Volts host David Roberts interviews Seth Cutler of IONNA to discuss the company’s efforts to make charging stations good to use, placed in optimal locations, and the challenges and priorities involved.
Anyone else get strong giga chad vibes from this guy?
I preferentially use Ionna due to their lower cost per kWh, app-free access, and higher kW charging. They are normally the best in my area, but we remain a long way from MW charging and the 1,000 volt vehicle archictures necessary to describe charging as good.
In Australia, EVs are going to have the “weekend problem”. Basically, almost everyone lives in the major cities, and almost every long weekend, a bunch of them go on a road trip, often with a caravan. This means that roads which are usually more or less unused go from empty to completely packed. These EVs are not only going to reduce their total range by having the caravan, but they also need to be charged at roughly the same place at roughly the same time.
Unlike Fossil Fuels though, where people wait in line and fill while standing at the pump, EVs will turn into a “breakfast stop” or a “lunch stop”, and basically all these chargers need to make their profits on those long weekends, and also need to share their energy in a grid which is going to be taxed to the max.
So imagine the UK’s “neighbours effect” (where people watching Neighbours all turn on the kettle at the same time, pushing the grid to its limits), but at a much larger scale (a million EVs on the road looking to get a fast charge on their way to a random remote location).
It’s a pretty unique problem and I wonder how we’ll deal with it.
Batteries are probably the answer.
Yeah true, there actually are some companies here which are creating solutions where they “trickle charge” off the grid and then fast charge into the car. It might be sort of “just enough” to handle the spike in load.
That’s interesting. The San Francisco to Los Angeles route had similar issues in the early days of Tesla adoption, because California residents were early adopters and the charging network wasn’t fully built out yet. Some of the busiest charger stations actually ran diesel generators as backup power, to recharge cars during peak demand.
There are probably long term solutions, like on-site battery storage for managing peak power demand beyond what can be drawn from the bottlenecked grid or on-site solar, but we’d have to get from here to there.
Some context I maybe left out is that because the US has limited Chinese EVs into the US market, China is basically pushing really hard to sell into Australia, meaning pretty great prices. Add Iran into the mix and EV adoption has gone through the roof, and the charger network has to really expand fast. This seems like a very similar situation to California. Do you know what happened with regard to wait times?
In Aus, I think the issue is not just power, it’s that you don’t want to overprovision chargers (and infrastructure) in a place where there generally is very low usage. (literally 4 hours of extreme usage twice a month odd).
I wonder how the fossil fuel distribution deals with the same problem. Stations have big underground tanks, so if it is true that they only see high demand twice a month, you’d imagine that the tanks and the actual dispensers would be over provisioned for most of the month, and that peak usage itself might lead to queuing (but no shortages, it sounds like).
Now obviously batteries are much more expensive than fossil fuel tanks, for any given energy capacity. But eventually I would think it could get there.
There’s definitely queuing depending on the time of day, but most of the stations on the arterial roads seem to be able to manage their tanks. Part of the reason I think queues aren’t too bad is that if you have, say, 10 stations, a person is mostly just filling up then paying, so the stations don’t have a lot of downtime, and flow rate is not an issue.
With Electric, you’d only be able to have enough stations to match the electric flow rate, so let’s say you have a megawatt coming in and 100kW chargers, you’d be able to do 10 at full speed, and you’d probably overprovision by 2 or something, so maybe 20 chargers because not all cars at all stages will charge at that speed, and a hot day might change things etc. Each of these is taking like 20 minutes nominally but that’s enough for some snacks and a toilet break, not to mention some people would want to charge to 100%, so people would probably be on them for closer to 30 mins?
My guess is the stations would need to do things (announcements etc) to get people to move their cars.
Part of the reason I think queues aren’t too bad is that if you have, say, 10 stations, a person is mostly just filling up then paying, so the stations don’t have a lot of downtime, and flow rate is not an issue.
Still, that’s a need to maintain and operate 10 pumps, when it sounds like 28 days out of the month it won’t need more than 2, maybe 4. They’re building out the ability to serve peak demand, despite average demand being so much lower.
But so long as pumps aren’t expensive, and tanks aren’t expensive, building and maintaining for peak demand isn’t hugely costly.
Electrical infrastructure is different, of course. It’s much more complex to build out a 10 MW superstation than a single 1 MW station. And then the individual chargers are pretty expensive, too, so building out 10 stalls is gonna be really expensive, too.
If the bottleneck is the “pipe” bringing in 1MW, but each stall actually supports up to 350 kW or something, it could be configured that there isn’t any wasted capacity in the aggregate (total charge being delivered is still 1 MW across 10 chargers, even as some drop to zero as the vehicle approaches full charge, or there are vehicles being swapped at that spot). Add in some on-site storage of something like 4 MWh so that you can flexibly add 1 MW of charging capacity (for a total of 2MW, without necessarily needing to ever pull more than 1 MW from the grid) for 4 hours, and that might take care of the surge demand in a reasonable way, too.
Maybe even throw in surge pricing of a per-minute use of the stall, so that people will be incentivized not to leave their vehicle longer than they need and unnecessarily delay the queue.
Still, none of that is cheap. I’d expect a charging station that implements those things to be more expensive than an ordinary city charger, to accommodate that significantly higher need for complex equipment and processes.
Are people really driving so far to all the same places at the same time that charging is required? EV ranges are typically over 300km!
There are maybe 2 million people in Sydney, for example, so a 50km radius. A good portion of them (~100k cars) will head out at the start of a long weekend, in different directions, but along maybe 5 arterial roads. These split up again. While it’s not “exact”, think of it as a stream of cars which need charging. There are places to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, people will head out at different times and so on, but that gap is maybe 4 hours, so “lunch” maybe spread from 11-2.
True, no one starts at the same locations, lots of people are going to have different itineraries, that diversity should help substantially
What does “good to use” mean? App-free? Locations and info on openstreetmap?
While he does go into detail in the linked podcast (with text transcription) IONNA does not require an app, but is still compatible with multiple popular charging apps. For the rest, you’ll just need to read/listen
Not half out-of-order is a good start!
