Everything I've Learnt About the Public EV Charging Businesss | Hacker News Reader

Everything I've Learnt About the Public EV Charging Businesss

blog.decryption.net.au

32 pointsdecryption24 comments

This space is so frustrating! All the charging companies want to be facebook for some reason.

Hopefully, someone will put them out of business with a decentralized system. They would sell standalone chargers that accept credit cards, and publish their busy/not-busy/broken status to some standard database.

Ideally, the database would be run by the government or nonprofit service. It would provide GPS coordinate based bounding box queries of each charger's status.

I think the whole US database would fit on a raspberry pi that's stuck behind a CDN (with a second raspberry pi elsewhere for disaster recovery).

Obviously, it would be run on something slightly beefier, but I can't imagine the server costs exceeding a few thousand a month.

On the decentralization front, I think we need to normalize "Level 1 Chargers" everywhere as an alternative. A "charger" can just be a standard outlet or three in a handy to access spot. No need for credit cards because the Level 1 electricity rates are probably cheaper than parking costs or other things people will be doing on your site anyway. (It's "basic hospitality" at that point, like how phone chargers have started to proliferate in places like coffee shops.) No need for a central database or status checks, because you can just put outlets everywhere and then expect people to find them/use them as they see fit. The more "Level 1 Chargers" that exist in the wild the less people think Chargers have to be gas-station like "pumps" and maybe the more that understand electricity is just electricity and doesn't need to be centralized in the same ways as gas stations. Yes, Level 1 Charging is slow, but it is still better than no charging, and as an available, massively decentralized option it can help drive down costs of Level 2/3+/Fast Charging.

Is there any reason not to do Level 2. Every building has either 240 split phase or 208 3 phase (at least in the US). If you are going to add a new circut and wiring to support charging, why not use a full power circuit?

Level 2 makes sense outside of the US as the easy decentralized default. In the US the cost differences between installing "a regular plug" and "a dryer plug" are just substantial enough that it moves it over the hump of "easy cheap electric project" to "who's going to pay for this?" The idea of normalizing Level 1 is not to add new circuits in many cases, just add additional boring "regular" outlets to existing circuits (like all the phone chargers we see), in many cases just opening up existing outlets already on the outside of buildings for convenience charging. As soon as people hit that "who's going to pay for this?" it stops being a hospitality project and starts to balloon in people's minds towards "well, we'll need to meter this and charge people's credit cards and…" I think Level 1 as hospitality is worth normalizing and is much easier to decentralize.

What existing circuit? Most parking lots do not have any electricty wired to them, and outlets on the exterior of buildings are relatively uncomen and woukd be a tripping hazard and generally unsightly if regularly wired to a parking lot. Plus, the charger would likely draw most of the amperage the circut can provide, so using an existing circut is asking for blown fuses.

I can see level 1 in private garages, or somewhere that happens to have a conveniently located 120V plug near the parking spot. But only because the plugs are already there.

Most parking lots have existing circuits for street lamps. There's even a bonus there that street lamps installed before LEDs became common are generally "Level 2" circuits already.

Outlets on the exterior of buildings are quite common today since electric lawn tools and power tools became much more common (roughly sometime between the 70s and 90s). There are some electric codes that require a certain number of exterior outlets. Protocols for minimizing tripping hazards are a solvable problem, including yes, relocating outlets to more convenient to parking spaces. That's often still cheaper than installing Level 2 outlets in the US.

> blown fuses

If a building is still using fuses and experiences blown fuses in 2022 it has other modernization challenges. You may just be colloquially using that to also encompass circuit breakers and breaking a circuit in a circuit breaker, but in general circuit breakers have some pretty strong ratings and it's not a critical hazard if a circuit breaker breaks a circuit. It may be annoying to other users of that circuit, sure, but it's a temporary inconvenience that is solvable with "politeness". (Be polite and don't try to draw more than your circuit is capable of. Share as necessary. Etc.) To my understanding most Level 1 EVSEs are quite polite and gently check circuit state before trying to pull full amperage.

Our house has a bunch of exterior 110v outlets, but they are all on the same 20A circuit. Our level 1 charger takes many hours to charge our small EV battery, and draws 16A. There's no way for it to politely ask the circuit breaker how much amperage is left on the circuit.

If I was wiring a parking garage, I'd likely run level 2 charges, since you get twice the charge rate for the same amount of copper.

But a private capital monopoly is how this happened with gas stations in the first place!

Esso stations, still found all over the US, come from the name “Standard Oil” - “SO”.

It took the Sherman Antitrust act and government intervention for the economics of a decentralized system to make sense. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/337/293

If past is preamble, we should expect a monopoly of crappy charging experiences followed by trust busting and regulation that make a decentralized system possible.

In my uninformed opinion I see a Wild West of taking the risk to find the right charging standards and business model, with a terrible user experience. But that is how many industries have gone before too.

The nearest esso to the bay area is in Canada. You sure esso is found all over the US?

A bit of poking around suggests that esso is ExxonMobil and would therefore be sold in California under the Mobile brand.

Chargers which are not taking credit cards and you need to clown around with 29 different applications while 20 years old automatic gas station takes credit cards really grinds my gears. It is like watching negative progress.

