Well what do you guys think? This has to be one of the most well thought out sites to avoid demand charges! Doesn’t hurt that it’s in a beautiful place either. At the end of the day, fueling cars at gas stations doesn’t make much money… but it doesn’t lose money to fill up tanks! In most cases high power DCFC loses significant money even if you got all of the hardware for free with complimentary installation… it’s a big problem folks. Can’t wait to share more details and more unique solutions like this install here.
@UC1AOTRbqUmDUb6oYYCD8NcA I don't entirely disagree with this sentiment but I think fast chargers are still important, especially after seeing what winter does to range in the northeast. I went from upstate NY to rhode island in my ID.4 to visit my friend and while the battery holds enough charge to make the trip out and back with only one charge stop, you REALLY have to strategically decide where to stop - the farther you go before charging, the more screwed you are if you get to the chargers and they're full or broken. I stopped once to charge each way because I wanted to check out the EA station in Chicopee Mass (and eat chick fil a for lunch) and then i also stopped at the auburn mall on the way back to make sure I had enough to easily get home. When you figure that batteries charge faster the lower they get so you WANT to run it down, but you don't want to run it below 20%, and you probably don't really want to fast charge above 60-70% in a commuting scenario because it slows down too much above that to be worth it, with all those rules considered, your ~200-230 mile first leg drops to like 150 miles per leg after that in ideal conditions. I think there a lot of ~300 mile round trip commutes that people might do a few times a year that would benefit from easier-to-find chargers. Even if its just one or two DC charge stalls every 10-20 miles. Kyle has proven that you can drive cross country in an EV without a lot of trouble but someone less experienced than him might get really frustrated on anything over 200 miles in a single direction on current EVs. Edit: Ahh cool the guy I was responding to deleted his comment or got his account deleted or something, in retrospect I know why but that means I now look like I'm a crazy person replying to no one but Kyle. The sentiment of mr. jan 6 if that was his real name was "fast chargers don't matter because everyone can just charge at home." And thats what I think is largely true but not the whole truth.
@@Cowclops - While I agree that HVDC will be important I don't believe DC Fast Charging is as big an impediment as it's being purported to be. Over 80% of EV owners charge at home. Many, if not most EV owners will NEVER need to use a public charger. Think about it. If you have an ICE vehicle and had a gasoline pump in your driveway how often would you need to visit a gasoline station? If you're like the vast majority of commuters in the US then you almost certainly drive less than 50 miles each day (the national average is only 30 miles), and you rarely ever need to drive more than 250 miles at any one time. If you have provisions to charge at home and have an EV with 250 miles or more of range (the average new EV achieves between 250 and 350 miles per charge), then you'll rarely if ever never need to stop at a public charging facility. When people drive by Tesla SuperCharging facilities and see lines they immediately think that waiting will be the new reality at all charging stations. This is nonsense. Those lines at Tesla charging stations are because many of those Tesla owners have lifetime Free charging. They're simply being cheapskates because if they had to pay to charge they'd be charging at home like everyone else. For the vast majority of EV owners the only time they'll need to use a public charger is when they are using their EV for the occasional long trip. Of course there are those living in apartments or condos that might also lack provisions to charge there. This is rapidly changing however as more and more condo and apartment complexes are installing chargers. As far as the inconveniences at those DC Fast chargers are concerned, if I'm only experiencing these small delays during those rare times when I need a public charger then I don't see why I should feel inconvenienced. If I was driving an ICE and had no choice but to use public refueling stations (typically once or twice a week), then I'd feel inconvenienced.
The real question is what happens when there are enough EVs where this location has to add 3-4 more of those units for $160k apiece. Of course the emissions for the batteries used in charging locations are never considered when measuring GHG emissions from BEVs, so that'll be something to think about. I'd be curious how long these batteries will last in a location that's constantly cycling the pack on a daily basis. As to general charging questions, what happens when every house on the block in a neighborhood is running a L2 charger overnight? Are all residential grids setup to pull that much power that quickly? How about an apartment complex with 50 units and 50 parking spots with L2 chargers installed? How about the power plant? Will it be able to generate that much energy without starting up a natural gas peaker plant?
The biggest obstacles to EV Adoption is the following: - Education - Incentives - Politics - Education This can be solved by main stream media doing commercials, 30 second segments, or brief mentions. "Oh yeah I don't even know what's it's like to get gas anymore, I don't have to pay for gas at all with my [insert EV], it saves me so much money and my fueling (charging) is done at home". Literally every comment section is full of people who think they get 500 miles out of their gas f-150 that they drive that far every day and that EV batteries need to be replaced after 5k and it'll cost 500k. Education is literally 90% of the problem - Incentives Yeah they're around, but they need to STAY and not run out 3 months into the year only to have a 13 month long process of getting them back for the next year. Also not limited to specific criteria. It should be for ANY bev, not whatever "build back better" is trying to fix. - Politics No more "unions", no more pretending Tesla doesn't exist and that they basically kickstarted the technological evolution with EV's. No more playing favorites. You buy ANY EV and get incentives. I've been telling people this for a long time. If the US cared that much to get everyone into EV's, we'd be there already. But the US is too involved with it's own politics, corrupt and money hungry government, and trying to get everyone to buy Ford or Chevy and nothing else.
there is a video from Santa Cruz Refuse on YT; they use solar to charge their FreeWire Boost unit for their EV trucks. they only have 208v electrical on site, they didn't have to upgrade to 480v service since the FreeWire doesn't need it and this was a good fit.
Yes! Solar panels mounted on a canopy over top where cars charging will be. That's a missing at many DCFC sites that gas stations have: a roof. Though at gas stations you have to stand there and hold the valve open.
Even here in Norway, demand charges prohibit DC chargers to be established in locations with low usage. There is a proposal for a new regulation where any install using less than 100.000 kWh annually will not get demand charges. That would allow remote places (e.g. dominantly weekend usage) still to be financially viable. For more frequently used locations, there is still better economics here in paying the demand charges, than getting a battery buffer. But I suspect US demand charges are far higher.
I'm happy with the Tesla superchargers, but would like to see more hotels with level 2 chargers. Really like skipping the Supercharger at the end of the day, plugin to level 2 and start the next day with 90% charge.
@@OutofSpecReviews Playing the demand charges game is both genius and speaks to how comical they are in this case - if you can get around them with simply installing more meters, then their purpose wasn’t reducing demand, it was increasing revenue.
@@OutofSpecReviews Sorry Kyle. But it makes no sense long term to DCFC a batteries from other batteries.... Instead we need to follow China's lead for creating Battery Swapping standards....
Wow! Kyle, this is probably the most consequential video you’ve ever done. You’re spot on, when you say that the future of mass EV adoption is dependent on a viable business model for on-highway fast-charging. Unfortunately, the market has been weaned on the crack cocaine of “free” superchargers and government-funded installations. What it’s going to take is for fast-charging to become so profitable that owner-operators will be lined up in demand for units like the one you explained so well in the video (as popular and profitable as a slot-machine in a NV restaurant lobby!) Free-enterprise works wherever it’s tried, but the essential profitability means it should cost a LOT more to charge on a road trip than it does at home… even more per mile than the cost of road-tripping an M5 swilling high-octane gasoline! If the price of fast-charging is allowed to rise enough for profitability, there will be no shortage of fast-charging stations, and range anxiety will have been conquered forever.
The only thing that will coerce businesses to install fast chargers will be a tax write off the reason being is because most people aren't going to buy an ev until these 1 of these 2 things are fulfilled number 1 is increasing the range and getting the charge time down to 10 minutes or two have charging stations in every town like gas stations that is the only two ways you will get mass adoption besides giving business owners tax write off for installing them.
@@justinjones6810 Another perspective is that an EV is a car you can “refuel” in your own garage. You can always leave the house with a full tank, and at a fraction of the cost of gasoline. DC fast charging, on the other hand, is almost as expensive as gasoline, and only used for when you can’t recharge at home. They will never be on every corner- no one would want to pay triple the price of home charging. Apartment complexes will eventually have to install a plethora of Level 2 chargers (competition), but residents will be the ones who pay for them, not taxpayers.
I literally drove right by that charger last Saturday. Unfortunately I'm still waiting on a Rivian R1T. Nice to know that's the place to get it charged when I'm up there. I go to Estes Park about once a month. I have a Veteran Pass to RMNP, so I go there as much as I can. It never gets old.
13:45 In terms of profitability, I think we should recognize that DC fast charging really does follow the same model as gas stations. Gas stations do not make their money off of selling gasoline (maybe a couple cents per gallon profit), but rather, they make their money from selling other goods and services. Because DCFC session times closely align with food and snack stops, they make the most sense for convenience store and fast food business hosts with 10% to 20% margins on their onsite goods and services. At that point, the power should be sold as close to cost as possible, and as long as site usage is high enough, the demand fees broken up over the total amount of energy dispense become far easier to manage.
Yes yes yes. Why people don’t do this i have no idea. People are just looking a place to spend money while charging on a road trip. Tesla has several attempts about this as far I know. But those are really limited compared to the thousands of supercharger location they have. Circle K knows this as well (at least what I saw from Bjorn’s videos in Norway). If I had a gas station right now, I would put DC fast chargers to my station. It would boost the sales of the store. I believe the owner of this installation in this video also gets it, since he installed these chargers. Overall, I also believe that DC charging will be solved by this model. Sell kwh for the cost and profit from the stores.
@@suvari225 The big problem at this point is ROI. Tesla Supercharger usage has gotten high enough to justify the cost of installation, but the population of non-Tesla EVs required to do the same is probably still a year or two away. Of course, that problem would be solved almost instantly if Tesla releases a competent CCS1 adapter in North America.
I once looked at buying a convenience store franchise and the gasoline brand was paying 1.5 cents per gallon to the franchisee to manage the gas pumps. The only thing the franchisee owned was the stock inside the store and they were highly encouraged to offer sandwiches and coffee. I know when I stop to charge I often look for a nearby coffee shop, so it would translate well to EV's, since a $4-5 coffee is certainly a profit center.
@@kenmcclow8963 that is not the usual gas station model. I owned a gas station until last year when I retired. My gas prices were very competitive and yet I operated on a 25+ cent margin. I owned my property and could set whatever price I wanted to but one has to remain competitive with the market. Margins inside the C-Store are about 30-35 percent. Gas station with the real estate costs millions of dollars. Each 2 sided gas pump costs about $20,000 . In comparison 2 250 kw DC fast chargers cost upwards of $200,000. The economics of D/C fast charging are difficult for small businesses operators.
I'd like to see what rate plan they're on. around here, light commercial demand is calculated as your highest 15 minute average for the month, at $15/kW. so you can use 100kW for 15 minutes, or 100kW for 30 days, the demand charge is the same. then you pay per kWh as well (but at a much lower rate than a flat rate for residential/office). so you can really run up the bill if you use that 100kW for 15 minutes and then nothing for the rest of the month. on the other hand, if you can manage your demand (like with an on-site battery), you can use a lot of kWh for a pretty fair price. about half of our bill is demand charge. basically, the power company is charging you for the size of the generator you would need to run your site, with a bit of wiggle room for motor starting.
I work for a company that does EV Charging Station turnkey installations. We are in the process of becoming certified FreeWire resellers. Super excited to see this review of their product in the real world!
Good stuff. I think these could be a short term answer to quickly expanding dcfc for out of the way area's and those with crazy grid charges. If you can cover the chargers and installations on your channel. 👍🏻
It sounds like an electric tariffing issue... i.e. something which requires legislative or PUC action to better accommodate charging sites. The site owner shouldn't have to purchase separate metering just to work around conventional demand-charge tariffs. Just using storage to work-around a man-made issue like demand-tariffs is an obvious inefficiency in the system that government needs to work out. I do like the idea of having some energy storage on-site, in particular because that could be combined with solar panel arrays at that location to improve the economics for the site owner. -Matt
The issue with this is massive demand charging will make peak hour charging / home power needs compete, and brownouts occur. It’s hard to Find a happy median where the power company can provide the power needed, and DCFC unit owners don’t lose money.
