UKH

Hi,

I've been trying to navigate the minefield of EV charge point options and grants.

Our small club has a small hut in North Wales (Deniolen), the hut is a 5 minute walk from the nearest road and parking is road side. Does anyone know how we could go about getting a road side charge point installed?

A lot of the info is for residential options that need to be taken up through the local council. There isn't much information availiable for small businesses that don't have off road parking.

Cheers

Michael

I think you might need a very long extension lead :p.

Questions that may help others to advise you:

1. Who owns the land used for parking?
2. Who owns the land between the hut and the land used for parking?
3. Does the hut have mains electricity?
4. Are there electricity pylons much closer to the land used for parking than for the hut (e.g. power being carried along side the road?)

Knowing none of the answers, I'm going to hazard a guess this won't be cheap.

Unfortunately there is no option for off road parking. We have right of access to the hut through a farmer's field (on foot). The only option would be a lamp post charger back up on the road I think. For reference for the road to the hut is a 3-5 min walk so extension cables are a no go.

Why not charge up at some of the numerous service stations e-route to/from the hut?

If it is the hut I think it is (I have stayed there a number of times) it is impossible to drive to so no option there - your only option is going to be to use public chargers. They are not going to install a charge point just for your club. I don't know if the village has a charge point as yet - but even if it does it will likely be just one so there maybe a queue! And it is a bit of a hike down there too. These are some of the issues the governments are going to have to address sooner rather than later

Corrected that for you!

I think you have next to zero chance of being allowed to install your own charge point on the side of a public road if you don't own the land, and even less chance of then being allowed to reserve it for it for your clubs' use (and even less of getting a grant!). I reckon your best bet may be to do an extra deal with the farmer whose land you walk through if that's possible. If he has space for a charger and one car's parking on his land, could you perhaps pay for one to be installed (~£600 after grant usually) in exchange for your club being allowed on to his land to use it? You'd have to think about how long this agreement lasted and who paid for the electricity.

Otherwise, it seems that Gwynedd council's policy is to install charging points in public car parks that attract tourists. I'd get in touch with them and see if you can persuade them to install one conveniently for you, but you'll need to have a decent case as to why it's a good location. I saw recently on the internet that they have installed one in the Nant Peris park and ride, which is not far from you, but it's not switched on yet AFAIK (I have an EV on order and Llanberis return will be near the limit of my range, so have been looking for updates!)

I was hoping that I'd be able to contact the council and either get a grant, or contribute towards the cost of getting an on street charger. There are a lot of nearby resedential properties that rely on street side parking and will also be in need if charging points before long so it should be mutually beneficial.

The next nearest point seems to be Morrisons in Caernarfon, the company car we're looking at has a 64kWh battery/260 mile 'real world range'. The Journey from our house is approx 185 miles, fast charging on route would add 50 mins to the journey, but we usually stop in Conwy for a shop anyway, so could tie charging it in with that.

It's not unworkable as it stands but there aren't many fast charges around the Llanberis area, so we could end up queuing to charge.

We plan to, but it's  not always ideal adding an hour onto the journey and potentially having to queue if the charging points are in use.

There is a general push on this topic at the moment so there is likely some mileage in pushing the council to install on street chargers in the area if it would help residents I think. There are some areas in the UK already installing chargers for this purpose. Just depends if they think that area is a priority. You might want to try and rope in some locals?

Current A55 charging capacity should get much better in the next six months I think/hope. There is a new shell charging area about to open with 4 rapids, a big instavolt one about to be built (with up to 12 apparently) and theoretically gridserve should update the old ecotricity points that are apparently unreliable.

You would get more informed advice about all this on the SpeakEV forum by the way, it's very active.

If you do get the OK from the farmer to have a parking space and charger on his land, then I do hope you arrange it so that the person charging their vehicle pays for the electricity rather than the club footing the bill. After all, it wouldn't be fair for that person to have free travel.

Otherwise you could end up with someone from the village using it to charge their vehicle during the week.