>It is like watching negative progress.

Oh no, my friend - what you are seeing is the ongoing march of progress! Who can argue against the latest in tech needing the latest in apps?

Totally agree. I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery?

In NZ they have a government list of every fast charge station.

https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/

Probably wouldn’t be too much more effort to add chargers status to it. Or even an API that others can develop apps against (like what we do in Australia for fuel pricing).

> I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery?

My guess is a harebrained idea at monetizing your charging data.

I co-founded two EV startups in Australia in 2019 and 2020 that failed at their mission of installing more EV chargers in this emerging market (less than 1% of new car sales are EVs compared to 5% in the US and 10%+ in Europe) and didn't install a single charger.

I did however, learn a fair bit about EV charging - the software that runs them, choosing locations, the electrical needs, how to install chargers, etc. - that someone else with a bit more business sense and access to capital might find useful.

Thanks for the interesting info. As you didn’t want to go into the failure there, would you be willing to explain more here?

You mentioned some missed out on the government grants - was that the main cause?

With EV Up it was a rotten co-founder that didn’t follow through on their contract. It poisoned the well, destroyed the trust between us and the remaining co-founders (me and one other person) left. That business still exists and is operating to this day - under new management.

For Park N Plug, missing out on the grant from ARENA was a big kick in the balls as we had investment depending on receiving the grant. When the grant didn’t happen we had no capital. To make things worse, we were relying on the R&D tax incentive to come through on our software platform, but the tax department said it wasn’t eligible despite earlier guidance it was.

That left us out of pocket on developer costs and deflated from the setback. We probably should keep at the software stuff and pivot the business, but my co-founder and I have other businesses we are busy with so the energy hasn’t been there.

This blog post and the reaction to it has been quite positive, so who knows, maybe I’ll try a third time to get something EV charger relate going.

Love the summary of well-worn but nonsensical anti-EV talking points at the start.

Since Australia hasn't set any legal targets for EVs, companies like Volkswagen have no incentive to sell their limited production of EVs in Australia.

Considering the solar and mineral resources they have, this is a tragic waste. Presumably they'll catch up soon though as it becomes unavoidably obvious how dumb they are being.

edit: only thing I missed was discussion about getting cheap electricity prices by acting as demand response and/or virtual power plants, possibly with colocated storage. I'm assuming that's part of the big players business plans but it doesn't get talked about a lot in public. Just hints from Tesla.

The tide is turning quite rapidly in Australia. New government held an “EV Summit” a few weeks ago outlining their hopes and will release a policy discussion paper late September. We will get to 5% of new car sales as EVs faster than any other OECD country has - just a shame we will be last to do so, haha.

I’m not convinced EVs as grid response or virtual powerplants will be as important as people think. No EVs on sale right now can do it except the Nissan LEAF and the hardware required (a rectifier) is not cheap (approx A$10k). I’m also sceptical car owners will get much value out of it. Is it worth the hassle just for a few bucks on your electricity bill every month?

Fleets however represent much more of an opportunity. Buses, heavy vehicles (garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc) and general fleet cars that are idle at night in a depot could be quite lucrative.

A lot of the gee-whizz stuff about EVs and grid focuses on the car powering the grid. But most of the benefit comes from opportunistic charging to help renewable rollout.

You can look up the details of what a home charger needs to do to get UK government funding support. I'd imagine Australia will follow suit.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-electric-vehicle-sma...

Ahhh, yeah grid demand response appliances are kinda common here (solar inverters and air conditioners). There’s been a few trials and whatnot of smart chargers installed in homes by grid operators:

https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/origin-energy-electric-v...

And a grid operator has been experimenting with special tariffs that are “free” during peak solar times:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/networks-test-time-of-use-appeti...

You’re right - it wouldn’t surprise me if there becomes a standard for EV chargers in Australia that makes it so they have to be centrally controlled to protect the grid/take advantage of excess renewables. Good to do it now before too many homes install EV chargers (probably only 30-40,000 in the country right now).

I still wonder why we don't see wide spread standardized battery packs placed in standardized housings, that could be swapped faster at existing gas stations with minimal infrastructure. Ideally, swapping would take relatively the same as filling a tank of gas and would be done by an automatic system. I've seen some videos of NIO doing this, but I'm pretty sure there's no standardized solution for the European market.

I think this model could work if car owners don't own those replaceable battery packs, but they just pay for the energy inside them instead. I guess it would be easier to install 1 automatic ramp in a gas station that services a client in < 5 minutes than to build charging stations that service clients in hours.

LE: not referring to the whole battery capacity, these packs could offer ~100km range depending on the vehicle.

Most people don't need to fast charge most of the time, so it never really made sense compared with gradual improvement in battery size/cost and fast-charging, and greater availability of slow charging at places where cars park anyway.

Gogoro scooters used this model, and it might still have niche uses, but generally not as good as our current solution.

I always appreciate a bit of behind the scenes info you might otherwise see, as I'm sure many on HN would.

Also with pricing, pricing transparency is a real PITA.

Amen to that - I love being able to plan things without having to listen to a sales pitch first, or explain myself to someone.

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