Before you said it was $160k for the freewire unit I was contemplating what it would take to get my company to install something like this at our main office.I think we're better off with a regular ol' 220V 50A charger, thats good enough to top off my personal commute in the id.4 in about an hour and we can just have our own electricians install it for "free." $600 for an L2 charger is an easier sell than $160,000.
Further, you don't want to charge at high power for day to day use. It's hard on the batteries. You're exactly right that a good level 2 charger is what you want at work. You probably want a lot more than one of them. The cost of a single DCFC unit would buy you 266 L2 chargers.
@@4literv6 unlikely considering that there is an extra battery charge and discharge in the mix here. Also worth noting DC fast chargers still have inverters and the high currents involved probably produce quite a bit of waste heat.
@@JamesSeedorf no what I said is completely accurate. Instead of blatantly contradicting others go do the research for yourself! Home lvl1 charging can waste 40% of the energy and lvl2 can waste 25%. This is from actual owners of evs and tesla themselves listing charging losses with the epa document's they are required to file. 👍🏻
The last time I was in Estes park there were a couple 7kw L2 chargers downtown. That was it. It is critically important for EV drivers and enthusiasts to be willing to face the costs of charging. In many remote locations the 480v 3-phase power needed to power a typical charging station either isn't available or can only be accessed at great cost. This is a developing market and frankly nobody is making money on it. Having said all that it is critically important that we EV enthusiasts support congressional moves to fund charging infrastructure development. This is actually more important to the EV revolution than subsidies for electric car purchases. It is only once a national grid of charging stations exist that EV adoption can become universal.
I don't know why they don't build sheds to drive the cars under why your charging. It gets extremely hot or cold these days all around America put solar panels and Powercells/batteries out there to keep municipal bills down. People complain to EA all the time it's not charging the full speed and I always thought that was because of the power grid/ companies in the areas charging host a lot of money. Shedding over units with solar is the way to go.
Definitely lots of issues, but good thing is they are all surmountable. I think the key for consumer adoption will be a *CONSISTENT* charging experience at every DCFC. Most drivers are coming from gas vehicles, and every single pump is an identical experience. Simplifying this for drivers is key. They shouldn't need to watch a video or read an instruction manual just to start a charge. Other than that, construction is the other big hurdle - but that's similar for gas stations. There is little incentive to spend $100k+ to install charging when utilization is so low. I have a feeling that will change moving forward.
Having so many apps is obnoxious - if someone like Kyle doesn’t have the app, it’s clearly not very common and most people don’t want to install apps just to charge their car.
When was the last time you went to a gas pump and were charged for the time it took to pump the gas? All EV chargers should be charging (price) for the Kw!! Not all do.
Very informative video and on a topic you rightly point out, is not being discussed enough. I work for a municipality and I’m tasked with getting EVSE’s installed across our city and I’ve been avoiding working on DCFC’s because of the costs of installation, the economics of usage fees and demand charges by our utility. I’m truly hoping some of these issues will change in the not too distant future.
14:30 Electrify America has already started bundling Tesla PowerPacks with their site installations to reduce the impact of demand charges. The problem, of course, is that that doesn't necessarily help on sites with high peak usage. A basic four-charger EA site (roughly 1 MW output from two 350 kW and two 150 kW units) can drain a 232 kWh Tesla PowerPack in about 15 minutes, or four bundled PowerPacks in just 1 hour. So even with installing a bank of four Tesla PowerPacks, a basic EA site could run up demand fees a couple times a week during peak travel seasons. Essentially, there's no way that battery backups alone can offset demand fees with the upcoming crop and population of EVs.
It's a rare vehicle that can accept 350 kW, and even then it's only going to be for some number of minutes before the charging curve starts to drop. The problem I see here is the cost of the PowerPacks, not the demand charge. To eliminate demand charges, all they have to do is throttle the chargers during times of high demand.
I agree with this point. DC chargers are very expensive. Battery packs are very expensive. It makes sense that demand charges represent real costs to the electricity providers, and can not be reduced significantly. Selling convenience food, if I have a rough sense of the economics correct, is not going to make up for these costs. In the long term, if DC charger costs come down a lot (is there a reason to believe this will happen?), if battery pack costs come down a lot (there is some reason to believe this will happen), then maybe this will work. In the mean time we are using government grants to help build these chargers, but its not clear to me how the long term economics are going to work. So Kyle's idea to try to figure out how to do all this profitably is very interesting. Some of the charging networks are public with surprisingly high valuations. I wish them well, we need this to work out.
Makes sense. I saw that here in San Diego. A few months ago, Electrify America added a Tesla PowerPack to a nearby charging station, where there appear to be a total of 4 charging stalls.
The first thing you learn about gas stations is that they don't make any money selling gas. Gas is a commodity, like electricity, so customers shop based on price. Gas stations make their money selling snacks and beer. The obvious corollary to this for EV chargers would be coffee shops or quick-serve restaurants, since charging takes 20 minutes. I don't really understand why companies like Starbucks or McDonalds are not signing up to recruit a vast captive audience who would be grateful to have somewhere to hang out while they charge.
Here in Germany a lot of McD and BurgerKings have DC Fastcharging solutions. Not operated hey themseselves butbim guessing they will offer the CPO a good pricing. Groceries have a lot of typ2 for free. So that's the way it will works.
Yeah man exactly. I wondered that myself. Why won't someone build charging stations with an attached convenience store/restaurant? Doesn't make much sense to me.
Ionity got a lot of money from an US investor and the planning to build charging parks at undeveloped rest areas including bakery or small coffee shop. I see it everytime on my favorite charging park. 40 Tesla Stalls and 18 DC Fastvhargers for CCS and ChadeMo operated by an Baker who build an whole food bakery into this Park.. And it works. A lot of charging traffic, solar canope to reduce demand power, ac charging for good tariffs. The Problem, you must have the ba*** to start it.
I think our biggest problem to mass EV adoption is ignorance and skepticism. Nobody I know who owns an EV experiences range anxiety but every skeptic is quick to talk about range and charge problems. Folks who don't understand what it's like immediately think they're going to need to drive 1000 miles every day in an EV even though they can't remember the last time they went on such a trip.
Ok child, go take your EV to middle of nowhere Oklahoma where you are working locum for a month, staying in a hotel and there's no charging stations anywhere near you and tell me how that works out? My town is in a tri-city area with one of the cities being the headquarters to a Fortune 50 company, there is one Tesla Supercharging station serving the whole area and it is 15 minutes from my house. If just the apartment complex down the road from me had all electric cars it would be an unmitigated disaster. If the people that come in town and staying at hotels had electric cars and they needed to charge it would be a disaster. You need to grow up and live in the real world. What did you say, build more chargers, oh wait, my friends and I own most of the land around here, assuming we sell any to you, even garbage farmland will cost $10,000 an acre before installing everything you need to get up and running.
It really depends on the area. There are lots of places that simply don't have the infrastructure so range anxiety can be valid there. Since there is not enough infrastructure in these areas people won't buy EV. Since not a lot of people buy EV nobody feels incentivized to build up infrastructure. That's one of the problems that hopefully will solve itself with higher and higher popularity in areas that have a good existing infrastructure.
Very nice overview of the challenges. Please find and interview condominiums that have found a way forward. Even as the President of a condo association, it has been extremely hard to move forward. I continue to use adhoc solutions but really want a holistic approach. The biggest issues we face at my condo are: 1) limited power 2) deeded and non-deeded parking 3) billing for the power use 4) how to minimize costs for EV owners both for initial installation and recurring monthly costs
This is awesome love your continued charging content! The infrastructure is key... and power storage offset via battery is going to be KEY for those underserved by the local utilities!!!
It's frustrating and sad that fast charging is not economically viable for site hosts. If fast chargers don't pay for themselves, we won't see very many. Thanks to this site owner for his charity to the rest of the EV community!
I believe 2022 will be the breakout year for electric vehicles. I have been interested in an ev for some time now but really didn’t want the car version, now that compact SUV’s have hit the market I’m all in I have already pre ordered my Id4.
It's worth keeping in mind that gas stations make ZERO money selling gas. Pumps are expensive (particularly with regulatory compliance costs increasing all the time), and selling a commodity like gasoline has become basically a zero margin business. Gas stations live from attachment rates for the high-margin consumer goods sold in the stores. There's not much reason to expect charging to work differently. As for everything else, the experience sucks because it's all early adopters and there's no pressure to do it right. When ICE cars are banned (and that IS coming), I expect charging to magically get way better overnight. Norway is a preview, not an exception.
Gas stations make on average about 5 cents a gallon actually. Lottery pays a lot of the bills then the rest brings in the real profit. Gas stations make a lot of money, you don't spend millions building a station to not make money. LOL
This is very country dependant. For the UK, as per martyn’s interview with the boss of osprey, all that matters is the grid connection and the site, once he has those he has cornered the market in that area, as both are limited. Theres a reason why early charging companies were bought out by banks and oil companies, its a long term game of investment now, the chargers are chump change, they are counting the years till ICE is banned, and then they hold the charging cards.
Gonna be honest, didn’t understand most of the technical details in the video, but you were able to summarize it really well and its great to have attention on this issue. Usually, its either ignored or lumped into an EV hit-piece.
As a first time EV owner of 7 months with our Model Y who is eagerly anticipating a Rivian, this video hits my concerns exactly. I love the dependability of the supercharger network but I’m gambling, or going on faith, that the network outside of Tesla will be up to snuff by the time our Rivian arrives. At home - no issues. We are wired for 60-amp charging and have a high powered wall connector. However - when road-tripping with a 7k-lbs SUV with a 135kw battery full of kids and stuff, a 80amp level 2 charger ain’t gonna cut it. Can’t sit there for 2 hours to get 60 miles of range. And the DC fast charging network outside of Tesla just isn’t reliable right now. If there is a reason I cancel my order it isn’t the car - it’s the charging infrastructure- and that is a real shame.
Viability of CCS currently depends heavily on your region of the country. I just did a 4400 mile road trip in my ID.4 on CCS and it was just as easy as my previous Tesla.
That is great to hear and is reassuring. Curious, did you leverage the guidance in your ID4 to route you to chargers or leverage an app like plugshare? Did you mostly use Electrify America?
I think the best solution will be to install grid scale battery installations at DC charging sites and combine the advantages of both while completely getting rid of demand charges.
I owned a gas station before retiring in 2020 and I did look into installing a few D/C fast chargers, but the economics just did not make sense. A double sided gas pump unit costs about $20,000 which is about a 10th of what a 250 kw D/C fast charger would cost. My gas station made about 25 cents per gallon, so on an average fill up of 10 gallons would gross me about $2.50. About half the customers came into the convenience store to buy snacks/sodas. Gross margins inside the c-store are about 35% so i made a gross profit of about $5.00 of each customer spent about 5 minutes parked at the pump. As Kyle said. Even if the D/C fast chargers were provided for free, it would still non make any sense
the elephant in the room is that DCFC will never be as ubiquitous or as cheap as filling up gas. Purely on an economics basis, there will never be enough people stopping at DC fast chargers to create enough volume to make them profitable. I think on major routes with high volume, sure its going to be common and even profitable. But at random out of the way locations? It's going to be subsidized by the volume at other locations. This is why we truly do need large, national ownership of fast charging stations. The alternative would be for states to appropriate funds themselves possibly with federal grants, to put DC chargers at rest stops, truck stops, etc. But I still think we need the standardization that EA offers. It really, really needs to be totally standardized before attempting to solve any of the other problems. Make it so every EV works with every charger, every time, then worry about the money later.
