By P Gosselin
Charging station operator now levying extra fee if you take too long to charge your electric car. The aim: “fairer distribution”.
Germany’s online BlackoutNews.de here reports how Dutch charging station operator Allego is imposing a “blocking fee” at all its European fast chargers.
The fee went into effect on July 1st.
For example, in Germany, if drivers take more than 45 minutes to charge their electric cars at an Allegro fast-charger, then they will have to pay an extra 25 cents-euro for each additional minute of charging beyond 45 minutes.
“This measure is intended to ensure a fairer distribution of the charging infrastructure and prevent unnecessary over-parking, writes Blackout News. “So if you stand at the charging station for an hour longer, you pay almost 15 euros extra,” according to elektroauto-news:.Apparently, the fee is designed to reduce the long charging lines occurring at charging stations, especially as millions of Europeans head out on their summer holidays.
“According to Allego, the introduction of this fee is necessary to ensure fair and timely access to charging stations,” reports Blackout News. “Allego explains that the charge is intended to prevent e-car drivers from occupying the charging stations for longer than necessary.”
This just means more burden on e-car drivers. Either they leave the charging station not fully charge and look for another charging station, or they pay extra to charge fully.
Another reason: power grid limitations. Blackout News reports further: “Due to grid restrictions in many European countries, Allego cannot install as many charging points as desired everywhere. In Germany, grid capacity is considered a bottleneck in many places, which could cause electromobility projects to be severely delayed or even fail.”
Solution? Electricity rationing.
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“”Electricity Rationing At Charging Stations Due To Limited Charging Infrastructure in Europe””
And if the cables have been pilfered, well, too bad.
“”Are electric car charging cables really being stolen? – Ask the Car Expert””
No need, they really are. The EU motto: If it works it’s no good to us.
Darn, they would deliver some real power to a stadium speaker system !! 🙂
Led Zeppelin.. would be jealous. !
Good job you’re talking Led Zep, DP would have needed way more. They were in the Guinness Book of Records (geddit!)
Still, these people play live unlike acts such as Taylor Swift where tapes and autotune abound. Glasto even has a stage for DJs now….
most if not all these cables are not from EV chargers. In an EV dc charger cable there are at least 2 high voltage / high power dc cables + >2 small communications wires + protective earth and possibly liquid cooling channels. from the picture “British transport police” would indicate these are from the UK railway network which also suffers with copper theft!
You don’t see any of that nonsense in a petrol station.
Some might try driving off without paying, but there’s no mindless vandalism. Green tech seems to bring out the worst in you people.
Here in South Carolina state law requires pre-paying for gasoline. Drive-offs are a thing of the past.
It’s not vandalism, its theft.
Yep, copper is expensive.
Your assumption that all EV cables follow a basic design may be true, but it is not verified.
Photo not from Europe or the EU.
The photo is very definitely from Europe.
I suggest you look at a map and see where the UK is.
Hmmm, I can’t recall anyone ever parking at a gas pump for longer than necessary.
Pretty hard to fall asleep in 5 minutes ! 🙂
I happened across the Buc-ee’s station near Johnstown CO a few weeks back. It has about the least expensive fuel in the state and over 100 pumps as well as a huge “convenience” store/bbq joint.
Are the 12 EV charging stations backed up?
No, golf courses manage their charging cycles quite efficiently.
That golf cart can beat a Mustang from 0-60….
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/supercharger-johnstown-co.286229/page-2
Then wait for hours to recharge if you can find a working EV charger.
ie TOTALLY USELESS.
He was watching movies for 7 hours and went viral on social media with the EV fan club-
BYD charging detail exposes ‘selfish’ habit among EV drivers (yahoo.com)
Sometimes they spend some time in the convenience store, but there is not usually a line. Buc-ees (look it up if you haven’t seen one) has a very large store so people can spend a lot of time inside.
Yes, if the driver is visiting the convenience store, or the restroom.
But modern EVs will charge from 20% to 100% in these times. So I do not understand What your problem is. When you refuel at petrol pumps you do not hang around sleeping at the pump – why should recharging be different?
I can fill up and pay in 5 minutes.
