Germany will require all petrol stations to provide electric car charging
reuters.com
reuters.com
I mean... I have an EV and I could count on two hands the number of times I've even used a public charging station. I charge at home, commute to work, charge up some there sometimes, and then return home and plug in. I have a "gas butler" [1] at home. Stopping at a gas station is a thing of the past for me, unless I need to pick up windshield wiper fluid.
Most EV drivers have no need to visit charging stations [...]
The fact of the matter is, that half of German households cannot charge their vehicles at home, because they live in a rented apartment.
In cities in particular (you know, the places where EVs make the most sense), many people don't have a garage - often not even a dedicated parking spot.
This is an actual problem that prevents many people from owning an EV in Germany.
The situation I have in mind is for large parts of a middle-big town that's a regional center.
That's still 20 minutes longer than it should take. And probably around 15 minutes longer than it takes to fill up with gas (which will give you twice the range). Speeding that up makes sense.
(To be clear, I don't think it's reasonable to mandate swappable batteries, for instance; there's far too much innovation and potential innovation in battery technology for that. However, I think it's reasonable to experiment with that, and any other solution that will let it take less time to charge.)
If people are willing to pay for this service, someone will be eager to make a buck and supply.
There is more money to be made in not providing the service and slowing down EV adoption, environment be damned. That makes it the perfect situation for the government to jump in and re-align those incentives.
(Including eg just drive your existing cars less. 50% reduction in driving existing cars is as good or better for the environment than eg 50% conversion to electric cars. But I don't expect the government to know what is better for the customer.)
(I'm assuming petrol stations are private enterprises in Germany on this point)
Privately run charging stations on public sidewalks are few and pricey and most of the time sitting empty.
So it's clear that if you want a mass switch to EVs the government will need to subsidize the infrastructure to make EV charging affordable. However, digging up the sidewalks of a whole city with public funds to cable it for EV charging is the last thing taxpayers want to hear even in green Austria since it's seen as a something that will only benefit the top % that can afford EVs and they already have charging stations at their houses.
So we're back to square one.
Do apartments in Germany not have charging stations? And if not, is there a fundamental reason why they can't be remedied somehow in the near-ish future?
The US is fairly unusual in its "for every apartment building there must be a giant parking lot" zoning.
This is what my neighborhood looks like: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.4550916,13.3779422,183m/data...
All of these are 5-6 story apartment buildings with no parking lots. I would be surprised if even 1 unit in a 100 has dedicated parking.
It's not really trivial to pack that full of chargers if you don't want to interfer with pedestrians or cyclists.
What I could think of is that gas stations themselves might become somewhat more multi-use, that's already the case in some places in Germany. So people might to grab something to eat while charging up or do some shopping and so on. Scale them up a bit so that people have something useful to do while their car charges. People in Germany still like traditional stores and physical shopping a lot, I don't think it's just pandering to the owners.
What would be the point of that? If station owners believe that charging stations will keep their businesses alive, then they'll put them in themselves, without needing a law telling them to do so.
https://cdn.nanalyze.com/uploads/2018/12/Largest-Electric-Ve...
Or build it into the lamp posts?
https://drive-green.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/07...
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8733539/ub...
Ideally we want people to not have to drive at all. Which is actually possible in most German cities. Last time I was visiting Mainz I was able to take trains and buses everywhere, including out into the countryside for a hike. This is a far better situation than anywhere in North America.
My Oma & Opa lived in suburban Mainz (Weisenhau) in an apartment building (with a parkade of some kind, don't recall the details as this was about 25 years ago) for decades before moving back downtown to a senior's residence. My aunt and uncle live in Mainz Laubenheim, in a single family home with a car parking pad in front for their vehicle. My other aunt lives in a building, she doesn't own or need to own a car really.
Just pust a few chargers that each charge two cars and reserve the the spots for electrical cars. When electrical cars get numerous add an hourly fee to motivate owners to move their cars when full charged.