Have had an EV since 2015 and have never used a DC fast charger. Tried once in ATL but it was not working. These will never make money, something like 85% of all EV charging is done at home. Tax payer $ and developer $ is the only way for this to be viable. The charger you at had a private guy put $200k into a black hole - he will never be able to justify maintenance and repair costs as his "investment" is a loss. Hope he has a separate business that can benefit from potential foot traffic. I also believe that charge times are the actual problem for EV drivers. Every road trip we take we always take the petrol as it is a HUGE time saver to have a 10 minute fill up take us 350+ miles. As opposed to an 80% charge after 40 minutes. Enjoy the content and approach
Another EV owner who doesn't realise that there are millions who live in homes where its not possible to charge a car. That is the real handicap facing EV adoption and, with the attitude of ignorance shown here, will be the thing that kills battery EV dead in its tracks.
@@SteveJones-om6ks . I never stated that and you know this or are an idiot - I did state that 85% plus DO charge at home. I will wait for your next dumb post
@@nosoupforyou425 Your comment you epic dickhead was that they wont make money because everyone charges at home. Thing is its 40% of motorists who have nowhere reliable to park their vehicles overnight not 15%. The chargers have to be in place before people will buy the EVs as well - if they cant tell how they will charge up reliably they wont even consider an EV. Will they moron?.
The rural county where I live has exactly three charging stations on the plugshare map. All are level 2, one is reserved for resort guests only, and the other two show reliability issues on the plugshare comments. This is in a county that is over 4200 km^2 and has about 30,000 people. EV charging has a long way to go.
Thanks for walking us through the concerns about public charging and sharing the costs of operating charging sites so we can appreciate what the owners need to consider (and become profitable for longer term sustainability, maintenance, upkeep and expansion of the charging network).
Great video! And very truth! Many countries on the world wants people to switch from ICE cars to EVs. But don't have the same idea with the charging imfrastructure. Here in Puerto Rico the Governor want the people to adopt EVs. But the charging infrastructure is a prehistoric one. In the whole island there are about 40 chargers, of those, about 10-15 are NEMA plugs, one CHADEMO 20+ kwh, and the rest 7.2 kwh. Only Tesla has two 75kwh chargers for the whole island, one in metro area, and one on the west side of the island. There are not so many EV cars, because people don't want to stay 3-4 hours in the car at 20+ miles/hour charging rate so they can have maybe 80-100 total miles of range to go back home. Only Tesla is growing, although is annoying to go to a screen only to do simple tasks as open a glove compartment, or to align the side mirrors. And the qrowth is due to their fast chargers. Only two of them, but the car will get about 100 miles in the time you go to rest room, eat something and have a little rest. That said, EV adoption here in Puerto Rico will not happen unless the shity charging infrastructure changes and grow. Thanks again for your video! Keep the good work!
Kyle - Great content and looking forward to more on this subject. My main gripe as a user, which you touched on, is why, in this day and age a road tripper needs to have a wallet full of cards and a phone full of apps to deal with payment to the various charging providers. Hope you will explore this further as part of your series.
This one had a credit card reader, but eventually the car / a third party (FORD PASS?) handles managing all the accounts for you. You just plug and charge.
Charged at this one today with my R1T. Didn't even need to remove my camping trailer. Found this video while charging and looking for more info on this site, very cool.
I've thought about hosting EV chargers at my place of business too. I can't imagine a way this becomes profitable either as it seems every commercially available unit are overpriced. Even the level 2 "adapters" are overpriced. To make matters worse, state incentives barely cover anything at all. They also require "open source" which I agree, but it removes the host from semi subsided units that lock into a particular payment ecosystem. These units also require the credit card processing "service" through them via 4g lte. Each unit, a separate data plan. They're all trying to make their own ecosystem further increasing cost. EVs also should be adopting a universal cable, imagine filling your ICE car with different nozzles or adapters.
So cool! I can't help but wonder if putting a solar canopy over the whole site would help offset some of the energy costs, especially since it could help charge that big battery? Is the main issue the marginal cost of the electricity used or is it the upfront capital costs that make the whole thing unprofitable? If the marginal cost of electricity is the big issue then getting 'free' electricity from the sun should help with that I would think. Then the only remaining issue would be capital costs of the setup and maintenance costs.
I love solar energy and have a fairly large home system consisting of 40 325 watt panels. On clear sunny days during the summer I generate about 75 kWh, which drops to an average of 40 kWh during the winter with shorter days and more cloud cover. Over the course of the year I generate more electricity than I consume but there’s no way I could charge a 75 kW EV without buying quote a bit of electricity from my public utility. It would take a lot of solar panels to power public a public EV charging station - many more than could be situated onsite.
To take that idea a step further, one could imagine a power company with a big solar and wind farm alongside a highway taking the logical step of installing a DCFC charger right there. With the energy being used so close to where it is being produced, you maximize efficiency by keeping transmission losses to a minimum. And, of course, whatever the solar and wind equipment produces that the car charger isn't using goes to grid, just as if the car charger weren't there. The catch is that, a parking lot right across the street from a wind farm might be lacking amenities. But, if you're talking about a 350kW charger with the typical vehicle not there for more than 10-15 minutes, you don't need much beyond a simple restroom and a coffee stand.
Finally! So glad you are focusing on charging, so many issues that need to be addressed and no one is talking about. From non-standard connections, apps & payment methods, capacity, & charge times, etc. these are and will be growing issues.
Great video. In Iowa, the electric utilities will be installing some of the DC fast chargers. That is one way to get DC fast charging without demand charges. Do you plan to cover utility-owned DC fast charging?
17:08 I thought that was energy at first as well, but I believe that might be actual charging power. Essentially, it's how much of the available power you're actually using, or how much available power is left to use. We might want to confirm that with Freewire.
I dipped my toe into the EV world by getting a PHEV this year. I've yet to successfully charge it at a public station. I've been driving and pumping my own gas for 35 years and I can count the number of times I've had a problem doing it on my fingers. Public EV chargers are a mess. They won't connect or are completely broken. They are blocked by ICE vehicles. They only have certain plugs or certain apps required. I really want to go all in on battery electric vehicles, but right now there's no way. I originally thought range anxiety would be my main concern, but in reality I'm more concerned about getting to a charger with a few miles to spare and finding it unable to charge.
I understand that, but I don't like the idea of a company that dictates what I can and can't do with my car that I purchased and own outright. I'm more likely to buy my BEV from a conventional manufacturer that isn't subject to flights of fancy.
@@CBR2200 Tesla lets you work on your own car. You can buy most parts from them. They just don't want shade tree mechanics working on the high voltage components, which TBH don't require much work in my experience. It will be interesting to see if other EV companies let you do things like take the battery apart and put a module in it.
Great technical video on how power from the grid is used in these higher-demand situations. I wonder how larger supercharging stations with high demand will pan out in metropolitan areas where charging infrastructure could be a limiting factor in how much power it can truly deliver to a DCFC lot.
Consider having similar batteries tied to the L2 stations and use their 35kwh to charge them. Then let those batteries distribute their energy to whatever charging station requires it.
Nice work! As a driver and electrical engineer myself, I'm very curious about what you find in your research. I've done some work looking into stations for the company I work for and the economics has been difficult, even for level 2 charging.
Great video. I think Freewire would be better with the batteries out of the unit, so you have a smaller stall (much like Tesla). We have similar demand charges in Australia, so seeing similar solutions. The other big issue is just access to power in small towns or even highway gas stations. And the utilities will often have big charges for infrastructure if you say need a new 5km high voltage cable built. In one case (Gundagai, NSW) Chargefox has installed batteries and has an agreement with Tesla that it can utilise the balance of their 500kW supply (not sure how demand charges are split)
It is not that people dont want EV's, the problem is the charging network. The government needs to provide subsedies to insetivise locations to install chargers. They also need to update the grid as the effect of those subsedies take effect. Standarization of plugs is also something that should be looked at.
Another issue not directly related to DCFC is the lack of amenities close by. Imho these stations need to be built like mini truck stops with small markets, fast food or sit down restaurant, bathrooms and maybe a lounge area. Shame on EA for always building at Walmarts or other big box stores. Walmart isn't what travelers need. I want to take a bio break, grab a sandwich and get back on the road.
As part of this topic can you talk about state laws around billing by kWh for non-utilities and how those laws are changing for EVSE specific installations?
Our fight is with the Public Utility Commissions of each state / etc. at least we can resell electricity in my state. In states it’s per minute, anyone who charges below the max rate gets screwed.
Completely agree that the site layout is as good as you can do to avoid additional grid charges and Freewire's offering is pretty cool. However as long as you need to download apps to charge its going to be a tech barrier for most. If they want to offer a discount by using the app that would be fine but its hard to beat a credit card swiper. Charging needs to be as easy as gas and ideally even easier for people to make the switch.
I wonder if freewire could or already does offer the ap on android auto or applecarplay? Then the car could have the ap enabled and do all the communicating once connected to the charger. Just like the tesla network has done since 2013 and recently the ea plug n charge feature. 🤔
Kyle, thanks for education on charging. Here in Florida, utilities will install L3 chargers selectively, but the operator is responsible for demand charges and that could break the economics. If a Lucid or Taycan is charging at the Freewire, does the charger ramp up DC voltage to 900, or is the 900v internal to the vehicle only made by 2-450v packs in series? We know L3 chargers adjust current flow, but are they smart enough to change voltage too at 400, 450, 800, & 900 as needed by various vehicles?
I live in NorthEast Wisconsin, and the charging infrastructure here is almost non-existent. I really think this is a huge growth opportunity for this region, but not seeing many in the works. I am planning on buying a Tesla Model 3, and road trips just to Northern WI are concerning to me. Closes supercharger is 25 mins away, and only has 4 stations. Most other options are a single charger at grocery stores or other businesses.
Yeah, we had to take our ICE to Door County (pre-Covid). There's no way EV's can become common in northern WI or MI, or parts of the smoky mountains. You can get there but then have to park on 120v for a few days if you want to get back home, and that isn't a vacation.
The future is in energy storage and solar canopies over the charging stations. As the batteries and solar panels prices hopefully keep getting more affordable and the charging stations will become more profitable
Kyle, excellent and insightful video. I feel that public utility companies shouldnt be barred from providing electric vehicle charging services. The state and Congressional level limitations placed on charging hosted by these PUs is ridiculous. China and Europe has a widespread public charging infrastructure and is YEARS ahead of the USA because of our lack of political will and party shenanigans. We need to catch up as a nation - part of that, I argue, is allowing PUs to perform charging activities. Looking forward to more videos on this hot topic.
the problem is that each public utility would try to do it their own way, whereas one or a few large national private chains will have a market incentive to standardize
That is expensive! Without ROI how do you expect to expand the charging network when incentives will be out? I agree with starting with just wall plugs, every car has its own charger, let's find a way to scale quickly public parkings to have tens of plugs with a locking and billing mechanism, let's make it cheap so ROI for slow chargers can be short and widely adopted at airports, night parkings, etc.
Slow charging while parked is the whole future. Consumer adoption isn't relevant when its mandated ie forced by banning polluting combusto carts from indoor garages, city centres, eventually all towns. By no means should demand charges be reduced to accommodate DC fast chargers. They can finance transmission to large dams and the higher rates to draw on those.
Kyle: great video! You could also have a separate discussion of downtime from broken charging stations and try to answer the question of who will pay for the maintenance of all the public charging. This is a real problem right now.
Great video! I totally geek out on the charging infrastructure problem so it's great to have this be a topic of discussion. From major stations like Tesla's Kettleman City Supercharger or Gridserve's Braintree charge hub, all the way down to a lowly 50kW post or even a 24kW DC wallcharger, I have a really hard time trying to figure out how the financials make sense and have a literal crap ton of questions. Would cheaper charging equipment make a difference or is it all demand charges? Can utility companies adapt to level the costs for chargepoint operators? Does it make sense for gas stations to have chargers? What's the ideal charging power / time per stop? What's the best station design? Travel plazas have chargers on the east coast but that's not a thing out west, why? What's going on with the national truck stop association (NATSO) and their EV charging? What's Tesla's charger uptime and how does that compare to EA, EVgo, etc? What's the challenge in keeping chargers working? Why don't fast food restaurant chains install chargers to get money from a captured audience? Why won't Chargepoint make their CPE250s actually output 62.5kW? Can a local electrician fix the chargers or does a tech have to come in from a big city and that's what takes so long?
