Germany Will Force 80% of Gas Stations to Install EV Chargers
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Need to fill up gas? Go to any gasstation, fill up, pay by card. Requirements: a car and money.
Need to fill up EV? Find a charging point with your exact plug. Learn about different plugs, different namings for the same things, very confusing. Then, you cannot simply fill up. You must first download an app, create an account, hook up your creditcard to that account, use the app to scan the QR on the station, fill up and pay by card. Even if you are not required (by french law) to open an account, you are charged more by $chargingcompany if you do not.
Requirements: a phone with camera and internet connection, creditcard, the correct cable, downloaded and configured app
For this consumer, this is a huge step backwards in usability.
I hope the EU steps in and solves this.
lawmakers in Europe don't drive. They normally get their private jet already "recharged".
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/article/f...
The incredible amount of HPC (> 150kW) chargers you can find even in the most remote rural areas in Germany is simply crazy, mostly thanks to the large amounts of german dealerships with HPC chargers (such as Porsche), gas stations like Aral with their own charging network, or even rest areas with IONITY or other providers... and lets not take into account Tesla SuC, as that would increase the number even more.
A quick Google tells me that Germany has around 15,000 petrol filling stations and already has around 90,000 public charging points.
Even if we assume that not a single petrol filling station has a charging point...and also assume that the not yet even proposed law is going to require a minimum of 2 charging points per station...that still only increases the supply by 30%.
We can all imagine variations on those parameters that make it look better or worse. Maybe they'll be required to have parity in numbers between petrol & EV pumps? But without anything concrete about the law, it is hard to know what there is to even discuss here yet.
In general, it makes a lot of sense to differentiate between slow chargers (usually AC, 11-22kW, installed at home, at work, in parking lots), DC fast chargers (50-100kw, often installed at grocery stores and similar) and HPCs (150kw+, often installed along highway corridors, enabling longer trips). They all serve different purposes.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/germany-added-35-more-ele...
Here's the Reuters original:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/germany-launch-mass...
What you mean?
The people running gas stations are not only attracting mobile pollutors to the location they occupy, they're leaking poisons into the air, earth and water locally as well as profiting from the sale of fossil fuels to be burned.
That's we are going to see in the long run. It is disputed that the e-cars have a smaller footprint than for instance modern small diesel motors (calculating the amount of km you can drive with + production chain).
They're doomed no question, this will only speed it up.
So how is that infrastructure going to work?
Edit: funny how few people are trying to comment on the '80% of gas stations shall have ev charging' and rather focus on alternatives to such gas stations, such as home charging, street side charging and what not. The article is about gas station charging, as is my comment.
If you've got parking spaces where cars are parked for hours then you've got lots of opportunities for installing DC and AC chargers.
How does that work for people who live in cities? I like electric cars - less moving parts, less noise, less cost maintaining and driving - but they are utterly useless to me because there is no way I can charge one. Hybrids are ok, though, I can charge in the rare case I'm actually parked near a charger.
With curbside charging, and wireless charging will be convenient once that's rolled out. No cables, just park over the charging plate.
It's not like wireless phone charging. It's very efficient:
https://insideevs.com/news/340478/120-kw-wireless-charging-p...
https://witricity.com/newsroom/blog/what-is-efficiency-how-d...
Where do you 'slow charge' your car when you're the average German renter (i.e. more than half the population).
But irrespective of that, what does that have to do with charging times at fuel pumps?
https://www.destatis.de/Europa/EN/Topic/Population-Labour-So...
We only charge our EV at home unless going on a long range trip.
For the few occasions we do charge on the road, I have no problems waiting a bit longer to charge than it would take to pump gas into a tank.
Is the only time of the day where police and civil police (ordungsamt) seem to close their eyes to what is clearly a violation of proper parking.
A couple of chargers here and there, hardly help.