Sounds like Ty Powdwr, right?

My opinion: it makes no sense for public grants to be made available for that specific use case. If you can canvass opinion and make a serious case for a shared charging point to be made equally available to everybody in the area, then maybe.

I thought it sounded like the Lincoln club hut.

In which case the scenario of a parking space and charger on the farmer's land would be impossible without some major groundworks.

If there are residentials in the area try speaking to Trydani for a community based solution.

Re permissions, I imagine Highways & maybe WPD on your list. Also google the LA and see if they have anybody looking after sustainable travel / low carbon transport

Re grant funding, LAs have to bid for it from WG, and will usually put forward ready developed and costed proposals.

National Parks sometimes have a sustainability fund..

Sometimes shaking the tree works!

That corner of North Wales is pretty badly served for public chargers.  I recently had to do Oxford - Bangor, staying overnight in a bnb with no charging possible, and back to Oxford, in an e-Niro (which by the sounds of it is the car you're considering).  I made a point of big top-ups at the fast chargers early on the A5, knowing there wasn't much ahead of me and I had to make it back to them on the way home!

If you need to do a 370 mile round trip in a car with 260 mile range, you need 110 miles of charge on the way - call it 130 miles to be safe.  That's 32kWh.  As long as you are below 50% battery, the e-Niro will charge at 77kW so it's a 25 minute stop somewhere with a good charger (look for Instavolt or the new Gridserve ones).

Or if you want overnight, your simplest solution might be to ask all the nearest houses if they'll sell you an overnight stay on their driveway!

Good idea. Much of the supposed cheap running costs of EVs is eaten into by the outrageous cost of recharging at these public chargers.

The reality is that there needs to be a quantum leap forward in charging points- all of this talk about cables running from lamposts etc misses the scale of the need by an order of magnitude at least.

What does the use of a public charge point usually cost? (I don't own an electric car, and have never used one.)

Say £6.50 for a 30 minute/90 mile charge at one of these motorway things. Cheaper than petrol certainly but naked profiteering in the business model. There are free ones about and various subscriptions one can explore but charging at home on a sensible tariff is cheaper but impractical if travelling any distance.

Excluding a particular expensive brand called Ionity, all the other rapids are in the broad range 30-40p/kWh.

Of course some EVs do more miles per kWh than others. An example I've worked out as a comparison with a similar performance diesel: a VW ID.3 should average 4 mi/kWh (slightly less in the depths of winter), so that's 8-10p per mile if you charge up entirely at rapids. My current Octavia VRS does 45-50mpg (diesel) and diesel currently costs about 1.45 a litre or something. That works out at 14-15p per mile (obviously a modern efficient or slower diesel engine might do a bit better.) But, in practice most people charge their EVs at home most ormall of the time. Even if you are on the price cap rate for electricity, that's about 21p/kWh so almost halves the electric cost per mile above. If you have Octopus Go you can charge at 5p/kWh for a few hours each night. TLDR it's a lot cheaper.

Indeed.  The three most useful networks are Gridserve (30p/kWh), BP Pulse (29p/kWh) and InstaVolt (40p/kWh). 

Home electricity is typically 12-14p/kWh so they're comparatively expensive, but given that you're paying for stations that can deliver 50kW plus, that's a significant infrastructure cost to cover.  It doesn't seem ridiculous to me.

If you want prices per mile, the overnight charging on Octopus Go is around 1.2p/mile.  Home charging on a normal tariff is 4p/mile.  A Gridserve charger is 8p/mile.  And a bog standard ICE might be in the order of 15p/mile.  Of coure, you maximise your home charging so you use motorway rapids as little as possible!

Thanks for the detailed replies.

My next questions (as a complete neophyte) are:

1. Can any model of EV use any of these chargers? (I.e. are there industry standards which make this all work correctly and safely?)

2. Is there any governmental strategy behind the provision of this infrastructure? Or is it all just appearing 'at random' (as it were) by virtue of private companies.