I could probably answer a few of those questions here. Cheaper equipment can definitely make a difference because it is still very expensive. Even a basic 50 kW unit is $30,000 to $40,000, and 150 kW to 350 kW units cost $100k to $150k. So the equipment is expensive; however, based on documents published by Electrify America and EVgo, demand charges still far outweigh hardware and installation costs. A basic EA site with two 350 kW and two 150 kW chargers would cost at least $500,000 to $600,000 to install, but a $10 per kW demand fee means that if that 1 MW site was fully utilized even just 15 minutes in a month, EA would be paying $10,000 a month just in demand fees. Utilities certainly could waive demand fees for charging providers, but I think that might require new laws and regulations. I doubt they would do so voluntarily. As for gas stations having chargers, it might make economic sense. The biggest issue for gas stations would be turnover times. The typical dwell time for a customer at a gas station is only 7 minutes, so in theory, they would need the typical EV driver to buy three to four times as many goods as an ICEV driver to justify the space. The ideal time per stop will change by the person. Some people insist that they only want a 5 minute stop, whereas a number of people prefer longer. Personally, my preferred time stopped varies. On anything over a 500-mile trip, I prefer to have at least one longer (45 minute to 1 hour) stop where I can unwind and enjoy a sit-down meal. At most, I would only want to make two additional stops, and I'd prefer that they be no more than 5 to 10 minutes. Best station design is also subjective. Personally, I would say that as a minimum criteria, it needs to support all EV types and formats, including EVs that are pulling trailers. Some travel plazas in the West do have chargers. EA has a contract with Love's, and I'm really hopping to hear about other charging providers teaming up with the other travel plazas out here. EVgo claims an industry leading 98% uptime. I haven't seen Electrify America or Tesla publish any uptime numbers. The challenges in keeping chargers up and running seem pretty numerous, but I'd say you could fit them into buckets. A) Installation/technician problems; B) software compatibility issues; C) EV incompatibilities; D) interface design/user error; E) abuse and vandalism. How these break down will depend on a lot of factors. One of the reasons Tesla's Supercharger Network is perceived as more reliable is because Tesla has been able to eliminate more of those issues than the public charging providers. I think that most fast food restaurants are unaware of the benefits of installing chargers, and I'm sure that the complication and upfront costs are daunting. Moreso, most fast food chains actually lease the property, so it's really the property managers who need to be approached. The ChargePoint Express 250 are rated at 62.5 kW, specifically 156 A at 400 V. Most EVs capable of taking the full amperage will only see 55 kW to 60 kW of actual charging power because the current they accept will start to drop before reaching 400 V. Depending on how the spec sheet is interpreted, the 125 kW from pairing the stations might only be possible for 800 V architecture EVs. Otherwise, the actual charge rate will be limited to 200 A or roughly 70 kW to 80 kW of actual charging power.
It’s interesting anyone expects to spend 7 minutes at an electric recharge in the future. Tesla has been leading the field for these charges, and people still spend 30+ minutes going 0-80%. Should we keep lying to the public promising them a smooth transition to EV, when it has to completely change the way we travel? It will never be like a gas car.
as basic DCFC ‘phase 1’ is ending and we need to ramp up the number of chargers to support increase in EV users, they need to think more about load sharing and queuing mechanisms - two bays is simple, 20 bays less simple. We need filter lanes to ensure people don’t queue jump, which means more careful thought about layout of the charging area in a service station for example and some space reserved for queuing to not block other parking spots. For load sharing I’d like to see something like Kempower units that have a big ‘charge cabinet’ and then multiple head units that you can connect like 8 cars to, and then dynamically allocate power based on their demand. Car finished charge or slowed down at 90%? that power can go to the other cars - so overstay isn’t slowing other cars down, and lets you roll out more bays more affordably to help with capacity and lower queuing times
We are still in days equivalent to when road fuel was purchased in cans from shops. Petroleum fuel sales soon evolved into tanker distributed fuel to manual then full automatic dispensing fuel pumps. Electric charging needs everyone to change attitudes, especially the distribution networks. It may happen slowly but the investment is essential
It's time to tell the Chademo story with your adapter as we are approaching peak Chademo across the country. We recently did nearly 600 miles in a day from Lawrence KS to North side of Chicago with our Leaf Plus. All locations had multiple chademo. We did not need any EA stops! It was amazing....maybe not in terms of charging speed, but in terms of chademo availability. I couldn't have made this trip 2 years ago.
I just wrote a grant app specifying two of these FW units. This is the only viable DCFC municipalities can afford to operate. It is a $10k difference in demand/reactive peak costs by distribution PER YEAR compared to a 100kW unit next to it. The individual metering is really smart of the lot owner. Good on him for operating it. I would like to see his secondary rate schedule for pricing $$$. Hard to make money fast charging. You mentioned ADA/etc, I noticed the placement of the bollards and unit is awkward. It’s not accessible by wheelchair and the door is awkwardly blocked by the island. Would like to see the service size and spec of those mini 208V transformers.
Regarding payback - if you want to make better profit, you should offer other services too like food/toilets/drinks/car cleaning. Gas stations are also making good money on additional services and not the gas itself
Great video Kyle. Monthly Peak Demand charges are bad and suppress the use of electricity at a time when we need to be using more, not less, as we move away from fossil fuels and towards electricity. In my opinion, we should do the following everywhere, all countries. This discussion is about wires services, transmission and distribution which normally attract peak demand changes at the point of use. The cost of providing a reliable electricity network or circuit is approximately proportional to the maximum kW or kVA that the it is designed for. Therefore the most important aspect of load is what is the maximum coincident load in an area or on a single circuit. On that basis we should monitor and bill people for their electricity use during the top 100 30 min peak demand periods on the local network. That's just 50 hours a year that would set you your bill. Under that billing tariff, you could run all of those outlets at maximum power at say 2 am or 2 pm, and pay no extra for doing so, because at those times, the local demand is well below the normal annual peak demand. Conversely, if you are in one of those local peak demand periods, at say 6 pm on a cold night in February when the electricity network is working really hard, you simply throttle down the charging rate to match whatever you are comfortable paying for your wires charges. Yes, that inconveniences users who are charging at that time, but it allows them maximum charging for the other 8,710 hours per year; and it does not disadvantage the local electrical distribution company to do that. They will still get their money. This is where we need to get to get to for many good reasons.
Maybe worth waiting until you get a Rivian review, but you mentioned site layout with respect to Tesla. I haven’t come across any DCFC sites that are setup for pull-through or in any way that would support towing with an EV. Forcing folks to leave their trailer somewhere is a non-starter. Maybe this will be where truck stops will play a roll? Anyway, very cool video as I didn’t know anything about the Freewire units beforehand. Given the weird fee scheme the CO-funded sites are using, I’ll probably go out of my way to use this station vs the one at the visitor’s center from now on.
Fantastic video Kyle, I love your thoughts on this problem. You’re absolutely right that this is the number one challenge we’re looking at regarding EV adoption.
There's a solution to all of this DCFC issue, you know: on-site flywheel energy storage. Not only does it not increase peak demand from the grid, because it can charge at a much more relaxed rate over time, it doesn't compete for EV battery cells, either, and it can be made from earth abundant materials that aren't sourced from conflict zones or hostile government regimes. Companies like Zooz, née Chakratec, are driving this kind of innovation. I don't know of any other low grid demand DCFC solution like flywheels other than supercapacitors, but those tend to take up a lot more volume than flywheels for the same amount of energy.
It would be interesting to see the actual numbers behind it all. How much do they pay per kWh, what the demand charges are, and how they are billed. This is a slick setup with each bank of chargers being on their own meter. The other X factor with installing a charger is does it drive customers to their business, and how much does that count for. Also it would be interesting to get the perspective from EA as they stated that they have 100 locations with batteries. I’m sure there is no getting around demand charges for them. How does the economy work for them on a huge scale. With the EA case you can assume the chargers were free since it’s repaying dieselgate. Can they make money on the ongoing basis?
Very interested in free wire installation cost. Seems like it’s not feasible to make money. Seems like government grants will be needed. Maybe this type of technology will catch on to lower overall demand on the grid. Nice video!
My question is that as more and more EV's are put on the market, the stress on the charging network is not keeping up with demand. With stations so spread out on major highways, every EV driver is hitting the same stations. Just over thanksgiving the three stops I made were nearly full and thankfully I did not have to wait. When I did the same trip during Memorial day weekend I ended up having to wait 30 min at one station and 45 min at another station just to get a plug. Then you add in the charging times and I added nearly 3 hours to a 5.5 hour drive with my ICE car
tbh, we are over Tesla's poor quality and customer service. We are eager to move to another brand, but the ONLY reason we haven't is the Supercharger network. Once CSS charging becomes comparable to the Supercharging experience, we will happily switch brands. We rely on reviewers such as Out of Spec to keep us informed on how the CSS experience compares to Supercharging.
So, here's a scary proposition. If the Electrify America stations are actually losing money on every charge, but exist only due to the Dieselgate settlement, will they simply disappear once the money Volkswagen has been required to spend on it has been exhausted? Without EA, numerous Interstate corridors would instantly become impassible in an EV, at least without resorting to spending hours waiting for a level 2 charge. I hope this doesn't happen.
Utility Demand charges are not a new phenomenon, having been around long before DC Fast Charging was a thing. They are not universal either, very dependent on the state and local utility. As others have said, DC Fast Charging is not going to be profitable, but it actually could make for a great loss leader to get travelers in the door somewhere and spend money. Think Costco and their gas stations. With DCFC fill ups taking about what an average person spends eating lunch, there are obvious opportunities
Well what do you guys think? This has to be one of the most well thought out sites to avoid demand charges! Doesn’t hurt that it’s in a beautiful place either. At the end of the day, fueling cars at gas stations doesn’t make much money… but it doesn’t lose money to fill up tanks! In most cases high power DCFC loses significant money even if you got all of the hardware for free with complimentary installation… it’s a big problem folks. Can’t wait to share more details and more unique solutions like this install here.
@UC1AOTRbqUmDUb6oYYCD8NcA I don't entirely disagree with this sentiment but I think fast chargers are still important, especially after seeing what winter does to range in the northeast. I went from upstate NY to rhode island in my ID.4 to visit my friend and while the battery holds enough charge to make the trip out and back with only one charge stop, you REALLY have to strategically decide where to stop - the farther you go before charging, the more screwed you are if you get to the chargers and they're full or broken. I stopped once to charge each way because I wanted to check out the EA station in Chicopee Mass (and eat chick fil a for lunch) and then i also stopped at the auburn mall on the way back to make sure I had enough to easily get home. When you figure that batteries charge faster the lower they get so you WANT to run it down, but you don't want to run it below 20%, and you probably don't really want to fast charge above 60-70% in a commuting scenario because it slows down too much above that to be worth it, with all those rules considered, your ~200-230 mile first leg drops to like 150 miles per leg after that in ideal conditions.
I think there a lot of ~300 mile round trip commutes that people might do a few times a year that would benefit from easier-to-find chargers. Even if its just one or two DC charge stalls every 10-20 miles.
Kyle has proven that you can drive cross country in an EV without a lot of trouble but someone less experienced than him might get really frustrated on anything over 200 miles in a single direction on current EVs.
Edit: Ahh cool the guy I was responding to deleted his comment or got his account deleted or something, in retrospect I know why but that means I now look like I'm a crazy person replying to no one but Kyle. The sentiment of mr. jan 6 if that was his real name was "fast chargers don't matter because everyone can just charge at home." And thats what I think is largely true but not the whole truth.
