By 2028 there must be fast chargers every 60 km on the EU’s key motorways
fleeteurope.com
fleeteurope.com
I find that directive/rule/law very very very nice. I wish more were like that. I don't see why I'd need to have a phone with me and even less why I'd need to install any app on it.
> (at present, some charging networks require subscriptions or app downloads).
Makes me happy to know they'll either comply or GTFO.
I’m annoyed by todays cashless society too but there aren’t good answers to these problems.
This was also an issue with mobile phone payments, it was solved then, it can be solved today.
However if we ignore the problem with money laundering, prepaid cards can still be a nice option for many people. If you are about to leave for a road trip you just make sure your card has enough money on it to cover the trip, then you don’t have to worry about your phone dying or your bank card failing etc. which can get you stranded.
Those problems have been solved for generations. The solutions aren’t free and require some work, but it’s a little crazy to say there “there aren’t good answers to these problems.” If they mandated that cash should be accepted, the companies would figure it out and it really would be fine.
Converting >$10k from card to cash on the other hand often requires an ID
Canada requires retaining a record of the ID used to buy the prepaid credit cards, too.
https://fintrac-canafe.canada.ca/guidance-directives/client-...
Well, then we're SOL and won't be able to charge our cars (fully) anonymously.
EV charge stations have a slower throughput than petrol stations, and that means you require more stalls to cover the same number of cars.
One of Tesla's "killer" feature is not just the number of charge stations, but also the number of stalls per station; there are usually 8 per station, though exceptions are abound. But it increase the likely hood that you will have access to a stall when you reach the station.
These legislations are not intended to design the infrastructure but to enforce minimal availability at places where there's no enough commercial reasons to build one. The idea is that regions not lucrative enough shouldn't be left behind because when left behind in infrastructure people start migrating to other places and make the problems even more severe.
So, the companies and and probably the countries will have to foot the bill for bringing the infrastructure to such places and the expenses for number of stalls is probably a rounding error in contrast to the expense of building the first one. We will end up having 1 stall where it's rarely needed and as many stalls needed at places where the demand is hight.
They're fitting a curve between expense of (installation and maintenance) vs (profit from charges sold).
It's reasonable that a company would want to minimize their expense by installing fewer chargers, while maximizing profit by ensuring that all their equipment is utilized as much of the time as possible.
The charger company doesn't want to have chargers that are only utilized during peak moments but still need to be serviced and paid for.
This comes at the expense of consumers who will suffer longer queues.
Interesting, as there's clearly a high up-front cost from some of: contract negotiation/land purchase or rent/electricity infrastructure/charger parts/charger installation, and an ongoing cost of maintenance and electricity.
I wonder how big the fixed upfront costs are (especially land-related, and electricity infra) versus the physical charger itself? I have a sneaking suspicion that the chargers themselves may be a surprisingly small part of the overall cost.
This[0] suggests that Tesla may also have optimised the cost of their superchargers (assuming they weren't pricing them down for the bid discussed.)
[0] https://electrek.co/2022/04/15/tesla-cost-deploy-supercharge...
Next part is probably power. Transmission new substation are likely needed to supply for demand. And it is unlikely to be available. Lines might or might not be present.
None of these would be happy, EU won't let companies optimize for absolute profit in the expense of society and EU won't act as a central planner which will turn the companies into a non-profits which build to comfort the electorate.
I guess the situation on peak hours will improve as the battery tech improves. The tech problems won't be solved through regulations, EU would intervene only if the issues are caused by suboptimal market conditions like monopoly trying to milk the customers or the for-profit institutions fail to provide the services and cause issues(like not installing charger at low demand locations).
That's not quite as fast as partially filling your gas tank, but it's within a factor of a few. Of course then next 100km can take 2-3x longer as the rate slows down from peak. (p.s. there are a lot of stations in the US with 20+ SuperChargers and people tend to fill up to 80-90% when traveling. They must be pulling MW!)