3. How is any of this supposed to scale up? In any motorway services, there must be a lot of cars filling with petrol/diesel every hour. How will that scale if it takes 30 minutes to top up an EV?

As an EV owner, I can comment as follows:

1) Pretty much anything built in the last 4 or 5 years will use Type 2 or CCS. Older stuff uses Chademo, but this is pretty much non standard now. so, generally, they all use the same format. 

2) Yes and no. There is a push in the planning policy to see more charging stations and the Government will tell you they have a commitment to working with the private sector to see more roll out, but I'm not convinced. 

Private companies have realised there is money to be made in charge stations, so a number are aggressively rolling out their expansion programme and the Gov seem to be happy to leave them to it for now. 

3) Good question. The Service station owners love them, the dwell time is longer, so they get to sell more. This is not unexpected, given they are retailers at heart. It seems there are now hub charge stations appearing, such as Rugby, where the open market charge points are extensive, so less or no queueing. 

Realistically, if you do any sort of mileage, it's a Tesla. The supercharging network is superb, it can charge up to 230kw at the new sites and they are being rolled out extensively. The biggest problem for a non Tesla driver is the lack of joined up charging infrastructure, poor maintenance meaning stations can frequently be out of service, queues while some doddering old fart charges his Zoe, or worse, a hybrid or getting ICE'd. 

As for the OP, you'll only charge at 2kw per hour on a mains supply, that's about 8 miles per hour. A charge point can be installed, but it needs to meet a number of requirements, and it is unlikely that you'll pass legislation and the grant funding here (if you pass the former, the latter makes it £400 more expensive).

A lot of people see charge point on a map, and then realise their Taycan or iPace will take rather a while to charge off an 8kw lump outside an Aldi..... 

Pretty sure I know the hut in question too. The track isn't passable in a normal car although the first time I visited nobody told me about this and I tried to drive down there. I got pretty far actually and was quite surprised I got back out.

At first it all went a bit VHS vs Betamax.  Things are now settling down and CCS is rapidly becoming the accepted standard, pushing back CHAdeMO.  Pretty much all motorway rapid stations have plenty of CCS and a few CHAdeMO.  So yes, any new EV you buy can use pretty much any motorway rapid.

Except: you can't use the Tesla chargers if you don't have a Tesla, even though they are CCS, because they are locked to their own cars.  This is clearly insane.  Allegedly there are moves afoot to fix this but I'm not holding my breath.  There's nothing quite as frustrating as waiting for one of the two 'public' chargers at a services, whilst ten empty Tesla stations just sit there.

Utter free market chaos.  The worst actors are starting to get pushed out now.  Ecotricity stepped up about a decade ago and put their Electric Highway charges in lots of motorway services, which I never thought they got enough credit for.  These EH chargers are now old and tired, but they're gradually getting replaced with lovely Gridserve machines.

It's not as bad as you think.  The EV mindset is totally different to an ICE.  You don't let it run down to 10%, and then fill it up all in one go, like you do with an ICE.  You keep it topped up all the time.  So every long trip starts at 100%.  This means you don't rely on motorway services anywhere near as much as you would assume.

My e-Niro does around 240-260 miles.  I can do Oxford-Stanage-Oxford with fifteen minutes on a rapid, and I can get to Penrith without a charge at all.  I only use a motorway rapid if I have to.  Sure, if you need to drive 500 miles in a go then this is going to become bloody annoying but actually not many people do that too often.  I would disagree that if you need to do high mileages then Tesla is the only way forward... although their private network does make it less likely you'll be stuck waiting.

I got my first EV in 2015, and for the first four years I was always saying that I've basically never had to queue for a charge (maybe once a year).  This summer it's become much, much busier, and I have had a few waits.  We clearly need more chargers (and for the Gridserve machines to get their long-awaited upgrade to supply two cars at once - currently they all have two cables and can only feed one at a time), but, largely, the network is growing with the demand.

Thanks for the informative replies.

It's not insane that non-Tesla cars are unable to use their charging network. it's the competitive advantage Tesla has, at great expense to themselves. 