@@Cowclops - Nah, I'll re-post it soon. It required some major editing
@@Cowclops - While I agree that HVDC will be important I don't believe DC Fast Charging is as big an impediment as it's being purported to be. Over 80% of EV owners charge at home. Many, if not most EV owners will NEVER need to use a public charger. Think about it. If you have an ICE vehicle and had a gasoline pump in your driveway how often would you need to visit a gasoline station? If you're like the vast majority of commuters in the US then you almost certainly drive less than 50 miles each day (the national average is only 30 miles), and you rarely ever need to drive more than 250 miles at any one time. If you have provisions to charge at home and have an EV with 250 miles or more of range (the average new EV achieves between 250 and 350 miles per charge), then you'll rarely if ever never need to stop at a public charging facility. When people drive by Tesla SuperCharging facilities and see lines they immediately think that waiting will be the new reality at all charging stations. This is nonsense. Those lines at Tesla charging stations are because many of those Tesla owners have lifetime Free charging. They're simply being cheapskates because if they had to pay to charge they'd be charging at home like everyone else. For the vast majority of EV owners the only time they'll need to use a public charger is when they are using their EV for the occasional long trip. Of course there are those living in apartments or condos that might also lack provisions to charge there. This is rapidly changing however as more and more condo and apartment complexes are installing chargers. As far as the inconveniences at those DC Fast chargers are concerned, if I'm only experiencing these small delays during those rare times when I need a public charger then I don't see why I should feel inconvenienced. If I was driving an ICE and had no choice but to use public refueling stations (typically once or twice a week), then I'd feel inconvenienced.
The real question is what happens when there are enough EVs where this location has to add 3-4 more of those units for $160k apiece. Of course the emissions for the batteries used in charging locations are never considered when measuring GHG emissions from BEVs, so that'll be something to think about. I'd be curious how long these batteries will last in a location that's constantly cycling the pack on a daily basis.
As to general charging questions, what happens when every house on the block in a neighborhood is running a L2 charger overnight? Are all residential grids setup to pull that much power that quickly? How about an apartment complex with 50 units and 50 parking spots with L2 chargers installed? How about the power plant? Will it be able to generate that much energy without starting up a natural gas peaker plant?
I may have missed it, but do you know what chemistry freewire is using?
You should absolutely interview the site host! We need to applaud those who spend the time/money/effort that the site host clearly has.
The biggest obstacles to EV Adoption is the following:
- Education
- Incentives
- Politics
- Education
This can be solved by main stream media doing commercials, 30 second segments, or brief mentions. "Oh yeah I don't even know what's it's like to get gas anymore, I don't have to pay for gas at all with my [insert EV], it saves me so much money and my fueling (charging) is done at home". Literally every comment section is full of people who think they get 500 miles out of their gas f-150 that they drive that far every day and that EV batteries need to be replaced after 5k and it'll cost 500k.
Education is literally 90% of the problem
- Incentives
Yeah they're around, but they need to STAY and not run out 3 months into the year only to have a 13 month long process of getting them back for the next year. Also not limited to specific criteria. It should be for ANY bev, not whatever "build back better" is trying to fix.
- Politics
No more "unions", no more pretending Tesla doesn't exist and that they basically kickstarted the technological evolution with EV's. No more playing favorites. You buy ANY EV and get incentives.
I've been telling people this for a long time. If the US cared that much to get everyone into EV's, we'd be there already. But the US is too involved with it's own politics, corrupt and money hungry government, and trying to get everyone to buy Ford or Chevy and nothing else.
If you already have a big battery inside the charging station the most obvious thing missing are solar panels.
there is a video from Santa Cruz Refuse on YT; they use solar to charge their FreeWire Boost unit for their EV trucks. they only have 208v electrical on site, they didn't have to upgrade to 480v service since the FreeWire doesn't need it and this was a good fit.
Yes! Solar panels mounted on a canopy over top where cars charging will be. That's a missing at many DCFC sites that gas stations have: a roof. Though at gas stations you have to stand there and hold the valve open.
Why would they? They'd need to charge more to cover that cost. Competition would render that site not used.
Even here in Norway, demand charges prohibit DC chargers to be established in locations with low usage. There is a proposal for a new regulation where any install using less than 100.000 kWh annually will not get demand charges. That would allow remote places (e.g. dominantly weekend usage) still to be financially viable. For more frequently used locations, there is still better economics here in paying the demand charges, than getting a battery buffer. But I suspect US demand charges are far higher.
I'm happy with the Tesla superchargers, but would like to see more hotels with level 2 chargers. Really like skipping the Supercharger at the end of the day, plugin to level 2 and start the next day with 90% charge.
I was going to add a smartass reply but you will learn in due time.
This is probably one of the most thought out DCFC / L2 installs I’ve ever seen
Totally agree!
@@OutofSpecReviews Playing the demand charges game is both genius and speaks to how comical they are in this case - if you can get around them with simply installing more meters, then their purpose wasn’t reducing demand, it was increasing revenue.
@@OutofSpecReviews Sorry Kyle. But it makes no sense long term to DCFC a batteries from other batteries.... Instead we need to follow China's lead for creating Battery Swapping standards....
@@nc3826 That’s not very viable with significantly less population and EV density
It's more and more common in Europe
Wow! Kyle, this is probably the most consequential video you’ve ever done. You’re spot on, when you say that the future of mass EV adoption is dependent on a viable business model for on-highway fast-charging. Unfortunately, the market has been weaned on the crack cocaine of “free” superchargers and government-funded installations. What it’s going to take is for fast-charging to become so profitable that owner-operators will be lined up in demand for units like the one you explained so well in the video (as popular and profitable as a slot-machine in a NV restaurant lobby!) Free-enterprise works wherever it’s tried, but the essential profitability means it should cost a LOT more to charge on a road trip than it does at home… even more per mile than the cost of road-tripping an M5 swilling high-octane gasoline! If the price of fast-charging is allowed to rise enough for profitability, there will be no shortage of fast-charging stations, and range anxiety will have been conquered forever.
The only thing that will coerce businesses to install fast chargers will be a tax write off the reason being is because most people aren't going to buy an ev until these 1 of these 2 things are fulfilled number 1 is increasing the range and getting the charge time down to 10 minutes or two have charging stations in every town like gas stations that is the only two ways you will get mass adoption besides giving business owners tax write off for installing them.
@@justinjones6810 Another perspective is that an EV is a car you can “refuel” in your own garage. You can always leave the house with a full tank, and at a fraction of the cost of gasoline. DC fast charging, on the other hand, is almost as expensive as gasoline, and only used for when you can’t recharge at home. They will never be on every corner- no one would want to pay triple the price of home charging. Apartment complexes will eventually have to install a plethora of Level 2 chargers (competition), but residents will be the ones who pay for them, not taxpayers.
I literally drove right by that charger last Saturday. Unfortunately I'm still waiting on a Rivian R1T. Nice to know that's the place to get it charged when I'm up there. I go to Estes Park about once a month. I have a Veteran Pass to RMNP, so I go there as much as I can. It never gets old.
13:45 In terms of profitability, I think we should recognize that DC fast charging really does follow the same model as gas stations. Gas stations do not make their money off of selling gasoline (maybe a couple cents per gallon profit), but rather, they make their money from selling other goods and services. Because DCFC session times closely align with food and snack stops, they make the most sense for convenience store and fast food business hosts with 10% to 20% margins on their onsite goods and services.
At that point, the power should be sold as close to cost as possible, and as long as site usage is high enough, the demand fees broken up over the total amount of energy dispense become far easier to manage.
Yes yes yes. Why people don’t do this i have no idea. People are just looking a place to spend money while charging on a road trip. Tesla has several attempts about this as far I know. But those are really limited compared to the thousands of supercharger location they have.
Circle K knows this as well (at least what I saw from Bjorn’s videos in Norway).
If I had a gas station right now, I would put DC fast chargers to my station. It would boost the sales of the store.
I believe the owner of this installation in this video also gets it, since he installed these chargers.
Overall, I also believe that DC charging will be solved by this model. Sell kwh for the cost and profit from the stores.
@@suvari225 The big problem at this point is ROI. Tesla Supercharger usage has gotten high enough to justify the cost of installation, but the population of non-Tesla EVs required to do the same is probably still a year or two away. Of course, that problem would be solved almost instantly if Tesla releases a competent CCS1 adapter in North America.
I once looked at buying a convenience store franchise and the gasoline brand was paying 1.5 cents per gallon to the franchisee to manage the gas pumps. The only thing the franchisee owned was the stock inside the store and they were highly encouraged to offer sandwiches and coffee. I know when I stop to charge I often look for a nearby coffee shop, so it would translate well to EV's, since a $4-5 coffee is certainly a profit center.
@@kenmcclow8963 that is not the usual gas station model. I owned a gas station until last year when I retired. My gas prices were very competitive and yet I operated on a 25+ cent margin. I owned my property and could set whatever price I wanted to but one has to remain competitive with the market. Margins inside the C-Store are about 30-35 percent. Gas station with the real estate costs millions of dollars. Each 2 sided gas pump costs about $20,000 . In comparison 2 250 kw DC fast chargers cost upwards of $200,000.
The economics of D/C fast charging are difficult for small businesses operators.
I'd like to see what rate plan they're on.
around here, light commercial demand is calculated as your highest 15 minute average for the month, at $15/kW. so you can use 100kW for 15 minutes, or 100kW for 30 days, the demand charge is the same. then you pay per kWh as well (but at a much lower rate than a flat rate for residential/office). so you can really run up the bill if you use that 100kW for 15 minutes and then nothing for the rest of the month. on the other hand, if you can manage your demand (like with an on-site battery), you can use a lot of kWh for a pretty fair price. about half of our bill is demand charge.
basically, the power company is charging you for the size of the generator you would need to run your site, with a bit of wiggle room for motor starting.
I work for a company that does EV Charging Station turnkey installations. We are in the process of becoming certified FreeWire resellers.
Super excited to see this review of their product in the real world!
Good stuff. I think these could be a short term answer to quickly expanding dcfc for out of the way area's and those with crazy grid charges.
If you can cover the chargers and installations on your channel. 👍🏻
It sounds like an electric tariffing issue... i.e. something which requires legislative or PUC action to better accommodate charging sites. The site owner shouldn't have to purchase separate metering just to work around conventional demand-charge tariffs. Just using storage to work-around a man-made issue like demand-tariffs is an obvious inefficiency in the system that government needs to work out.
I do like the idea of having some energy storage on-site, in particular because that could be combined with solar panel arrays at that location to improve the economics for the site owner.
-Matt
The issue with this is massive demand charging will make peak hour charging / home power needs compete, and brownouts occur. It’s hard to
Find a happy median where the power company can provide the power needed, and DCFC unit owners don’t lose money.
Before you said it was $160k for the freewire unit I was contemplating what it would take to get my company to install something like this at our main office.I think we're better off with a regular ol' 220V 50A charger, thats good enough to top off my personal commute in the id.4 in about an hour and we can just have our own electricians install it for "free." $600 for an L2 charger is an easier sell than $160,000.
Further, you don't want to charge at high power for day to day use. It's hard on the batteries. You're exactly right that a good level 2 charger is what you want at work. You probably want a lot more than one of them. The cost of a single DCFC unit would buy you 266 L2 chargers.
@@incognitotorpedo42 you waste more energy though on lvl1&2 ac charging thanks to inverter conversion losses though.
@@4literv6 unlikely considering that there is an extra battery charge and discharge in the mix here. Also worth noting DC fast chargers still have inverters and the high currents involved probably produce quite a bit of waste heat.
@@JamesSeedorf no what I said is completely accurate. Instead of blatantly contradicting others go do the research for yourself!
Home lvl1 charging can waste 40% of the energy and lvl2 can waste 25%. This is from actual owners of evs and tesla themselves listing charging losses with the epa document's they are required to file. 👍🏻
First time I hear a TH-camr talk about accessibility at the charging stations. Love you Kyle.
Alyssa: Please take me to a nice place where we can hang out and talk about good stuff.
Kyle: Say no more!