A 15minute charging stop can FEEL shorter than a 5minute gas stop if you have to stand there and hold the gas pump handle the entire time vs walking away from your car and going to buy a snack or (in the case of Tesla, this was a excellent idea and not just a silly easter egg) sitting in your car for 15minutes playing a video game. My wife and I will happily spend 30minutes playing with the music synthesizer in my Tesla and forget that we finished charging after 20minutes.
I see people fill their tanks unattended all the time. Probably not a good idea, but it happens.
Maybe it's country specific.
> Maybe it's country specific.
Sounds like it.
In every state in the US that I've been in in the last 20 years (which is about 1/3 of them), I've never encountered a pump without the latch. I think most people use the latch when filling up, even though they're present - it's just much more convenient to have the filling process automatically stop when the tank is full.
So is driving over the speed limit and rolling through stop signs. And yet, here we are.
400 kW chargers are already being deployed in Europe. Examples:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2M5W6saAk
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ZWN_-a2j4
- https://fastnedcharging.com/hq/fastned-and-evbox-join-forces...
- https://fastnedcharging.com/hq/fastned-expands-into-denmark-...
Ionity's been installing 350 kW chargers for a long time and will start installing 400 kW chargers soon (like the Alpitronic HYC400).
Some 720 kW capable chargers are beginning to be installed such as the Willbert Amber II:
- https://www.willbert.tech/product/amber-ii-v2
- https://www.willbert.tech/blog/introducing-willbert-s-hub-te...
The individual Amber II chargers are 360 kW but they can be paired to share power dynamically via a DC bus. In that configuration it can deliver a maximum of 720 kW to a single plug.
Big charging locations are already being built. For example, this one is 13 Alpitronic 300 kW chargers, 26 charge ports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMyz62dXPmc
This one has 10 Aliptronic 300 kW chargers, 20 charge ports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpbtgfqrYdA
And often different charging networks deploy chargers near each other, so if one is full or expensive or performing poorly you can switch to another one.
Here's Fastned and Tesla living together and an EnBW station with 52 charge ports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrDUuusBcTg
Here's Gridserve and Tesla living together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY
The thing that they say about EVs is "imagine if your car started with a full tank of gas every morning. How often would you use a filling station then?"
You can't simply compare "time to fill at the filling station, times number of stalls, is this number the same or else it's an issue". That math doesn't work. As the majority of trips are short, and the majority of charging is at home overnight, and even when on the road there are other charging options (for e.g. I usually see cars charging near my local shops on one of these https://www.sourcelondon.net/home) then the numbers are not directly comparable.
Are there actually stats that show this?
What I hear anecdotally from friends (in Berlin and other bigger German cities) is that in the city it is often very hard to find charging spots. The problem is that in urban areas charging at home is almost never an option, as people live in apartments and not houses. There the parking is either done curbside (with curbside charging stations near your apartment being rare), or on the rented parking spot on the apartment building property (which landlords aren't exactly rushing to modernize).
Which is interesting because only 55% of dwellings in Canada are single-family homes or semi detached condos (where you'd be able to have a home charger).
Just goes to show that as EV adoption goes up, the percentage of people able to charge at home will go down.
In general yes, I see 80% of charging at home, but you can google this as well as I can.
Specifically for Berlin / inner city I don't know.
A point of denser city living is to lessen the need for private car ownership. I'm also in an apartment in London. We don't have a charger, but then we don't have a car either, we don't need one here.
I once had a long car commute for a while, with time spent on the M25 (a ring road around London, a major motorway / traffic jam) and that was still around 110 miles daily round trip. I could have done it daily on an overnight charge.
So maybe EVs doing a quick partial change out of "desire to avoid filling completely" which swings the numbers the other way. IDK how big these relative effects are, but this is another way in which the maths is different, the numbers are not directly comparable.
Article headline: "By 2028 there must be fast chargers every 60 km on the EU’s key motorways"
So yeah, the topic is Europe (EU and UK)
Of course 400-600 mile drives exist, just that they don't form a large proportion of car trips.
