional 0.5Bn financing arranged. That won't come cheap.

There are only around 1M Evs on our roads therefore the economics are currently a bit skewed so us early adopters are paying over the odds to cover the investment cost. I suspect it will be another 5 years or so before be see economies of scale start to impact rates.



Nomme de Plum

4,684 posts

17 months

Monday 22nd April
quotequote all
plfrench said:
Murph7355 said:
Until a few months ago, Grid Serve were happily charging 69p. Now it's 79p.

What's happened to electricity prices in that time?

Most chargers I've seen have been on existing land in unused/defunct/scabby parts of existing service stations. Stations that I will wager already have a chunky electricity supply.

And if Ionity can contend with 30p rates for an increasing number of brands....

I'm not suggesting they should be charging 7.5p. But 80p++ rates are almost certainly a piss take.
Interesting that Tesla have recently cut the cost for non-Tesla owners to become Supercharger members 47p/kWh for a £90 membership cost could be very attractive if you need to charge out and about a lot.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/consumer/tesla-...
Tesla built their network as part of the offer for the sale of their cars. All done at investors expense. Now they are leveraging that infrastructure by selling to non Tesla owners. Clever move or maybe Chinese competition is making them innovate.