Accurate
The last time I was in Estes park there were a couple 7kw L2 chargers downtown. That was it.
It is critically important for EV drivers and enthusiasts to be willing to face the costs of charging. In many remote locations the 480v 3-phase power needed to power a typical charging station either isn't available or can only be accessed at great cost. This is a developing market and frankly nobody is making money on it.
Having said all that it is critically important that we EV enthusiasts support congressional moves to fund charging infrastructure development. This is actually more important to the EV revolution than subsidies for electric car purchases. It is only once a national grid of charging stations exist that EV adoption can become universal.
"Check that out-" Super ultra mega close-up of Kyle's finger XD
I don't know why they don't build sheds to drive the cars under why your charging. It gets extremely hot or cold these days all around America put solar panels and Powercells/batteries out there to keep municipal bills down. People complain to EA all the time it's not charging the full speed and I always thought that was because of the power grid/ companies in the areas charging host a lot of money. Shedding over units with solar is the way to go.
$$$$$
Definitely lots of issues, but good thing is they are all surmountable.
I think the key for consumer adoption will be a *CONSISTENT* charging experience at every DCFC. Most drivers are coming from gas vehicles, and every single pump is an identical experience. Simplifying this for drivers is key. They shouldn't need to watch a video or read an instruction manual just to start a charge.
Other than that, construction is the other big hurdle - but that's similar for gas stations. There is little incentive to spend $100k+ to install charging when utilization is so low. I have a feeling that will change moving forward.
Having so many apps is obnoxious - if someone like Kyle doesn’t have the app, it’s clearly not very common and most people don’t want to install apps just to charge their car.
@@brandenflasch roaming is helping this a ton. Ideally you'd only need one app to pay, or scan a QR code and pay without an account.
When was the last time you went to a gas pump and were charged for the time it took to pump the gas? All EV chargers should be charging (price) for the Kw!! Not all do.
Very informative video and on a topic you rightly point out, is not being discussed enough. I work for a municipality and I’m tasked with getting EVSE’s installed across our city and I’ve been avoiding working on DCFC’s because of the costs of installation, the economics of usage fees and demand charges by our utility. I’m truly hoping some of these issues will change in the not too distant future.
14:30 Electrify America has already started bundling Tesla PowerPacks with their site installations to reduce the impact of demand charges. The problem, of course, is that that doesn't necessarily help on sites with high peak usage. A basic four-charger EA site (roughly 1 MW output from two 350 kW and two 150 kW units) can drain a 232 kWh Tesla PowerPack in about 15 minutes, or four bundled PowerPacks in just 1 hour. So even with installing a bank of four Tesla PowerPacks, a basic EA site could run up demand fees a couple times a week during peak travel seasons. Essentially, there's no way that battery backups alone can offset demand fees with the upcoming crop and population of EVs.
It's a rare vehicle that can accept 350 kW, and even then it's only going to be for some number of minutes before the charging curve starts to drop. The problem I see here is the cost of the PowerPacks, not the demand charge. To eliminate demand charges, all they have to do is throttle the chargers during times of high demand.
I agree with this point. DC chargers are very expensive. Battery packs are very expensive. It makes sense that demand charges represent real costs to the electricity providers, and can not be reduced significantly. Selling convenience food, if I have a rough sense of the economics correct, is not going to make up for these costs.
In the long term, if DC charger costs come down a lot (is there a reason to believe this will happen?), if battery pack costs come down a lot (there is some reason to believe this will happen), then maybe this will work. In the mean time we are using government grants to help build these chargers, but its not clear to me how the long term economics are going to work.
So Kyle's idea to try to figure out how to do all this profitably is very interesting. Some of the charging networks are public with surprisingly high valuations. I wish them well, we need this to work out.
Makes sense. I saw that here in San Diego. A few months ago, Electrify America added a Tesla PowerPack to a nearby charging station, where there appear to be a total of 4 charging stalls.
The first thing you learn about gas stations is that they don't make any money selling gas. Gas is a commodity, like electricity, so customers shop based on price.
Gas stations make their money selling snacks and beer. The obvious corollary to this for EV chargers would be coffee shops or quick-serve restaurants, since charging takes 20 minutes. I don't really understand why companies like Starbucks or McDonalds are not signing up to recruit a vast captive audience who would be grateful to have somewhere to hang out while they charge.
Here in Germany a lot of McD and BurgerKings have DC Fastcharging solutions. Not operated hey themseselves butbim guessing they will offer the CPO a good pricing. Groceries have a lot of typ2 for free. So that's the way it will works.
They at least don’t lose money every time they fill up - which is the case for nearly all non buffer DCFC charging in the US
Yeah man exactly. I wondered that myself. Why won't someone build charging stations with an attached convenience store/restaurant? Doesn't make much sense to me.
Ionity got a lot of money from an US investor and the planning to build charging parks at undeveloped rest areas including bakery or small coffee shop. I see it everytime on my favorite charging park. 40 Tesla Stalls and 18 DC Fastvhargers for CCS and ChadeMo operated by an Baker who build an whole food bakery into this Park.. And it works. A lot of charging traffic, solar canope to reduce demand power, ac charging for good tariffs. The Problem, you must have the ba*** to start it.
In Pittsburgh, evgo seems to have all their chargers at dunkin. It doesn’t seem any are really fast chargers tho.
I think our biggest problem to mass EV adoption is ignorance and skepticism. Nobody I know who owns an EV experiences range anxiety but every skeptic is quick to talk about range and charge problems. Folks who don't understand what it's like immediately think they're going to need to drive 1000 miles every day in an EV even though they can't remember the last time they went on such a trip.
Ok child, go take your EV to middle of nowhere Oklahoma where you are working locum for a month, staying in a hotel and there's no charging stations anywhere near you and tell me how that works out? My town is in a tri-city area with one of the cities being the headquarters to a Fortune 50 company, there is one Tesla Supercharging station serving the whole area and it is 15 minutes from my house. If just the apartment complex down the road from me had all electric cars it would be an unmitigated disaster. If the people that come in town and staying at hotels had electric cars and they needed to charge it would be a disaster. You need to grow up and live in the real world. What did you say, build more chargers, oh wait, my friends and I own most of the land around here, assuming we sell any to you, even garbage farmland will cost $10,000 an acre before installing everything you need to get up and running.
EVs don’t have to work for everyone all at once to work well for many now. Let’s work on that.
It really depends on the area. There are lots of places that simply don't have the infrastructure so range anxiety can be valid there. Since there is not enough infrastructure in these areas people won't buy EV. Since not a lot of people buy EV nobody feels incentivized to build up infrastructure. That's one of the problems that hopefully will solve itself with higher and higher popularity in areas that have a good existing infrastructure.
Very nice overview of the challenges. Please find and interview condominiums that have found a way forward. Even as the President of a condo association, it has been extremely hard to move forward. I continue to use adhoc solutions but really want a holistic approach. The biggest issues we face at my condo are:
1) limited power
2) deeded and non-deeded parking
3) billing for the power use
4) how to minimize costs for EV owners both for initial installation and recurring monthly costs
This is awesome love your continued charging content! The infrastructure is key... and power storage offset via battery is going to be KEY for those underserved by the local utilities!!!
It's frustrating and sad that fast charging is not economically viable for site hosts. If fast chargers don't pay for themselves, we won't see very many. Thanks to this site owner for his charity to the rest of the EV community!
I believe 2022 will be the breakout year for electric vehicles. I have been interested in an ev for some time now but really didn’t want the car version, now that compact SUV’s have hit the market I’m all in I have already pre ordered my Id4.
It's worth keeping in mind that gas stations make ZERO money selling gas. Pumps are expensive (particularly with regulatory compliance costs increasing all the time), and selling a commodity like gasoline has become basically a zero margin business. Gas stations live from attachment rates for the high-margin consumer goods sold in the stores. There's not much reason to expect charging to work differently.
As for everything else, the experience sucks because it's all early adopters and there's no pressure to do it right. When ICE cars are banned (and that IS coming), I expect charging to magically get way better overnight. Norway is a preview, not an exception.
Gas stations make on average about 5 cents a gallon actually. Lottery pays a lot of the bills then the rest brings in the real profit. Gas stations make a lot of money, you don't spend millions building a station to not make money. LOL
@@venom5809 Gas station owners are not poor.
The screen on that charger is massive. I could watch a movie on it.
Freaking love Estes Park. What an awesome installation!! Thanks for the great video Kyle.
This is very country dependant. For the UK, as per martyn’s interview with the boss of osprey, all that matters is the grid connection and the site, once he has those he has cornered the market in that area, as both are limited.
Theres a reason why early charging companies were bought out by banks and oil companies, its a long term game of investment now, the chargers are chump change, they are counting the years till ICE is banned, and then they hold the charging cards.
Man I wish those on charge of the new monies being allocated by the infrastructure bill to build out the charging grid talk to people like Kyle.
A video on charging station layouts would be awesome
I’m working on one of these. Creating ADA Compliant access to EVSE’s and making them safe from traffic is extremely challenging.
Gonna be honest, didn’t understand most of the technical details in the video, but you were able to summarize it really well and its great to have attention on this issue. Usually, its either ignored or lumped into an EV hit-piece.
As a first time EV owner of 7 months with our Model Y who is eagerly anticipating a Rivian, this video hits my concerns exactly. I love the dependability of the supercharger network but I’m gambling, or going on faith, that the network outside of Tesla will be up to snuff by the time our Rivian arrives. At home - no issues. We are wired for 60-amp charging and have a high powered wall connector. However - when road-tripping with a 7k-lbs SUV with a 135kw battery full of kids and stuff, a 80amp level 2 charger ain’t gonna cut it. Can’t sit there for 2 hours to get 60 miles of range. And the DC fast charging network outside of Tesla just isn’t reliable right now. If there is a reason I cancel my order it isn’t the car - it’s the charging infrastructure- and that is a real shame.
Viability of CCS currently depends heavily on your region of the country. I just did a 4400 mile road trip in my ID.4 on CCS and it was just as easy as my previous Tesla.
That is great to hear and is reassuring. Curious, did you leverage the guidance in your ID4 to route you to chargers or leverage an app like plugshare? Did you mostly use Electrify America?
I think the best solution will be to install grid scale battery installations at DC charging sites and combine the advantages of both while completely getting rid of demand charges.
I owned a gas station before retiring in 2020 and I did look into installing a few D/C fast chargers, but the economics just did not make sense. A double sided gas pump unit costs about $20,000 which is about a 10th of what a 250 kw D/C fast charger would cost. My gas station made about 25 cents per gallon, so on an average fill up of 10 gallons would gross me about $2.50. About half the customers came into the convenience store to buy snacks/sodas. Gross margins inside the c-store are about 35% so i made a gross profit of about $5.00 of each customer spent about 5 minutes parked at the pump. As Kyle said. Even if the D/C fast chargers were provided for free, it would still non make any sense
Amazing real world context… thx for sharing!
the elephant in the room is that DCFC will never be as ubiquitous or as cheap as filling up gas. Purely on an economics basis, there will never be enough people stopping at DC fast chargers to create enough volume to make them profitable. I think on major routes with high volume, sure its going to be common and even profitable. But at random out of the way locations? It's going to be subsidized by the volume at other locations. This is why we truly do need large, national ownership of fast charging stations. The alternative would be for states to appropriate funds themselves possibly with federal grants, to put DC chargers at rest stops, truck stops, etc. But I still think we need the standardization that EA offers. It really, really needs to be totally standardized before attempting to solve any of the other problems. Make it so every EV works with every charger, every time, then worry about the money later.
Excellent video, and great insight into the complexities of fast charging.
Love to hear charging getting some attention!
