WHERE TO CHARGE?
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ELECTRIC REVOLUTION
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For this next section of the blog, please try and forget everything you are used to with your gasoline car, gas stations and gas pumps. Try to imagine Electric is the way it has always been. I’m going to explain where to charge, how to charge, what’s happening now and what’s happening next. Let’s start first with where you can charge today. Unlike gasoline cars, where you can only refill at gas stations, with electric, ‘filling up’ can be done at multiple types of locations.
So where will you be charging your electric car? In the most likely order:
At home
At work
On-street / public charging
Destination chargers
Superchargers
HOME
If you have a garage or driveway, you can easily just use a standard 220v-240v (110v in the US) outlet, which will add around 100km to 150km (90 miles) of range overnight while you sleep. This is known as ‘Level One’ charging with simple electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE). This is what I do. If you want to have a faster charge rate, then you will need to spend up to $1,000 to get a 22kW charger installed that will charge most electric cars from 0 to full in about three hours, this is known as Level 2.
When it comes to funding the installation of domestic home chargers, many governments offer subsidies or grants. On top of this many OEMs include the cost of a home charger as part of the deal when you buy a new car. According to the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, 84% of current EV drivers charge at home.
What happens when you don’t have a garage, a driveway or parking space outside your home? It’s not easy to exactly quantify how many people will not be able to charge at home, the data is not precise. One way to figure this out is to look at how many people live in single-family ground level dwellings. Starting with the United States, on average 70% of the population lives in a single-family home. This would imply that at least 30% of the population cannot charge at home. If you assume the distribution of car ownership is even amongst homes in the United States and all gasoline cars were replaced with electric, this will mean that over 80 million cars could not charge at home. This will vary from state to state, for example in New York almost 25% of the population live in apartments, while in West Virginia just 5% live in apartments.
In Europe the picture is even worse from the charge-at-home perspective, where just 57% of the population live in houses and 42% live in apartments. This means almost 120 million cars in Europe will not be able to charge at home (assuming of course there is no basement charging or equivalent on street). So where will they charge?
WORK
I had to attend a meeting at a brand-new, 20 story headquarter building for a major European bank. When I drove into the underground carpark, I couldn’t believe what I saw; at least 50 car park spaces with brand-new electric car charging points. Most of them seemed to be turned off, and to be fair most of the spaces were occupied by gasoline cars. When I asked about the chargers they said were planning for the inevitable electric future.
This is the kind of planning which should be mandatory for any new large buildings, not just office blocks, but shopping centers, sports stadiums, city center carparks etc. This is sadly not the case today.
For example, in a brand-new shopping complex in the center of Luxembourg there are around 700 car park spaces, but I counted just six charging spots (most of which are usually occupied by plug-in hybrids!) All governments should make it mandatory in all new building codes that car park spaces have the majority of spaces fitted with charging. Following this all-existing building complexes, especially apartment blocks with carparks, should have charging retrofitted.
This doesn’t need to be level two chargers, which could add significant costs, even standard domestic wall sockets would be enough (because most people are going to spend 5 to 10 hours at work).
Who should pay for all this electricity? That’s another question. It could be part of an employee’s package, it could be part of the car park fee in the car park, or could be even supplemented by governments, instead of subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
So, if you don’t have access to home charging, and for now at least you don’t have access at work where else can you charge? This is where it starts to get messy.
ON STREET
Many major cities have installed on street public charging. Some of these are supplied by the city, and some by private operators. The same problem exists as described earlier, ease-of-use, whereby multiple charge-cards and a lack of visibility of the charger status is the current state of play. Also, many of these on street charging points are often occupied, by gas cars or ‘hogged’ all day by a single EV user who left their car plugged in for hours. Some operators enforce penalties and surcharges if the car has been parked charging for too long.
Some cities give free parking at EV charging spots, while others charge for parking rates per day, making it prohibitively costly to leave your car there for 8 plus hours. In any event free carpark spaces are not sustainable in cities as the number of EVs begins to grow.
So, what’s the solution? There have been many innovative trials of simple technology for charging. One obvious example is to utilize lampposts. In London, lamppost charging was introduced as a trial several years ago. While this is Level 1, charging, it does provide a solution, although cables can look unsightly and dangerous lying about on the payment. Pop-up charging points, and curbside chargers called ‘armadillos’ have also been introduced. Lamppost charging in car parks and on city streets is a relatively simple, cost-effective way of providing charging to the masses.
So, if not at home, a lamppost, on street or at work, where else can you charge?
DESTINATION CHARGERS
These level two chargers are often found at hotels, restaurant, tourist and leisure locations. The problem is they can be difficult to find as they often don’t appear on charge maps because they are usually private.
Sometimes when I’m booking a multi-day trip, I will pick a hotel that has charging facilities on site. This takes me a little bit of work and research. I often book a hotel on one of the well-known travel sites like booking.com. Here I can filter by almost every possible choice of hotel facility like breakfast, bedroom type, self-catering, shopping street access, even if the room has a washing machine but you can’t filter if the hotel has chargers. I wrote to them and asked but never got a reply.
Destination chargers are very handy, they just need to be easier to find. There is a lot more work to be done in making sure everybody can switch to an EV and can access charging at or close to where they live. It will take years before this is in place, but good progress is being made. Like all new technologies, multiple standards will eventually standardize. It is likely in the future that on-street, parking and destination chargers will be so widespread than you never give range even a second thought.
The final piece of the charging puzzle is perhaps the most important of all, as it eliminates the much-feared range anxiety: Fast charging or Supercharging, and that will be the topic of my next blog.