A few km into the suburbs and hello to 1 - 2 hours transit time to come into the city center, with multiple connections, delays, dropped connections, stuffed with as much humans as possible, freezing in Winter, cooking in Summer,....
https://ubitricity.com/en/charging-solutions/ac-lamppost/
I see it as something entirely solvable considering that even a heavily used car spends most of its time parked.
What if it's parked up blocking the charging point? This hand waving away the central problem is common. Let the eat cake.
I would venture a prediction that it will be exponential - we'll be seeing charging for EV's popping up everywhere, even in standard public parking spaces. It already is - I'm surprised how quickly it's happening.
This is precisely my point with EV. Don't get me wrong, I WANT to buy EV, but the whole ecosystem is still not quite mature enough.
With my petrol car, I can turn up at a gas station with the tank near-empty and I can fill it up to full in 5 minutes, or 8 minutes tops if I'm "running on fumes".
Meanwhile if I turn up with an EV (any EV, even a Tesla on the superchargers) with 8–10% charge left, I need to sit in a godforsaken carpark twiddling my thumbs for 15–20 minutes and that ONLY gets me to 80% charge, if I wanted 100% charge (i.e. on-par with a full-tank on petrol) I'd be sitting there forever.
I'm not talking out of my head or from heresy. On a recent holiday I hired a top of the range EV and did a lot of driving as it was a road-trip type holiday. So I'm speaking from first-hand experience here. (And before the EV-fanbois come along, yes I did my homework, yes I spoke to friends who are EV owners before I left, so I was absolutely up-to-date on the latest "how to do it" for the exact car I rented).
So yeah, charging ABSOLUTELY needs to get to a point where it's on-par with "splash and dash" in the petrol world.
The related point is batteries. Clearly more mature batteries equals more range equals less need to charge. So that is another area ripe for more maturity.
I don't think there's anyone in the world who wouldn't like this, and there are many people already working on it.
But I would say: you don't seem to be justifying the statement I've quoted. You're speaking from experience to say that filling up an EV from 0-100% is slower than an ICE vehicle, but everyone knows that. You're not saying why every EV needs this for everyone's case, aside from your use of capital letters.
The reality is that would be nice (or having a fusion reactor where I never have to fill up again would be nicer), but there are plenty of people and journeys that happen in ways that EVs could easily fulfil, and the zero to three journeys a year most people do that require a long uninterrupted haul across hundreds of miles might have to be planned a little differently, or might require the renting of an ICE car.
I'm afraid you are perfectly demonstrating my point that the pro-EV side contort themselves to extreme levels to try to justify the lack of maturity in EV.
The fact is: I own an ICE car. Whether I drive it 5 miles or 500 miles is irrelevant. I don't have to "plan a little differently" on my 500 mile journey. And I don't have to drive a different car on the 500 mile trip.
As I said at the start of my original post. I am on your side. I want to buy EV. But I suspect, like many others, I look at it objectively and I see that the technology is not quite mature enough. I've no doubt one day it will be, but not today.
I'm just saying there's no point flat out stating that things must improve when a) for a lot of people they're good enough right now, and it's about effort invested vs additional numbers of people to reach, and b) real experts are already constantly working on this.
People will accept some increase in inconvenience on a particular metric if the product is a lot better on other metrics.
Look at mobile phones. Before the iPhone, all of them had a detachable battery. When Apple came out with a device with a glued-in battery, a lot of people were saying they would never ever buy a phone whose battery can’t be swapped out for a fresh spare.
The argument was same as yours: “I can’t possibly wait ten minutes to charge if the phone dies!”
Presumably 99.9% of those people now carry a smartphone with a fixed battery.
Your argument happily co-incides with the point I was making.
Smartphones have matured and are now at the point where you easily get a whole day's battery life, maybe a day and a half if you don't use it much. So who cares if the battery is glued in. (And as an aside, phones also charge a lot faster than they used to).
EV needs to go through the same maturity process.