Article is about the EU only, not the UK. Even their map deliberately leaves the UK blank.
Parent comment phrase "in Europe" typically includes UK as well, not just EU members. I'm already more than comfortably aware that the EU does not include the UK.
But, UK habits are at present more like those on the continent of Europe than to USA. That's why I felt the anecdote relevant.
What was your point again?
In context though, it was about "how many charging bays do we really need, if some or many cars don't need to charge en route, or need it much less often?" so the semantic argument around "what does 'usual' even mean?" is a ridiculous distraction. These long trips of course exist but are not the largest percentage of cars on the road.
For a lot of people, it's true that they won't need charging stations. But for urban areas those stations will be more necessary than in suburban or many rural areas.
... designed by people living in suburban sprawls, for people living in suburban sprawls.
Hoping for them to offer EV charging in light of the current parking situation is almost laughable.
Of course it will start with the expensive hotels and move down the price range. People who look for cheap budget hotels drive cheap used cars and so they have not yet reached the early adopter stage of EVs (the early adopters might have a 2011 leaf, but that isn't a road trip car) while people who stay at expensive hotels have already looked at a new EV (they probably haven't bought one yet, but they have seriously considered it)
booking.com lies — their "has EV chargnig" search filter actually means "there may be an EV charger somewhere in the same city".
Gas stations make small margin on gas, but high margin on convenience stores;
Electric Cars upset this, because 80% of trips can be slow charged at home; But the one difference is those 20% of trips requiring charging will have longer stops (potentially optimizing for higher, restaurant margins).
*Yes, there are situations where home charging in cities is less likely possible.
Honest question as at that point you just need a parking spot with a charging station, no human required on site.
So, there needs to be a power grid (electricity generation + distribution) to be able to slow charge at home for the masses and fast chargers ever 60km. That is quite a delta to what we have for our power grids today.
Surely, we don't have to be cooking all night long on every connection; but surely even historically the grid can handle 16 light bulbs somewhere in the house.
Didn't you hear? We will have chargers in every street light pole, even in European old-town city centres!
Also: "old-town city centres" are often car-free.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-parkland-ga...
This obviously can't be allowed to happen .. but I don't think there's any sign of that, as grid electricity remains cheaper than onsite generation. On a trip last month it was very noticeable that several rest stops had under-construction chargers in addition to the one or two that had previously been put in.
If you allow gas powered generators to complement EV stations, you will have more EV charging stations in remote areas or otherwise areas that wouldn't see EV chargers. Every extra EV charger will drive up the adoption.
But you don't have to do this! You can just put them on the grid. There are very few places that are truly off grid in Europe, mostly on islands, and absolutely zero on motorways.
If you can install a 2.5MW diesel generator to cover those areas, encouraging adoption, that is a good thing. I am not talking about 4 lane motorways, where access to megawatt power lines might not be that challenging, but more remote areas.
Many charging locations are getting dedicated batteries to smooth off the peaks and valleys of fast charging, turning it into a much more constant draw. When a peak is needed the battery fills in. When the site is more idle, instead of a valley, power is diverted to the battery to ready it for the next peak.
Another strategy companies like kempower are using is 25 or 50 kW modules that can be dynamically allocated across the whole site. At the peak of the curve a car gets many modules. As the power a car can take decreases deeper into the curve the extra modules can be assigned to a different plug. If everyone pulls in at low state of charge at the same time the site hits the limits and cars have the throttle. A more typical usage pattern of cars pulling in and out at different times means cars can maximize their charge curve while capping the total draw of the site.
Filling up a gas tank and leaving takes about 5 minutes so even if you arrive there and you have to wait in a line it's not a big deal. If recharging an EV up to a reasonable level takes 15 minutes, either they 3x the number of stands or make customers unhappy and leave for the next station, if they can get there. If they can't, they are hostage of the physics of batteries and EVs and they'll have to wait.
So I think that each charging station will have more stands to recharge EVs than gas pumps now.
