The excellent “Foresight Climate and Energy” website recently released an article about charging EVs in the city.

The article talks about the two-tier charging set up we have in the UK – although it doesn’t quite present it in this way. There are those who can charge their own car using their own equipment (the haves) and those who cannot (the have nots). The “haves” benefit from the convenience of parking at home – no change there. But in the world of EV charging, this opens up the possibilities offered by cheap overnight charging, or even the ability to charge the car for free using excess power from your solar PV array.

We are at risk of creating further social divides between the “haves” and “have nots”. For those with the means to park off road at home, their EV running costs are dramatically lower then for those without those means. And so we are entrenching the cost disparities of car ownership.

Jaap Burger states: “Currently, most public charging prices are flat rates. Users pay the same price whether they charge during the evening peak or overnight.”

“We need to extend the benefits of smart charging to users of public charging networks, as high prices turn otherwise interested drivers away from EVs.”

Unfortunately the article doesn’t really present any practical solutions to these problems.

EV myth busting

Based on my own use of an EV (Nissan Leaf) for the past 2 years, there are some factors that are routinely “glossed over” by EV enthusiasts (of which I am one).

Our vehicle requires 4 hours of charging each day at 6.8 kWh to provide sufficient charge to drive the number of miles we require each day, especially during the winter when the cold affects the range of the vehicle. The vehicle does one round trip between Huntingdon and Cambridge each day, plus additional smaller trips most evenings. This is a pretty standard commute in Cambridgeshire – nothing too excessive.

What you often see quoted is that vehicles require less charging than this to cope with the daily commute. Whilst this might be true in theory (where you might only drive 5 miles each way at 40 mph), for anyone with a 20 mile each way commute on a dual carriageway plus a few errands in the evening, you will require the full 4 hours of cheap overnight charging.

So What?

This means that in a city context, each house requires easy access to a dedicated charge point.

Anything less than this means that you’ll be fighting to access a charge point every night. Think of the stress!

You can imagine the scenario. There is one charger on the nearby lamp post, but 4 of your neighbours have EVs. You come home from work at 1700 hrs, and plug the car in. Your neighbours now cannot access the charge point. You need to drop your daughter off at her ballet lesson, so you unplug, and whilst you are out, your neighbour spots the opportunity, and takes up the charging spot. Now you don’t have enough charge for the morning commute.

Dynamic pricing

It strikes me that the only way to mitigate this scenario is to actually not have cheap overnight charging at a set time.

You need to make the limited charging resource available to the maximum number of people each day.

Perhaps each person has an allocated 4 hours of cheap charging, irrespective of time of use? But this would run counter to the law of supply and demand & time of use tariffs.

Public policy response

I don’t know what the solution is, and I haven’t seen any decent proposals that get to the heart of the problem.

But what I do know is that public policy is often slow to respond, and so to allow a large percentage of the population to be unable to access EV driving by pricing them out on the one hand, or preventing them from having easy access to an EV charge point on the other hand, seems morally problematic.

Honesty

But we must start with an honest appraisal of the issue.

Smaller and more affordable EVs will have smaller batteries. These will require charging most nights. To pretend otherwise seems to just be avoiding the issue.

To place chargepoints in a terraced street at a density of even 1 per 4 houses will require very significant investment.

Some solutions such as charging from lampposts are tremendous ideas and relatively low cost, and in the right circumstances work really well. But in most Victorian terraced streets, the lamppost is set away from the street, and so the Ubitricity solution just won’t work – it will create a massive trip hazard and a barrier to wheelchairs and other pedestrians.

But any solution that requires groundworks will be costly, and presents all the usual infrastructure issues over ownership, maintenance regimes and so on. There are ambitious schemes such as this one announced by Connected Kerb in Surrey. The scale is impressive. Clearly they will have done extensive studies about the necessary scale of the intervention required. My assertion though is this is the minimum baseline that all local authorities need to be aiming for, rather than an unusual outlier.

The alternative is for EV owners to “graze” on power as they go about their day. This idea envisages that EV owners plug in when ever they are parked. In theory, this is a great idea. But it requires public and private carparks to have literally millions of EV chargers installed – which seems unlikely. But even if that does occur and we can make chargers widely available on this scale, it doesn’t get around the issue of pricing.

The underlying economics

Same electricity, different cost:

• 7.5 pence per kWh – At home, overnight
• 44 pence per kWh – Tesco Fast Charger (7kW) provided by Pod Point
• 62 pence per kWh – Tesco Rapid Charger (50 kW) provided by Pod Point
• 79 pence per kWh – MFG Ultra Rapid Charger (150 kW)  

These relative prices make perfect sense. The Ultra Rapid Charger comprises expensive commercial infrastructure, which needs to generate a profit, and it is provided on a key arterial route. Hence it is the most expensive per kWh.

But unless we can somehow deliver electricity to EV owners using public infrastructure that provides parity with the “haves”, we are going to entrench a social divide.

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