Similarly EVs don't need to exactly reach the convenience of refueling, it just needs to be good enough in balance.
You don't use the bathroom or buy coffees? With a family, that'll kill your entire 20 minutes. Food or sleep will kill even more time.
And why the heck would you sit in your car while waiting? If you're driving in your car all day, a 10 minute walk every 3 hours will do wonders for your sanity and health. There's a reason commercial drivers are required by law to take a 30 minute break every 4 hours.
1) More frequent but short breaks, e.g. literally a 3-4 minute break every hour. Just enough to fill up the tank, for someone to run into the bathroom etc.
2) If doing a long break (e.g. lunch with the family) do a 2-3 minute stop at a gas station before orafter, but for the stop itself drive 5-10 minutes off the main road to unwind somewhere for an hour on more.
E.g. I was recently driving through the Rheine valley, and had lunch with this view, which is a 10 minute drive from the closest gas station: https://goo.gl/maps/VVXTWQDkc2F48UHe8
If I had an EV I'd have been stuck with the family in some uninviting car park at that gas station instead, and instead of a nice lunch having to pick through overpriced gas station fast food options.
Re #1: I find that those types of stops happen at the beginning of trips. If you're only an hour or two into your trip when you need to grab gasoline, you grab it quick. But with an EV you should be charging at home or at your hotel overnight, so you start out with a full battery and don't need a charge until about 4 hours in. Once you're 4 hours into a driving day, you want to stop for more than 3 minutes.
With that in mind I think we've been optimizing the charging infrastructure in Europe for something that worked well in North America.
Since you are going to need a bit of a longer stop I'd think it would be equally if not more important to ensure that there's fast chargers at every restaurant & attraction that's a short drive from the highway, rather than blindly copying what works for gasoline powered vehicles.
Re #1: I didn't mean to do short pit stops because you need to, but, and particularly with kids of a certain age, getting them out of the car to walk around for 5 minutes every hour might work much better than a similar 15 minute break every 3 hours, etc.
Which is still a big advantage of combustion, since fueling itself takes 1-2 minutes you can more easily pick which stop is the rarer longer stop.
It seems like complete economic suicide to me, and they are just doubling down all the time. I can morally understand not using russian energy, but the consequences of this seem to have been completely ignored. Even worse, all nuclear has been shut down, doubling down on dependence on outside powers like the US, middle east, and france.
All this in the name of green energy, arriving at loads more coal production and political dependence. Plus now, every german older household is forced to change their heater, at a cost of 500bn-1tn euros over the next decade.
It's just worse and worse, the largest power in europe is basically destroying itself.
Why? Why??
Recent german industrial production data for reference: https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1699687261808263594
You can’t keep kicking the can down the road forever.
Germany committing economic suicide will not save the planet. It's also not going to persuade china and india to change course.
Actually will make the situation worse, since Germany uses the taxpayers money to support many other countries around the World.. Less tax money, less money to share.
> It's also not going to persuade China and India to change course
Even worse: It will show other Countries that the right way to move forward is to be like China and India, instead of being like Germany.
Another thing. China has more people that Europe and US combined and so does India. With your statement you are somewhat implying that we (European as Us citizen) have a right to pollute more per capita than Cinese and Indian citizens. I don't think that's fair.
So you've admitted China and India has more people, who want to consume more and produce more CO2 (don't make the mistake in thinking they are transitioning to renewables, they are adding them, but also adding shittons of coal power plants).
We have 2.3bn people that WANT to consume as much as the west per capita.
How is german economic suicide going to help? You bring down your own consumption for some moral reason, while completely ignoring what is happening in asia? How does that help anyone? It doesn't help the planet, it doesn't help yourself. The whole thing is some wierd suicidal virtue signalling. It makes no practical sense.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=CHN~DEU
Seeing how China essentially took over global PV market share from Germany and Japan and will cross 500GW installed this year, doubling that number by 2028, I think they were already persuaded years ago - it's just that ramping up production to the scale of a 1bln+ country takes time.