That's a good use case for battery backed or battery integrated chargers. They can charge up the battery on a smaller grid connection but still deliver fast charging since you're drawing from the battery pack.
Freewire's Boost Charger 200 is an example of a battery integrated charger: https://freewiretech.com/products/dc-boost-charger-200/
Maybe 2 chargers 50kW would be perfectly sufficient and much more economical outside of freeways?
They rely on the fact that it is common for some of the stalls to be empty, occupied by cars that have finished charging or can't charge at the full rate for whatever reason.
Some sites have batteries to provide a bit more power for the busiest times too. That has the benefit that those same batteries can participate in grid balancing the rest of the time (buying and selling power for profit, and getting paid for various technical grid services too).
That remains for the free market to decide....if the owner considers a generator is cheaper, then leave him be. Where grid power is enough, electricity will be much cheaper than a generator, so if the owner wants a generator, it's probably a choice between having a generator charger vs no charger.
Possibly. But I would expect this to be a very uncommon scenario. Unless you’re running a car race* for instance you’d have to have a situation where somebody would both be willing to pay 2x or more per kWh and also prefer to not charge their car at all if they couldn’t do it in 5-15 minutes.
* https://www.sportskeeda.com/amp/f1/news-red-bull-s-helmut-ma...
Some local chargers are 16p/kW but there is a spread all the way up to 80p/kW.
Already done in Europe. Thanks Russia and Germany.
That sounds pretty far from a nightmare to me.
I'm not sure about this. As I understand it, burning fossil fuels to generate electricity at a central facility is far more efficient than running millions of small engines.
The solar panels are placed in the wilderness and an eye sore. At least with a coal plant I can expect it.
I wish I was as delusional as most pro-EV people. Not only is EV an environmental nightmare (batteries? Where does energy come from?) the options right now for renewables are wholly inefficient and an eyesore. We'd do more to stop people from flying aircraft and driving large cruise liners. But that would get in the way of profits. Champagne socialists are hilarious.
Homes need to be heated, people need to be transported. You can only play a shell game for so long.
> Not forgetting other sustainable alternatives to ICEs, the European Parliament mandated at least one hydrogen refueling station every 200 km along TEN-T motorways by 2031.
Good stuff
If we have that many charging stations there is no need for humongous batteries, they can have lighter frames and engines, be cheaper to buy and repair, less road tax.
As the real Tesla use to say: Balance the source with the load.
It remains dubious where all that electricity should come from. When making a budget and your spending is still larger than your income you look for places to cut. If most of your money goes towards transporting suitcases of money one might consider if there is a need to bring that much.
if hydrogen cant compete it will just die out. Worth a shot tho.
https://driveclean.ca.gov/hydrogen-fuel-cell#:~:text=Fuel%20...
That said - my diesel car easily does 600-700 miles per 60litre tank
The Hyundai Nexo gets 570–612 km (354–380 mi) EPA range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Nexo
Unless this is also clarified, it’s not a finished proposal.
This will require a number of new transmission lines, and quite some new electric generation, at the very least in hundreds of megawatts of base load. (A nice new nuclear power station providing a couple GW would be handy, but I can't expect it to spring up by 2028 anywhere, except maybe France.)
In practice, these charging spots are leased out by governments, and operated by private parties that sign some SLA. Miss the SLA, lose the lease.
I was talking to my parents, who live in a very rural area of the U.S.—the nearest mailbox is a ten minute drive—and they said "we'd love an electric vehicle, but where would we charge it around here?" and we pulled up a map and there were something like two or three suitable charging stations within 20 miles, and many more within the range of a full charge.
That's why I'd assume that the busiest motorways in the EU would already have plenty of fast charging stations within a 60km drive. Maybe they already do, and this is more about adding additional bureaucracy. Or, more generously, maybe it's about those other clauses, like the payment system and displaying the prices and whatnot, and the bit in the headline was always expected to take care of itself.