This is how it looks at my place in Copenhagen: two charging stations each serving two cars.
https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=55.70679767500985&lng=12....
But I also think charging at petrol stations make sense. When considering buying an electric car, at least if the family only have one car, it is a big issue if it can be used on long trips, even if you only do them a few times a year.
And if you are driving to Italy doing 90+ miles/h on the German highways then you will need to charge you vehicle several times. And you will not have time to get off the highway every time. But a 20 minute toilet and coffee break is acceptable.
And yes, overall for private people it’s totally impossible to think of everything in this regard, even if you are lucky enough to have an owned home.
Where do you live? The regulations vary a lot from state to state and even city to city, as the local Bauamt or Baubehoerde usually has the last say when it comes to approval/denial of installations like this.
In the BW area there's something available like the Netze-BW initiative that does most of the mentioned regulations/paperwork for you [1].
I'm not sure whether or not RWE or EON (the energy suppliers for more Northern states of Germany) have a similar initiative, but it seems that you can get the "Wallboxes" from them as well [2]. In the larger cities like Karlsruhe, I've seen a lot of the charger stations of Innogy [3] that seem to offer installation services for parking lots and private garages as well as for businesses.
> I can assure you though that nobody is paying several hundred bucks per month for a garage or parking lot
Prices kinda exploded around the Baden-Wuerttemberg area over the last years in the "Regionalmetropolen" aka where most industries or businesses are located. Can only speak for those, though I'd imagine that a lot of the mid-larger cities have even more problems with higher densities of people/m^2.
[1] https://www.netze-bw.de/netzanschluss/elektromobilitaet-zuha...
[2] https://www.eon.de/de/eonerleben/elektroauto-zuhause-laden-w...
[3] https://www.innogy-emobility.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte
If you do, it doesn't matter if you're renting or not, you have a similar ability to charge at home. What you probably can't do is install a dedicated fast charger unless you somehow plan to take it with you when you move, or work a deal with the landlord to share the cost.
I think the one thing that does change in Germany is more people live in apartments where you have less options for installing a charger than in the suburbs in your own garage in the US.
- I need one car, not many (I'm lucky to get _one_ space, ain't gonna get several!).
- I can't charge it there, there's no infrastructure. Sure, I can ask city to add infrastructure but... good luck with that, it's going to take a while, there are a lot of problems to solve (besides actually installing power near my space, we need a meter to charge me, and it needs to be a "smart meter" that doesn't allow everybody to use power paid by me; it needs to be at least moderately vandalism-proof. And I need to find a way to leave my car plugged in for extended periods of time, unsupervised, without fearing that someone will steal stuff from it - e.g. the charging cable?)
- If all the above are solved - I still need to use that car for extended trips (vacations, visiting parents in a different city). Those would still mean that I need to charge "on the road". Due to the first point, it'd still be a challenge to go 100% electric even if I had the "charging at home" part covered.
Really, I think if we don't solve the "charging in gas stations" part, electric vehicle use is going to be inherently limited.
Not true.
And if every gas station has a fast charger then you don't need a parking space with a charger.
a) I'm not in the US. b) My extended family is all German. I'm quite familiar with the differences in Germany. Gas stations are still not the right distribution model.
Another thing to consider is the assumption that home charging is always feasible. I would love an EV, but it simply doesn't make sense where I rent.
I think there is a place for gas stations with chargers .... along the interstate .... but not in cities
Street parking needs EV charging and gas stations maybe need fast charging but not normal level 2 charging.
Gas stations are setup to service cars in minutes; to re-charge a similar number of electric cars in the same time would require either new battery technology that can be charged at something like 30C or a huge parking lot. Having more chargers around is a good thing, but gas stations aren't ideal for more than an occasional customer. It might be good in rural areas though that wouldn't otherwise have any chargers, as a sort of emergency backup charging location if some unwary traveler finds themselves without enough charge to get to the nearest city.