And they're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts - it's just cheaper this way.
The train is LONG gone and it's economic and political suicide to start now.
The whole "WhY DoN'T yOu BuIlD nUclEaR" is ignoring the large delays and over budget projects of modern reactors.
They were EOL, I'm not sure what you expected them to do with them? I don't really care about whatever pro/anti nuclear stance you have, I think it's pointless to even discuss in the German context because that ship sailed years ago.
Germany could shut down everything tomorrow and it wouldn't make a dent. Not making a dent _and_ ruining your economy will not make anyone follow your lead either.
Did someone with connections to the fossil fuel industry tell you that Contracts for difference would do that? They seem to have worked well to provide cheap alternatives to fossil fuels via market based incentives in many other countries and industries.
You didn't explain why you think they'll be such a disaster in this instance? Do you actually have a reason for thinking so?
Can you stop parroting the incredibly stupid line of "ruining your economy", please? It's extensively used by the oil industry lobby/propaganda to disparage any change that will affect their bottom line, you are (willingly or not) just repeating bullshit from lobbyists. And looking stupid while doing it.
Once this has been completed, we're free from buying coal, uranium (Russia? Niger?), or gas and stop emitting large amounts of C02 due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Especially the "storage" part is really far in the future, certainly not by 2030 or so.
Also, you are becoming dependent on countries like China for solar panels and other non-free or semi-free countries for rare earths, lithium etc. The sun may shine for free, but no one escapes a thorough entanglement in global trade networks nowadays.
Bought a 115Wp rated solar panel earlier this year, made in China.
For the foreseeable future (years, or 20y+ rated lifespan of such a panel), I can generate power from that panel without making ANY additional purchases.
At the end of that lifespan, market conditions will be very, very different from today.
How does that "make me dependent on China, etc"?
Any renewable installed = long-term, independent power generating capacity obtained. Regardless where initial materials came from.
Dependency is hitting gas station every day & not being able to move car when oil company fails to supply gas station. Long term investments like solar panels don't work like that.
While your whole post implicates that you are leaning to the conservatice spectrum, I will try to be as objective as possible.
Germany has been ruled by conservative governments for the last 16 years. These governments have hindered innovation (see German internet speeds for example) and lobbyists made sure that nothing changed in regards of mobility, energy, city building and whatnot.
The russian attack on Ukraine has made clear that dependency on foreign states is not a good idea and that we have to act on that swiftly. Acting swiftly comes with a cost for the moment for sure.
Energy prices are already falling though for example, renewables are being build, probably like never before, see [1] at the bottom, and dependency on fossil fuels is being reduced steadily.
That could have been done slowly over the last 16 years, but conservatice politicians were busy doing... I don't know what.
Nuclear is and was never a viable option. While fans of this technology are repeating it over and over, the German reactors were EOL. Also: The energy companies were only able to run those reactors because that has been subsidized in different ways.
The economic downturn is somewhat more complicated, I think.
Lots of companies have used the pandemic to rise prices. While that might have been a real issue due to logistics during the pandemic, right now it's only greedflation with companies rising prices "because they can". That hits companies as well as persons and leads to people being more frugal and results in the economic downturn.
The "downturn" also might be a more realistic view of the situation, as the current government is not that leaned towards pampering businesses and lobbyists as the former ones. Former growth is in parts the result of subsidizing, tax reductions, low interest rates etc. These are all valid measurements to boost an economy, but someone has to pay the price for that.
Now, there's also a price to pay for modernizing the country at a larger scale and businesses have to pay their share, too. I think that's only fair.
[1]: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Dossier/erneuerbare-energie...
Olaf Scholz was vice prime minister, and finance minister in the last governments. So I guess he was as responsible for the last 16 years as Lindner is today?