Have had an EV since 2015 and have never used a DC fast charger. Tried once in ATL but it was not working. These will never make money, something like 85% of all EV charging is done at home. Tax payer $ and developer $ is the only way for this to be viable. The charger you at had a private guy put $200k into a black hole - he will never be able to justify maintenance and repair costs as his "investment" is a loss. Hope he has a separate business that can benefit from potential foot traffic. I also believe that charge times are the actual problem for EV drivers. Every road trip we take we always take the petrol as it is a HUGE time saver to have a 10 minute fill up take us 350+ miles. As opposed to an 80% charge after 40 minutes. Enjoy the content and approach
Another EV owner who doesn't realise that there are millions who live in homes where its not possible to charge a car. That is the real handicap facing EV adoption and, with the attitude of ignorance shown here, will be the thing that kills battery EV dead in its tracks.
@@SteveJones-om6ks "attitude of ignorance shown here" or inability to discuss without attacking proving arrogance and false sense of superiority?
@@nosoupforyou425 I'm not the one who stated everyone can charge at home moron. Wake up.
@@SteveJones-om6ks . I never stated that and you know this or are an idiot - I did state that 85% plus DO charge at home. I will wait for your next dumb post
@@nosoupforyou425 Your comment you epic dickhead was that they wont make money because everyone charges at home. Thing is its 40% of motorists who have nowhere reliable to park their vehicles overnight not 15%. The chargers have to be in place before people will buy the EVs as well - if they cant tell how they will charge up reliably they wont even consider an EV. Will they moron?.
The rural county where I live has exactly three charging stations on the plugshare map. All are level 2, one is reserved for resort guests only, and the other two show reliability issues on the plugshare comments. This is in a county that is over 4200 km^2 and has about 30,000 people. EV charging has a long way to go.
Thanks for walking us through the concerns about public charging and sharing the costs of operating charging sites so we can appreciate what the owners need to consider (and become profitable for longer term sustainability, maintenance, upkeep and expansion of the charging network).
We have a few of these FreeWire stations in Tulsa. They’re free to use which is pretty awesome 👍
Great video! And very truth! Many countries on the world wants people to switch from ICE cars to EVs. But don't have the same idea with the charging imfrastructure. Here in Puerto Rico the Governor want the people to adopt EVs. But the charging infrastructure is a prehistoric one. In the whole island there are about 40 chargers, of those, about 10-15 are NEMA plugs, one CHADEMO 20+ kwh, and the rest 7.2 kwh. Only Tesla has two 75kwh chargers for the whole island, one in metro area, and one on the west side of the island. There are not so many EV cars, because people don't want to stay 3-4 hours in the car at 20+ miles/hour charging rate so they can have maybe 80-100 total miles of range to go back home. Only Tesla is growing, although is annoying to go to a screen only to do simple tasks as open a glove compartment, or to align the side mirrors. And the qrowth is due to their fast chargers. Only two of them, but the car will get about 100 miles in the time you go to rest room, eat something and have a little rest. That said, EV adoption here in Puerto Rico will not happen unless the shity charging infrastructure changes and grow. Thanks again for your video! Keep the good work!
Dude you make awesome videos. The technical details are superb. Thanks for all the research you put into these.
Kyle - Great content and looking forward to more on this subject. My main gripe as a user, which you touched on, is why, in this day and age a road tripper needs to have a wallet full of cards and a phone full of apps to deal with payment to the various charging providers. Hope you will explore this further as part of your series.
It looked like it had a credit card reader on it?
This one had a credit card reader, but eventually the car / a third party (FORD PASS?) handles managing all the accounts for you. You just plug and charge.
I like the idea, but I think that they could add some solar power to these units. Plus, it would give needed cover for people.
It's more upfront money. At least if they already have a battery, they'd be able to store energy during the day, so that would be good.
Charged at this one today with my R1T. Didn't even need to remove my camping trailer. Found this video while charging and looking for more info on this site, very cool.
I've thought about hosting EV chargers at my place of business too.
I can't imagine a way this becomes profitable either as it seems every commercially available unit are overpriced. Even the level 2 "adapters" are overpriced.
To make matters worse, state incentives barely cover anything at all. They also require "open source" which I agree, but it removes the host from semi subsided units that lock into a particular payment ecosystem. These units also require the credit card processing "service" through them via 4g lte. Each unit, a separate data plan. They're all trying to make their own ecosystem further increasing cost. EVs also should be adopting a universal cable, imagine filling your ICE car with different nozzles or adapters.
So cool! I can't help but wonder if putting a solar canopy over the whole site would help offset some of the energy costs, especially since it could help charge that big battery? Is the main issue the marginal cost of the electricity used or is it the upfront capital costs that make the whole thing unprofitable? If the marginal cost of electricity is the big issue then getting 'free' electricity from the sun should help with that I would think. Then the only remaining issue would be capital costs of the setup and maintenance costs.
I love solar energy and have a fairly large home system consisting of 40 325 watt panels. On clear sunny days during the summer I generate about 75 kWh, which drops to an average of 40 kWh during the winter with shorter days and more cloud cover. Over the course of the year I generate more electricity than I consume but there’s no way I could charge a 75 kW EV without buying quote a bit of electricity from my public utility. It would take a lot of solar panels to power public a public EV charging station - many more than could be situated onsite.
To take that idea a step further, one could imagine a power company with a big solar and wind farm alongside a highway taking the logical step of installing a DCFC charger right there. With the energy being used so close to where it is being produced, you maximize efficiency by keeping transmission losses to a minimum. And, of course, whatever the solar and wind equipment produces that the car charger isn't using goes to grid, just as if the car charger weren't there.
The catch is that, a parking lot right across the street from a wind farm might be lacking amenities. But, if you're talking about a 350kW charger with the typical vehicle not there for more than 10-15 minutes, you don't need much beyond a simple restroom and a coffee stand.
Thanks for covering the Freewire charger in-depth, I always wanted to know more about this charger and how it worked.
Finally! So glad you are focusing on charging, so many issues that need to be addressed and no one is talking about. From non-standard connections, apps & payment methods, capacity, & charge times, etc. these are and will be growing issues.
Great video. In Iowa, the electric utilities will be installing some of the DC fast chargers. That is one way to get DC fast charging without demand charges. Do you plan to cover utility-owned DC fast charging?
I would like to know about this as well!
17:08 I thought that was energy at first as well, but I believe that might be actual charging power. Essentially, it's how much of the available power you're actually using, or how much available power is left to use. We might want to confirm that with Freewire.
I dipped my toe into the EV world by getting a PHEV this year. I've yet to successfully charge it at a public station. I've been driving and pumping my own gas for 35 years and I can count the number of times I've had a problem doing it on my fingers. Public EV chargers are a mess. They won't connect or are completely broken. They are blocked by ICE vehicles. They only have certain plugs or certain apps required. I really want to go all in on battery electric vehicles, but right now there's no way. I originally thought range anxiety would be my main concern, but in reality I'm more concerned about getting to a charger with a few miles to spare and finding it unable to charge.
I understand that, but I don't like the idea of a company that dictates what I can and can't do with my car that I purchased and own outright. I'm more likely to buy my BEV from a conventional manufacturer that isn't subject to flights of fancy.
@@CBR2200 Tesla lets you work on your own car. You can buy most parts from them. They just don't want shade tree mechanics working on the high voltage components, which TBH don't require much work in my experience. It will be interesting to see if other EV companies let you do things like take the battery apart and put a module in it.
Great technical video on how power from the grid is used in these higher-demand situations. I wonder how larger supercharging stations with high demand will pan out in metropolitan areas where charging infrastructure could be a limiting factor in how much power it can truly deliver to a DCFC lot.
Consider having similar batteries tied to the L2 stations and use their 35kwh to charge them. Then let those batteries distribute their energy to whatever charging station requires it.
Nice work! As a driver and electrical engineer myself, I'm very curious about what you find in your research. I've done some work looking into stations for the company I work for and the economics has been difficult, even for level 2 charging.
Level 1 charging for employees is much easier to provide and is significantly easier to make work in existing 3 phase panels.
Great video.
I think Freewire would be better with the batteries out of the unit, so you have a smaller stall (much like Tesla).
We have similar demand charges in Australia, so seeing similar solutions.
The other big issue is just access to power in small towns or even highway gas stations. And the utilities will often have big charges for infrastructure if you say need a new 5km high voltage cable built.
In one case (Gundagai, NSW) Chargefox has installed batteries and has an agreement with Tesla that it can utilise the balance of their 500kW supply (not sure how demand charges are split)
It is not that people dont want EV's, the problem is the charging network.
The government needs to provide subsedies to insetivise locations to install chargers.
They also need to update the grid as the effect of those subsedies take effect.
Standarization of plugs is also something that should be looked at.
About time to talk about demand charges. You should get Tom to talk about it from a site owner perspective.
Another issue not directly related to DCFC is the lack of amenities close by. Imho these stations need to be built like mini truck stops with small markets, fast food or sit down restaurant, bathrooms and maybe a lounge area. Shame on EA for always building at Walmarts or other big box stores. Walmart isn't what travelers need. I want to take a bio break, grab a sandwich and get back on the road.
As part of this topic can you talk about state laws around billing by kWh for non-utilities and how those laws are changing for EVSE specific installations?
Our fight is with the Public Utility Commissions of each state / etc. at least we can resell electricity in my state. In states it’s per minute, anyone who charges below the max rate gets screwed.
Surprised the owner didn’t spend another 50 k installing solar
This might be your most interesting video yet! ...and you have a lot of good ones
Completely agree that the site layout is as good as you can do to avoid additional grid charges and Freewire's offering is pretty cool. However as long as you need to download apps to charge its going to be a tech barrier for most. If they want to offer a discount by using the app that would be fine but its hard to beat a credit card swiper. Charging needs to be as easy as gas and ideally even easier for people to make the switch.
I wonder if freewire could or already does offer the ap on android auto or applecarplay? Then the car could have the ap enabled and do all the communicating once connected to the charger. Just like the tesla network has done since 2013 and recently the ea plug n charge feature. 🤔
At the very least they should have vending machines there.
Kyle, thanks for education on charging. Here in Florida, utilities will install L3 chargers selectively, but the operator is responsible for demand charges and that could break the economics. If a Lucid or Taycan is charging at the Freewire, does the charger ramp up DC voltage to 900, or is the 900v internal to the vehicle only made by 2-450v packs in series?
We know L3 chargers adjust current flow, but are they smart enough to change voltage too at 400, 450, 800, & 900 as needed by various vehicles?
I live in NorthEast Wisconsin, and the charging infrastructure here is almost non-existent. I really think this is a huge growth opportunity for this region, but not seeing many in the works. I am planning on buying a Tesla Model 3, and road trips just to Northern WI are concerning to me. Closes supercharger is 25 mins away, and only has 4 stations. Most other options are a single charger at grocery stores or other businesses.
Yeah, we had to take our ICE to Door County (pre-Covid). There's no way EV's can become common in northern WI or MI, or parts of the smoky mountains. You can get there but then have to park on 120v for a few days if you want to get back home, and that isn't a vacation.
The future is in energy storage and solar canopies over the charging stations. As the batteries and solar panels prices hopefully keep getting more affordable and the charging stations will become more profitable
Kyle, excellent and insightful video. I feel that public utility companies shouldnt be barred from providing electric vehicle charging services. The state and Congressional level limitations placed on charging hosted by these PUs is ridiculous. China and Europe has a widespread public charging infrastructure and is YEARS ahead of the USA because of our lack of political will and party shenanigans. We need to catch up as a nation - part of that, I argue, is allowing PUs to perform charging activities. Looking forward to more videos on this hot topic.
the problem is that each public utility would try to do it their own way, whereas one or a few large national private chains will have a market incentive to standardize
Totally agree L2 at home is first priority. Should be subsidized by government.
That is expensive! Without ROI how do you expect to expand the charging network when incentives will be out?
I agree with starting with just wall plugs, every car has its own charger, let's find a way to scale quickly public parkings to have tens of plugs with a locking and billing mechanism, let's make it cheap so ROI for slow chargers can be short and widely adopted at airports, night parkings, etc.
Absolutely the only answer is charge while parked.