- short/mid distance (city/metro area/village cluster/...) - personal charger, often implying personal parking slot
In which case indeed gas stations become complete obsolete.
But if electric cars become more wide spread then there will be many cases of people without personal parking slots using them and fast chargers in super marked parking slots and similar are still rare. Especially people traveling inside of Germany. So gas stations with chargers are still somewhat useful.
I believe enforcing chargers on gas stations will allow easier adoption outside of the "personal parking slot sharing only case", especially they make electric cars more reliable for holiday/weekend/busisness trips inside of Germany.
Otherwise I might go once in awhile to fill up my wife’s car- she feels safer with the gas car ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also I put air in my tire at the gas station... that was neat because they upgrade to work with Apple Pay... I felt old trying to figure out where to insert my quarters
It sounds like policy written by the convenience stores (I assume some sort of convenience store owners special interest group or association exists in Germany). Their business model is they sell gas at approximately break even and make all their $$ on the store. They stand to lose big as things move electric. If they can get out in front of it and be the place where people expect chargers (as opposed to expecting to charge at the grocery store or work) to be then the stand to gain a lot of business. No one store or chain wants to be the first mover though so you get legislation instead.
Perhaps if you own a house in a suburbs and commute the same amount daily to a spot that also coincidentally has an electric charging spot your view is realistic
Society's most important goal is to reduce petrol consumption after all, to survive climate change, and only secondarily to make life nicer for EV owners.
But even more so, we need to reduce car usage regardless. Which is something Germany is ahead of Noth America on already.
I'm not sure why this is a not reality yet. When this happens, I will certainly not be the one refuelling my car at -30C in the winter, I will be seated in my electric car waiting for the swap to complete.
Where I live in the UK 100% of houses around me don't have a driveway(beauty of terraced houses). There's streets upon streets of these. The only way anyone is going to charge an electric car living in those is either at a public charging station elsewhere, or if the council installs some charge points(yeah, with what money lol).
Are you sure about the 95% number?
With such a big range, we don’t need a lot of gas stations anymore (it’s more like the square term in the coverage of an area makes the number of gas stations extremely sensitive to the average range, but long story short, we need less and less of them)
Also, since margins on petrol are so low, many petrol stations make their profit from their shops, not from the fuel itself. Since it takes some time for a car to charge, customers are likely to spend more time and therefore more money in the petrol station’s shop.
Since so few of them are, I assume that it's not beneficial.
If the government wants this, it should pay station owners to do it.
Cause and effect. It would be profitable if there were enough BEVs, and there would be enough BEVs if people weren’t afraid they might not be able to find somewhere to recharge.
At least, that’s the logic.
A failing of modern economic theory, assuming that every entity acts logically and in their best interest.
Is it bad that I don't really care?
I mean we've seen what happens when companies are left to their own accord. Sometimes an external pressure is required.
I hope to see one day that gas stations have become obsolete.
Chargers require capital outlay. Unless you can prove that your revenue is going to offset the capital outlay fairly quickly (<1 year), I'm not going to do it given the margins on most gas stations.
If it were a great deal (measuring by NPV), you'd see companies formed to raised capital and install charging stations at gas stations in some sort of revenue sharing / land leasing arrangement. In fact, there are such companies, and they are slowly marching down the path.
Again, if the government wants to make this happen, there's an easy solution: provide the capital.
So you could argue it's would be in the best interest of the owners to not allowing charging stations, as that would help to slow the uptake of EVs.
And the majority of these 'every day commuters' would currently own conventional cars.
Those who drive electric cars would be charging their cars at home and as such hardly every need to stop in these stores.
By replacing conventional cars with EVs will only see that tight profit margin getting tighter.
And that's with me making few convenience stops. There's lots of people that get a coffee every day, they aren't buying gas each time.
That said, this is designed to increase BEV ownership levels, which might lead to large queues if the stations all only have one charger… but that would lead to natural economic incentives for fast chargers and more of them even without government incentives or extra laws.