This is simply not true, German reactors were perfectly fine and could've continue operating for decades to come, shutting them down so early was a political decision. Currently Germany got rid of their cleanest source of electricity while still depending on fossil fuels. At some point it will become obvious that renewables are not enough not power a modern economy and Germany will either stick to gas or become dependent on it's neighbours to stabilise it's energy grid.
Also please tell me, how, starting from tomorrow, we can ensure that we handle the waste products of nuclear power generation safely and easily. Please don't come up with things "there are some reactors which can burn it". We don't have these reactors yet. They are in development, maybe there's a prototype somewhere, but nothing we can use. We need solutions that work right out of the box and right now.
If not, we have to store the waste for a looooooooooong time and who pays for that? The tax payers. For a long time, maybe hundreds if not thousands of years ongoing from now, who knows.
Please note that the 22 billion Euro from the energy providers are just for searching a place to store the waste, not the actual storage itself.
edit: Just to note it, because some people might not know this. The decision to phase out the nuclear reactors was made by Merkel and made into law by her government. It's not something the Green party came up with one morning in 2022.
Where is this "fact" coming from? Coal is being phased out. Numbers for last year increased slightly, but that was due to gas, not nuclear shutdowns. For this year coal usage is on track to being at 2020 levels, which was an outlier year.
Source: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Don't know why you say we rely on France or even the US and the middle east?
[1]: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/denmark-germany-sign-ag... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/where-does-germany-s...
But what the government is doing is partly ideology based and partly, I believe, the personal ambition of the economy minister himself. I think the American approach is much more sane and they will probably still end up being the global leaders of green energy tech.
Bullshit. You can get a new contract for 30 Cent/kWh right now. That's the same price as in 2017 [1].
[1]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Preise/Publikat... Page 47
Of course, as is tradition in the last decades, the law was done quickly, but the investing part was somehow forgotten. Instead, if investing in renewables, the reliance on Russian gas was increased (Insert joke about irony here).
Now it's 2021 and a new government is elected. Covid just ended and the war in Ukraine started. The nuclear plants are one-by-one shutting down, but the ones running are getting very costly extensions to have reserves. They are old, have not been maintained (because they were shutting down) and are too expensive, and energy companies don't want to keep them online anymore. The underinvestments so far take revenge. The reliance on Russia is now seen as a big mistake. In a years time, Germany changed that reliance (under a green minister's leadership, no less) by building LNG terminals and diversifying sources [2]. While still having the long-term goal of not getting in such a situation again.
However, Germany is extremely expanding wind and solar, with the goal of having 80% coming from renewable sources by 2030 [3].Right now, electricity pricing has nearly reached 2021 level and is continuing to fall. Gas is still higher but there is a big push for industries to change to hydrogen where possible.
> every german older household is forced to change their heater
Long term yes. If you need a new heater which can't be repaired, you need to get a heat pump. This will be subsidized. This will lessen outside reliance and be a part in taking climate action.
> It's just worse and worse, the largest power in europe is basically destroying itself.
I think that is a bit harsh. It's more that decades of ignoring problems and not investing have culminated in a bad situation. Neoliberalism has created immense investment bottlenecks, and Germany was lucky to survive that long. Now they have a lot of catching up to do. Which won't be easy, in no small part because Germany is not allowed to take on new debt (constitutional amendment) and raising taxes is a now go, because neoliberalism. So yeah..
[1] https://www.infratest-dimap.de/fileadmin/_migrated/content_u... [2] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... [3] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/schwerpunkte/klimasch...
This is also simply not true. You are not allowed to install new heatings that burn gas or oil. Wood pellets, heat pump, etc, all allowed.
If you have a working heating, nobody is forcing you to rip it out. You are allowed to have repairs if it stops working. If it completely breaks down, there is also possibilities to get exemptions if i.e. a heat pump is not feasible. Maybe take a look at the actual law and not what some media is trying to read into the law.