While I like the idea of a convenient fast charging network for EVs, there are all these details like funding, electric infrastructure, availability of raw materials, availability of labor, and the ongoing cost of maintenance.
Here in the US charging stations are broken all the time. Even Tesla supercharging stations often have several stalls down.
I would bet huge sums of money that there is no possible way Europe has this in place on schedule.
Of course that does nothing for us saps who actually have to live here.
But Europe is pretty big and diverse (in the positive meaning of the word) which means that making a sweeping statement such as "European governments do a pretty well job of handling infrastructure" is absurd. Do the national and regional governments of every region in every country of Europe do a pretty well job of handling infrastructure? The answer is obviously no. Some things are pretty good and some things are pretty bad. Like... everywhere else in the civilised world.
An EU directive is either directly binding law itself (like the GDPR) or a requirement on its member states to pass a certain matter into local laws. If a member state fails to comply with the directive, the European Commission may file a lawsuit at the ECJ which may impose serious fines until the country in question complies.
In this case, compliance can be done by governments on many levels: some may choose to construct charging stations themselves, some may require licenseholders of gas stations to do so, and some can do nothing and hope the free market does the work for them on their own.
Nearly. A /directive/ is the requirement for each state to implement legislation and a /regulation/ is a directly binding law.
If neither company wants to build the stations, what happens? Does government build them? Offer subsidies to entice the companies to build them? Make building them a condition of approving permits for other stations that the companies do want to build?
Europe standardized on CCS chargers and CCS type 2 combo plugs quite a while ago. All brands of charger on all charging networks charge all brands of EV.
Standardization drives investment and development for infrastructure.
It's still early days for EV infrastructure, even in Europe. They're setting the direction.
> So what happens when no company actually wants to build chargers in a place where the legislation requires chargers?
They aren't specifying particular locations, just maximum spacing. Member states can incentivize deployment however they like. And there are deployment exemptions available for exceptional cases where there just isn't going to be the traffic:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230327IP...
A lot of it will be as simple as adding more chargers to existing fuel stations along those routes. Circle K, Shell, BP, etc. have been doing that for years.
If someone is not already working on it, someone will be soon
However, this is a different use-case than motorway charging. Home chargers are slow, designed for charging overnight. On a road trip you want to recharge in 20-30 minutes, and that requires much bigger DC chargers you won't find at home.
Chargers need to be where you park for an hour or more, so at the home, destination or basically where there are car parks.
The real disadvantage of a trolleybus is your are stuck going exactly where the wires are. If something is blocking your lane you can't go around. If you want to close the road for maintenance you can't run the trolley bus. This loss of flexibility makes the regular bus make more sense in a lot of cases.
If you do have a situation where a trollybus will work, you probably should just put in a train that doesn't run in traffic. A tram running on tracks that are not in a road at all isn't much more expensive, and can handle more people than a bus in the busy part of the day. I'm a big fan of the automated light metro system idea: it runs faster than a tram (because it doesn't have to worry about anything in the tracks), it is cheaper in the long run (operating costs the big cost in any transit system), is can run 24x7 (if designed for it - many are not), and you won't have problems finding crew (many transit systems have the money to expand service, but cannot hire qualified drivers). In the end though there are pros and cons to everything so you need to figure out what is best for you.
https://insideevs.com/news/440388/germany-a5-autobahn-catena...
That means, again, that poor people and those without ev cars will finance those who have.
Perfectly fine example of a government aligning the incentives towards its goals (EV adoption), rather than ensuring absolute fairness.
Whether or not it's fair enough depends on how much your government tries to make it fair.
(As a fellow cyclist I am also cognizant of the fact that roads are mostly paid for by gasoline taxes where I live, and I also enjoy subsidized infrastructure that way.)
My point exactly.
In light of the last 2000 years of history, what do you think is more plausible? (A) the government being smart, or (B) the government spending more than it makes and then raising debt and taxes for useless projects?
You haven't.
Keep on dreaming, but that day will never come.
Can you provide evidence of your claims?