And charging points could — in principle at least, I’m no civil engineer — go in any parking place too, so there’s room for more entrepreneurs make up for the need for more places to park and wait to recharge.
It is also a downgrade for long haul trips, depending on how long of breaks you take while driving.
That being said, I might buy an electric truck to replace my work truck once I can afford it.
"Yes sir, it's an EV charger. It takes 3 days to charge your car"
https://www.abwasser-analysezentrum.de/branchenuebersicht/mi...
I fully expect the future to have charging stations pretty much everywhere there's parking, power, and demand. If gas stations are clogged up by EV charging, it won't be long before charging spots are popping up everywhere to capitalize on it.
What Germany has done here is bit comparable to say forcing a burger joint to offer vegan options or a juice joint to serve alcohol for no reason other than pandering to the niche users.
Gas stations might not even be ideal providers of charging stations, other business such as restaurants, malls, salons, etc. where people spend a lot of time are more better suited to provide charging stations and in fact they already do.
This sort of government coercion is another reason why I think electric car ownership or general move to cleaner fuels will be seen with skepticism by many people like me.
Secondly, we can't deliberate for another 15 years for every scepting to come round and for the market to sort itself out. Every year of setback in climate change mitigation will incur massive financial damange in the future.
The chargers in rest stops/stations road side will be where business is.
There is time: in March, 2% of new vehicles sold in Europe were BEV. On the other hand, the total spend on electricity per mile driven is 1/3 that of petrol. That means a complete transition would ultimately yield 1/3 the revenue. In order to remain even, the companies would need to see 3x the gross margin on the electricity than they gain on petrol. Is that possible? BP's gross margin is 7.5% (TTM). Can they get <20% gross margin on electricity?
Maybe. But the real killer is people charge at home, over night. So, no. Electric charge stations will not supplement petrol station revenue. They are toast. They'll need to find entirely new businesses to invest in to survive.
Oil and gas majors are super cortexes of geological, chemical, industrial, logistical, geopolitical and material science expertise.
The gas station/fuel part of the business is on a long-term trend down (toast). Finding places to make up for the 50% lost sales will be tricky.
[0] https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/-/media/global/files/annual... SEE PAGE 108
You lure them in with the electricity then push all your high-margin crap on them like drinks and snacks. It would massively increase foot traffic to quick-service restaurants, cafes and other activities on or near the premises as well.
People will go to stations less, but they will spend more time there. Current EV utilization of paid, away-from-home chargers shouldn't be expected in future when EV owners can't just rent a ICE vehicle for any trip greater than ~400km roundtrip.
The suburb I live in has about 50 gas stations for 200,000 people. I charge my BEV overnight at home and have spent at most $100 charging at paid stations in 3 years. (Charging at home is about 1/2 the cost of a charge station for me.)There is a major freeway through town, but the vast majority of traffic is commuters, who will likely also charge at home.
Some stations will successfully transition, and for sure, there will be solutions I can't imagine at this point. It will be interesting to see how it actually plays out.
All petrol stations that have a store have a selection of hot drinks and food, and various other things you would expect form a corner shop. The prices are lower than coffee shops, and in some cases better quality too (especially for food). I saw one brand recently started selling their food on delivery services as less people were travelling during quarantine.
Most of the automated stations (i.e. you can only pay at a machine, not they fill up the car for you :D) share the premises with a fast-food restaurant.
Most EV chargers price their electricity at quite a bit higher than you would pay at home, so in the short term I guess they can jump on this bandwagon. But as range increases and cities start installing more on-street chargers that model will fail too.
Many traditional petrol stations are toast already. The one in the village where I live closed decades ago. The one in the next village only survives because it's got a fairly successful tire business run by the owner's son as a side gig, and because it's the only place in a 30 km radius where you can buy basic necessities like toilet paper, toothpaste, and basic foodstuffs, as well as other goods like beer and soda.
