Fallacy Behind Fast Charging Networks Build-up

Growing adoption of EVs and plug-in hybrids is bringing about a race to build fast charging networks for those vehicles. But are expensive fast chargers what EV owners actually need?

The buzz

When following car and EV related news these days, I frequently come across articles about new fast and super-fast charging stations being built and put in service. Often the launch announcements are followed by practical tests of various EVs to measure how fast they can charge on those fast chargers.

Utility companies are happy to jump on this buildout spree, because those expensive fast chargers are often subsidized from public infrastructure funds, so building them is a “good business” regardless of how utilized they became when installed.

I do not dispute the need for fast charging networks alongside the main motorways and highways for long distance travel, but I am questioning the need for expensive chargers in many other locations, such as city centers and shopping center parking lots. Let me explain why I think so.

A typical setup in downtown Prague: two time-limited chargers per hundreds of parking spots.

Let’s go shopping

Let’s take a typical Prague example. The shopping center Metropole Zličín has parking capacity of over 1500 cars. Yet, checking PlugShare app, we find that there are two chargers (1, 2) with total capacity of five vehicles to be charged simultaneously. Not to mention, that one of those charging slots is ChaDeMo, which is rare in Europe, so the more realistic number for concurrent charging is four.

With only five charging slots for so many cars, the charging station has become a precious shared resource. This requires pricing not only energy consumption (kWh), but also time spent at the charger. This is what most of the charging operators in the Czech Republic do: during the initial period, the customer pays for consumption, but after a set time limit, there is per-minute time penalty for occupying the expensive charger.

Now imagine a typical weekend family trip to the shopping center. You come in the morning, do some shopping, get lunch in the food court, and go to the cinema in the afternoon. A family easily spends between four to five hours at the shopping center.

A car owner with an internal combustion engine just parks the car and enjoys the day. An EV car owner, if she decides to use a charger, plugs in the car in the morning, but then must go back to the remote corner of the parking lot to unplug the car and move it to a different parking slot midday through.

Not a very convenient setup for the EV car owner… and this is how it works in most charging places. We are completely missing a public equivalent of what Tesla calls destination chargers, i.e., low speed chargers where you plug in upon arrival and happily charge overnight or during a day trip to a city without being concerned with time.

Best case scenario

Given that most cars are stationary most of the time I would argue we need to aim for a completely reverse approach here. Rather than having few expensive fast chargers, which due to their cost become a precious shared resource, we should have vast number of cheap slow chargers and aim for realizing the following dream scenario:

• Every EV or PHEV can be connected to a charger whenever it is parked. There are enough chargers available everywhere.
• The cars get charged when there is excess electricity in the grid, either during off-peak hours or during intermittent generation spikes from renewables.
• The majority of the EVs and PHEVs should also support Vehicle-to-load (V2L) technology, so not only can they be charged in a smart way, but they can share energy back to the grid when needed during peak hours. The hundreds of thousands of parked and plugged EVs thus forming a giant distributed battery.

Imagine all the different business models which can be realized on top of the above scenario.

• For example, if you use your car for short commuting during a workweek, you can dedicate a substantial portion of your battery capacity as a smart grid energy storage buffer and being rewarded for doing so.
• Or a smart grid can self-regulate locally: as cars are spread across many locations, localized consumption spikes and throughs can be managed by tapping into cars only in a certain radius and thus helping to balance the grid.
• All this automation can help realize the full potential of renewable electricity generation such as wind and solar, every EV owner effectively participating in the energy storage business, while also improving the convenience of driving and “refueling” the electric vehicles.

Concluding thoughts

We are still in the early EV adoption phase and there are many things which have not been figured out yet. For the time being we keep building EV charging stations next to the traditional gas stations, because, you know refueling a car and recharging an EV seem like the same use case at first sight.

I argue that we should apply more of an out-of-the-box thinking and while indeed EVs also need to be “refueled” from time to time, the way we store and distribute electricity is vastly different than gasoline distribution. Acknowledging this distinction allows us to arrive at a completely different solution. Ideally a solution which will hit multiple birds with one stone and may be even improve convenience of an EV car ownership.