You can’t get close to that with an cumbersome EV
say 45 minute (very gracious) to charge EV… 5 minutes to fuel ICE.
40 minutes difference at 110kph.. I’ll be 70km or so further in my trip by the time the EV is finished.
Filling up at a petrol pump takes a couple of minutes at most. As bnice says above, it’s hard to fall asleep in five minutes.
The EV, on the other hand, is charging for 45 minutes, so the driver sits in the car and goes to sleep. This driver is sleeping, and the other drivers lined up behind him are probably sleeping, too.
A couple of minutes verses 45 minutes. I know which way I’m going.
In the UK charges are at service stations so drivers hook-up and go and have a snack or lunch. Other sites are in town centres or at super stores so people hook-up and go and do their shopping.
And if you happen to be in a hurry to get somewhere?
That’s as good an explanation as any as to why at least one EV charging provider in Germany has found the need to ration the time one can park at their charging stalls.
Coming to America sooner than one suspects.
As the saying goes, “Time is money.”
If one values their “free time” as much as a typical employer values their “at work” time, that can range from the equivalent of, say, $15 USD/hr to the equivalent of $100 USD/hr.
Personally, I have much better things to be doing than waiting an extra 40 minutes of so to feed my personal transportation vehicle.
That’s $US20 in California. Our time is more valuable.
Falling asleep in an EV being charged.. .. a Darwin moment beckons. !
Depends on make & model and the battery and its capacity how quickly it charges. Some older vehicles cannot fast charge.
As there is a premium rate for fast charge, some opt to slow charge for cheaper rate, if they are in no hurry.
A US charging company is imposing 85% charge limits:
“To ease congestion at popular charging stations, charging network operator Electrify America is testing a strategy that would automatically end customers’ charging sessions when their battery hits 85%.”
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/15/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-limits
I understand your comment, but the assumption that any specific battery can be charged in the specified 45 minutes is not exactly a robust assumption.
Your last line:-
“Solution? Buy a diesel.”
There, fixed it for you.
Agree. Ours is for towing our camper and/or for trips of over 200 miles with no relatives to cadge electrons from. We’ve used it twice in the last 8 months, and it will now last us the rest of our lives (with a missus who’s 7 years younger). 70% of our driving miles are in our super zippy Bolt EUV. 20% on our mid drive electric bikes, and the rest in the CCLB diesel Colorado,. The Bolt is capacious, silent, comfortable, and we’ve never used a public charger.
If your driving routine involves enough long trips, get an ICE vehicle. But for the over half of us Yanqui’s who have multi car households, 2nd car EV’s rule.
One of these? “What We’ve Learned After 2 Years Of Chevy Bolt Recall”
Over half of 2017 to 2021 Bolts have recorded a battery replacement.
https://insideevs.com/news/621377/two-years-after-chevy-bolt-recall/
No. I have a 2023. Per Ordell in Jackie Brown, that was an “Old crime”, and was fixed.
Yes, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
CO2-phobia has infected our political class, to the detriment of all of us.
There is the greening effect….
Thanks to the cool wet summer it’s very lush and verdant….
Particularly madmen.
“Apparently, the fee is designed to reduce the long charging lines occurring at charging stations…. they leave the charging station not fully charge and look for another charging station…”
The effect will be to redistribute the long charging lines not eliminate them. Flattening the curve – anyone?
The fee is designed to price [some] people out altogether.
Makes sense. Sounds like the daily car use fee some big cities charge to drive in. Since they do that we need to get rid of all cars, right?
You need to get rid of cars?
There are plenty of cities just right for you…
Car-Free Cities Around the World. https://discerningcyclist.com/car-free-cities-around-the-world/
Leave the rest of us alone, no?
Please forgive me. it was sarc. Apparently bad sarc. I don’t want to get rid of cars. I want to use them optimally.
Waiting to fill up electrically would admittedly be as frustrating a waiting to fill up at Costco on a Saturday afternoon. But I won’t be selling my Colorado or my Bolt for that reason. Before i did that I would put them up on blocks and just enjoy the killer GM sound systems.
“”But I won’t be selling my “”
Well, