EV charging points Townley Road

[uandi]

The reason why the charging points aren't used much might be because they are so expensive

A full charge on an a small City car like the Renault Zoe is about ?12 at home. ?20 on a lamp-post charger and ?34 on the Source charger.I wonder if Southwark made any stipulations about cost?

[goldilocks]

How many miles would you get on that type of car from a full charge?

[micromacromonkey]

Google says 300-395km, so let's say 200 miles, and that costs ?34.

Renault claim their 1 litre petrol Clio does 66mpg around town. Chinny reckon to that, but even if we accept 50mpg, at 125p per litre of petrol (says google), that gives us ?22.50 for the same amount of miles.

So that is VERY expensive IMHO. Charging infrastructure should not only be available, but be price controlled. Most of the cost of petrol is tax so what is the excuse for Source? (Apart from upfront capital costs, but then other industries don't expect customers to pay through the nose for this.)

[micromacromonkey]

https://www.whatcar.com/news/electric-vehicle-charging-%E2%80%93-what-does-it-really-cost/n16833

[Penguin68]

I wonder what the rental terms are for these charging points - fixed price or a %age of revenue? If the latter the council has no interest in pegging charges. Rather the reverse. Indeed, who is selling the power to the provider? Is it an energy co or are they buying it via the council? For the council, whatever the payment structure, they are turning parking spaces (which we used to, and still do, pay for through the Council Tax) into revenue generators. As they do for CPZs. This is all about uncapped revenue generation. In this case with, I'm guessing, no hypothecation.

[micromacromonkey]

Penguin68 Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I wonder what the rental terms are for these

> charging points - fixed price or a %age of

> revenue? If the latter the council has no interest

> in pegging charges. Rather the reverse. Indeed,

> who is selling the power to the provider? Is it an

> energy co or are they buying it via the council?

> For the council, whatever the payment structure,

> they are turning parking spaces (which we used to,

> and still do, pay for through the Council Tax)

> into revenue generators. As they do for CPZs. This

> is all about uncapped revenue generation. In this

> case with, I'm guessing, no hypothecation.

Perhaps a FOI request required to obtain the info from the council.

[DadOf4]

I chatted to one of the founders of Char.gy recently (they do some of the lamppost points in Southwark - not the ones on Townley)

Informally, he told me that the business model is that they ask councils to jointly fund the installation and then they make their money on the metered electricity.

Councils have all got targets around installing more EV charging points, so this model seems to be a reasonable cooperation.

In an ideal world, this would be provided directly by the council without a private company putting on their margin, but I don't think councils have got a pot to pee in at the moment. Putting in the infrastructure costs money - that has to be paid for from somewhere

The Source chargers are very expensive, much more expensive than the lampposts - I would assume that is because the charging company have to make a larger contribution because the infrastructure is much more significant.

By way of reference, it costs me ?2 to charge my PHEV at home, ?4 on a lamppost and ?10 on Townley Road

And finally, my POV: more EV charging points are essential - we have to incentivise EV use over petrol/diesel. In a city where most of us dont have driveways, only these type of chargers becoming ubiquitous is going to seriously increase the % of EVs in this city (just go to Amsterdam if you want to see how it should be done).

Its a chicken and egg thing - people wont buy EVs unless they know they can charge them. I think its good to see these points going in as it will encourage more people to go electric (I didn't feel I could go fully electric specifically because there weren't enough chargers)

And people HAVE to be able to park next to them. People moaning that this means a few parking spaces lost have probably never had that awful feeling of running out of charge in a City with poor EV infrastructure