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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s kind of interesting that the entire conversation, the cost, the technical difficulties, all lies around people having to not change their behaviour. You get entire questions around batteries being expensive but then the power infrastructure is also expensive, etc. Like you say, maybe some sort of surge pricing is needed, but then costs go beyond equivalent petrol costs (though I guess it’s not a problem in the real world as the costs would only really grow when petrol already becomes niche).
But yeah, overall there are solutions, but it’s kind of interesting in terms of what challenges each country faces which are pretty fundamentally different despite the old infrastructure being the same, because the technicals of electricity are different.
A good opposite example is the really, really remote areas in Australia, which could just be set up with a small solar install + battery, and that would probably easily beat out having to drive out there every few days with petrol / diesel.