There is talk of opening it up to the great unwashed, but at a max of 40kw, which is not great. 

I got a Tesla primarily due to the charging network. That's Elon Musk doing his job. Sure, I wanted a Taycan, but I'm not spunking that amount of cash to have to sit behind Mrs Miggins charging a Leaf while I desperately try to get from the arse end of Shropshire to Edinburgh. 

I agree with the rest - good post.

It really is a different mind set - all about topping up, not going from 80% to 10% and then charging. The non-Tesla network is still disparate, with no real joined up thinking. Once the weaker players drop out of the market and or the big guys like BP, Shells really step up, then the infrastructure and network will open up and anyone who does not have a Tesla will have a decent chance of making a longer journey with less charger anxiety. 

I do pretty big mileage, easily 500miles plus a day and there is no way on God's earth I could do that in anything other than a you know what. . 

The next elephant in the room is also looming. I'm vaguely acquainted with someone who does software development for one of the big charging players in Germany and his project at the moment is billing for blocked chargers. I drive past one most days which is provided by the local council and the same car that is hooked up when I collect my kids from school is still there in the morning . So my local authority took away a parking space I paid for and put in a private charging point with another €100,000 or so of my money. A bit like the OP really!

I was surprised today when visiting a Tesco supermarket that is in process of installing their first chargers there including CHAdeMO. A range of 7 kw, 22 kw and 50 kw chargers with the latter having one CHAdeMO connector and one CCS, all the others appeared to be CCS. Someone involved in this partnership must see the need to have the “old” connector still - presumably to make money.

I’m guessing T or it’s partners are not supplying the 22 and 50 chargers free of charge; I had read mention of their 7 Kw being free “whilst shopping”. The machines are not up and running yet, but the signs say spaces for EVs whilst charging only; no mention of charges.

Quite a few people have driven down there by mistake over the years, I'm sure you're not the only one to make that mistake.  If you're lucky and it's not been too wet recently, you can drive down it.  But you obviously have to reverse back up.

I'm assuming you're talking (we're all talking?) about the SWMC/Lincoln hut?

If that's the case, then no, I don't think you'll get a charger there.  Unless you can get something put in the lamp post.  Worth ringing up the council and asking, but I can't see it'll happen.

Oh, I completely agree it's a wise move if you're a Tesla shareholder (or indeed an owner)!  But if it had been legislated that all charge stations had to be open to all models then the outcome would have been better for all.

(I guess you could then ask if Tesla would have built so many...)

That's a shame.  40kW is nice enough but 70kW or more would be better.

That's fair. An awful lot of people would say that if they needed to do 500 miles daily then a diesel is what they want, so good work for making the effort to go electric at all.  

Longer range alternatives are coming. The new Kia EV6 claims 300 plus miles.

There are a lot of CHAdeMO cars still out there - all those Outlanders and Leafs for a start.

Makes sense. A lot of places are supplying 7kW free whilst you're visiting.  But 22kW or more would be very generous!

I have approached the local council regard instillation of a community charger. I was never thinking that ot would be for sole use of the club/hut. That's where my issues started, a lot of the grants available are resedential for locals who rely on the road side parking. Hopefully they'll be able to give me some pointers as to how one might be installed.

Indeed, I think we are fellow SWMC members, although I've been exiled up North for a bit.

I was quite amazed I managed to get out considering the low ground clearance of my car and the fact it grounds out on stuff that the girlfriend's car has no problem with.

Yea we're LMC, I saw that the your hut was closed for referb (according to the website), will it be back in usable condition for the winter season?

Not sure as yet, I'm not committee any more so far don't get the inside scoop but I gather they are looking into it. I really hope so, otherwise I'm calling you to come and stay in Ty Gwyn.

We're always happy to see the place getting use, recently had a new roof fitted, bought an extra sofa and are perhaps considering a refit of one of the bunk rooms.

The perfect place to work through a bottle or two, whilst relaxing next to the  stove.