If that place had to survive on the money from petrol sales alone they wouldn't have been there. If there's a demand for charging stations I'm sure they'll adapt. :)
But of course it's doubtful that people will be using charging stations the same way they use petrol stations. Mostly, it's more optimal to charge while the vehicle is parked (at home or some place with a charge point) since it takes a while for vehicles to fully charge. Also, you would not typically run these things dry and instead charge to top up when convenient (i.e. not in a hurry trying to get somewhere). And if you are really going to charge for 30minutes to an hour, do you want to be stuck at some gas station if you don't have to? I'd probably opt for some more interesting places if I had the choice.
This would totally change the dynamic of EVs.
Go to a station, just hot-swap the batteries and be gone. Charging time becomes irrelevant: the stations can be as small as they're now (parking wire), they just need storage for hot batteries and chargers. Because that's how you use anything _serious_ which is electric right now such as power tools and drones: you don't wait for charging.
The idea of "waiting for charging" is something which is fine at home, or to charge the secondary battery pack.
Batteries in modern e-bikes are almost that already. The battery itself includes a controller which advertises what the batter can do often regulates both charge and discharge. This allows the battery to be changed and upgraded in the future.
The limiting factor is that currently every company that does this (f you bosch) wants to keep this as closed as possible, meaning that we essentially can't escape the vendor lock-in or even fix your own battery pack.
This needs to die. If I know I can get a charged battery at every station and be paying for delivered power I wouldn't care less about having my own. This would also put more incentives in keeping those packs as efficient as possible, which in turns is incredibly good for the environment.
Residential "level 2" chargers can push around 6kW, and often requires professional installation, and if you have an older home, requires the upgrading the service wiring to to the house. That would take roughly 10 hours to charge, giving around 25 miles of range per hour of charge. Great if you can recharge when you get home from work.
Gas stations could have higher-grade power connections- "level 3" chargers typically pump out 50kW, and can charge a 60kW battery from flat to full in a little over hour. Typically you're not charging from flat, so you can "top off" in less time, getting something like 3-4 miles of range per minute of charging.
J/K. I'm 99% sure that commercial charging stations charge in ~30 minutes or less, not 8 hours.
The high Lords of the holy car dislike to be driven by some upstart/newcomer.
Haven't EVs outside of China basically standardised on either CCS2 or CHaDeMo? (it's also pretty easy for a charger to support both).
The cool thing about charging stations is they don't require big underground tanks or really any more space than the parking spots. Put them where there's already parking.
Prices can vary by time of day and demand in our network. Consult our App. (further conditions apply)
edit: Thinking further about it I missed some "anti-sparqz".
Edit: Curious to know why this comment is unpopular?
In preparation for the end of pumping gas as we know it, petrol stations in Australia have replaced the corner shops, delicatessens, etc. We don't have a single 7/11 in South Australia.
> petrol stations in Australia have replaced the corner shops
Are petrol stations somehow responsible for consumer habits? What about sky-high residential realestate prices that make cornershops too expensive to open? Or low density housing that Australian cities are known for?
> We don't have a single 7/11 in South Australia.
There are plenty of convience stores in Adelaide, including ezimart and nightowl. Perhaps 7/11 franchisee fees are too high?
Yes, of course real estate costs and subsequently rent make small business difficult here.
City chargers with a time limit would make sense also. I've seen them in various places here and abroad. One advantage of having them at petrol stations (convenience stores in the future) is that people don't hang around as long.
Last year when I was at a shopping centre in Century City LA, there was a line to use the superchargers that would've been 10+ cars long. They might need to add dozens of chargers to deal with future demand if people are shopping for 90 minutes.
I don't own an electric car, but I would think that if I were charging at home every night (or at more and more carparks), a trip to the petrol station would almost never happen.
I think I’ll live.
Your point still kind of stands: ICE engines aren't without fire risks.