I disagree, I believe the largest issue is A/C charging for the mass amount of people who live in apartment complexes.
Slow charging while parked is the whole future. Consumer adoption isn't relevant when its mandated ie forced by banning polluting combusto carts from indoor garages, city centres, eventually all towns.
By no means should demand charges be reduced to accommodate DC fast chargers. They can finance transmission to large dams and the higher rates to draw on those.
Kyle: great video! You could also have a separate discussion of downtime from broken charging stations and try to answer the question of who will pay for the maintenance of all the public charging. This is a real problem right now.
Great video! I totally geek out on the charging infrastructure problem so it's great to have this be a topic of discussion. From major stations like Tesla's Kettleman City Supercharger or Gridserve's Braintree charge hub, all the way down to a lowly 50kW post or even a 24kW DC wallcharger, I have a really hard time trying to figure out how the financials make sense and have a literal crap ton of questions.
Would cheaper charging equipment make a difference or is it all demand charges? Can utility companies adapt to level the costs for chargepoint operators? Does it make sense for gas stations to have chargers? What's the ideal charging power / time per stop? What's the best station design? Travel plazas have chargers on the east coast but that's not a thing out west, why? What's going on with the national truck stop association (NATSO) and their EV charging? What's Tesla's charger uptime and how does that compare to EA, EVgo, etc? What's the challenge in keeping chargers working? Why don't fast food restaurant chains install chargers to get money from a captured audience? Why won't Chargepoint make their CPE250s actually output 62.5kW? Can a local electrician fix the chargers or does a tech have to come in from a big city and that's what takes so long?
I could probably answer a few of those questions here.
Cheaper equipment can definitely make a difference because it is still very expensive. Even a basic 50 kW unit is $30,000 to $40,000, and 150 kW to 350 kW units cost $100k to $150k. So the equipment is expensive; however, based on documents published by Electrify America and EVgo, demand charges still far outweigh hardware and installation costs. A basic EA site with two 350 kW and two 150 kW chargers would cost at least $500,000 to $600,000 to install, but a $10 per kW demand fee means that if that 1 MW site was fully utilized even just 15 minutes in a month, EA would be paying $10,000 a month just in demand fees.
Utilities certainly could waive demand fees for charging providers, but I think that might require new laws and regulations. I doubt they would do so voluntarily.
As for gas stations having chargers, it might make economic sense. The biggest issue for gas stations would be turnover times. The typical dwell time for a customer at a gas station is only 7 minutes, so in theory, they would need the typical EV driver to buy three to four times as many goods as an ICEV driver to justify the space.
The ideal time per stop will change by the person. Some people insist that they only want a 5 minute stop, whereas a number of people prefer longer. Personally, my preferred time stopped varies. On anything over a 500-mile trip, I prefer to have at least one longer (45 minute to 1 hour) stop where I can unwind and enjoy a sit-down meal. At most, I would only want to make two additional stops, and I'd prefer that they be no more than 5 to 10 minutes.
Best station design is also subjective. Personally, I would say that as a minimum criteria, it needs to support all EV types and formats, including EVs that are pulling trailers.
Some travel plazas in the West do have chargers. EA has a contract with Love's, and I'm really hopping to hear about other charging providers teaming up with the other travel plazas out here.
EVgo claims an industry leading 98% uptime. I haven't seen Electrify America or Tesla publish any uptime numbers.
The challenges in keeping chargers up and running seem pretty numerous, but I'd say you could fit them into buckets. A) Installation/technician problems; B) software compatibility issues; C) EV incompatibilities; D) interface design/user error; E) abuse and vandalism. How these break down will depend on a lot of factors. One of the reasons Tesla's Supercharger Network is perceived as more reliable is because Tesla has been able to eliminate more of those issues than the public charging providers.
I think that most fast food restaurants are unaware of the benefits of installing chargers, and I'm sure that the complication and upfront costs are daunting. Moreso, most fast food chains actually lease the property, so it's really the property managers who need to be approached.
The ChargePoint Express 250 are rated at 62.5 kW, specifically 156 A at 400 V. Most EVs capable of taking the full amperage will only see 55 kW to 60 kW of actual charging power because the current they accept will start to drop before reaching 400 V. Depending on how the spec sheet is interpreted, the 125 kW from pairing the stations might only be possible for 800 V architecture EVs. Otherwise, the actual charge rate will be limited to 200 A or roughly 70 kW to 80 kW of actual charging power.
@@newscoulomb3705 you rock, Eric. Thanks for chiming in!
@@anthonyc8499 You're welcome!
It’s interesting anyone expects to spend 7 minutes at an electric recharge in the future. Tesla has been leading the field for these charges, and people still spend 30+ minutes going 0-80%. Should we keep lying to the public promising them a smooth transition to EV, when it has to completely change the way we travel? It will never be like a gas car.
@@URBANENGINEER it should never be like a gas car, it should be better. I haven't gone to a gas station in months and it's awesome.
as basic DCFC ‘phase 1’ is ending and we need to ramp up the number of chargers to support increase in EV users, they need to think more about load sharing and queuing mechanisms - two bays is simple, 20 bays less simple. We need filter lanes to ensure people don’t queue jump, which means more careful thought about layout of the charging area in a service station for example and some space reserved for queuing to not block other parking spots. For load sharing I’d like to see something like Kempower units that have a big ‘charge cabinet’ and then multiple head units that you can connect like 8 cars to, and then dynamically allocate power based on their demand. Car finished charge or slowed down at 90%? that power can go to the other cars - so overstay isn’t slowing other cars down, and lets you roll out more bays more affordably to help with capacity and lower queuing times
Do you think they could have made that screen a bit more reflective? You could still kinda see some useful information on it.
Chargers need to be installed at or next to every single gas station. Charges need to do 0-80 in at least 10min
We are still in days equivalent to when road fuel was purchased in cans from shops. Petroleum fuel sales soon evolved into tanker distributed fuel to manual then full automatic dispensing fuel pumps.
Electric charging needs everyone to change attitudes, especially the distribution networks. It may happen slowly but the investment is essential
It's time to tell the Chademo story with your adapter as we are approaching peak Chademo across the country. We recently did nearly 600 miles in a day from Lawrence KS to North side of Chicago with our Leaf Plus. All locations had multiple chademo. We did not need any EA stops! It was amazing....maybe not in terms of charging speed, but in terms of chademo availability. I couldn't have made this trip 2 years ago.
I just wrote a grant app specifying two of these FW units. This is the only viable DCFC municipalities can afford to operate. It is a $10k difference in demand/reactive peak costs by distribution PER YEAR compared to a 100kW unit next to it.
The individual metering is really smart of the lot owner. Good on him for operating it. I would like to see his secondary rate schedule for pricing $$$. Hard to make money fast charging.
You mentioned ADA/etc, I noticed the placement of the bollards and unit is awkward. It’s not accessible by wheelchair and the door is awkwardly blocked by the island. Would like to see the service size and spec of those mini 208V transformers.
Regarding payback - if you want to make better profit, you should offer other services too like food/toilets/drinks/car cleaning. Gas stations are also making good money on additional services and not the gas itself
Isn’t it crazy that if you have and old Tesla with the “dual chargers”. You could charge at 80 amps on level 2.
Great video Kyle. Monthly Peak Demand charges are bad and suppress the use of electricity at a time when we need to be using more, not less, as we move away from fossil fuels and towards electricity.
In my opinion, we should do the following everywhere, all countries. This discussion is about wires services, transmission and distribution which normally attract peak demand changes at the point of use.
The cost of providing a reliable electricity network or circuit is approximately proportional to the maximum kW or kVA that the it is designed for. Therefore the most important aspect of load is what is the maximum coincident load in an area or on a single circuit. On that basis we should monitor and bill people for their electricity use during the top 100 30 min peak demand periods on the local network. That's just 50 hours a year that would set you your bill.
Under that billing tariff, you could run all of those outlets at maximum power at say 2 am or 2 pm, and pay no extra for doing so, because at those times, the local demand is well below the normal annual peak demand. Conversely, if you are in one of those local peak demand periods, at say 6 pm on a cold night in February when the electricity network is working really hard, you simply throttle down the charging rate to match whatever you are comfortable paying for your wires charges. Yes, that inconveniences users who are charging at that time, but it allows them maximum charging for the other 8,710 hours per year; and it does not disadvantage the local electrical distribution company to do that. They will still get their money.
This is where we need to get to get to for many good reasons.
Awesome video Kyle! I would love to watch more videos on this subject since I've been interested in doing the same thing.
I do 99.9% of my EV charging at home, so I really don't see a big DC fast charging issue for daily use.
Maybe worth waiting until you get a Rivian review, but you mentioned site layout with respect to Tesla. I haven’t come across any DCFC sites that are setup for pull-through or in any way that would support towing with an EV. Forcing folks to leave their trailer somewhere is a non-starter. Maybe this will be where truck stops will play a roll? Anyway, very cool video as I didn’t know anything about the Freewire units beforehand. Given the weird fee scheme the CO-funded sites are using, I’ll probably go out of my way to use this station vs the one at the visitor’s center from now on.
How about adding some solar to help feed that battery when not in use during that nice sunny day ?
Fantastic video Kyle, I love your thoughts on this problem. You’re absolutely right that this is the number one challenge we’re looking at regarding EV adoption.
There's a solution to all of this DCFC issue, you know: on-site flywheel energy storage. Not only does it not increase peak demand from the grid, because it can charge at a much more relaxed rate over time, it doesn't compete for EV battery cells, either, and it can be made from earth abundant materials that aren't sourced from conflict zones or hostile government regimes. Companies like Zooz, née Chakratec, are driving this kind of innovation. I don't know of any other low grid demand DCFC solution like flywheels other than supercapacitors, but those tend to take up a lot more volume than flywheels for the same amount of energy.
It would be interesting to see the actual numbers behind it all. How much do they pay per kWh, what the demand charges are, and how they are billed.
This is a slick setup with each bank of chargers being on their own meter. The other X factor with installing a charger is does it drive customers to their business, and how much does that count for.
Also it would be interesting to get the perspective from EA as they stated that they have 100 locations with batteries. I’m sure there is no getting around demand charges for them. How does the economy work for them on a huge scale. With the EA case you can assume the chargers were free since it’s repaying dieselgate. Can they make money on the ongoing basis?
Very interested in free wire installation cost. Seems like it’s not feasible to make money. Seems like government grants will be needed. Maybe this type of technology will catch on to lower overall demand on the grid. Nice video!
My question is that as more and more EV's are put on the market, the stress on the charging network is not keeping up with demand. With stations so spread out on major highways, every EV driver is hitting the same stations. Just over thanksgiving the three stops I made were nearly full and thankfully I did not have to wait. When I did the same trip during Memorial day weekend I ended up having to wait 30 min at one station and 45 min at another station just to get a plug. Then you add in the charging times and I added nearly 3 hours to a 5.5 hour drive with my ICE car
tbh, we are over Tesla's poor quality and customer service. We are eager to move to another brand, but the ONLY reason we haven't is the Supercharger network. Once CSS charging becomes comparable to the Supercharging experience, we will happily switch brands. We rely on reviewers such as Out of Spec to keep us informed on how the CSS experience compares to Supercharging.
So, here's a scary proposition. If the Electrify America stations are actually losing money on every charge, but exist only due to the Dieselgate settlement, will they simply disappear once the money Volkswagen has been required to spend on it has been exhausted?
Without EA, numerous Interstate corridors would instantly become impassible in an EV, at least without resorting to spending hours waiting for a level 2 charge. I hope this doesn't happen.
Utility Demand charges are not a new phenomenon, having been around long before DC Fast Charging was a thing. They are not universal either, very dependent on the state and local utility.
As others have said, DC Fast Charging is not going to be profitable, but it actually could make for a great loss leader to get travelers in the door somewhere and spend money. Think Costco and their gas stations. With DCFC fill ups taking about what an average person spends eating lunch, there are obvious opportunities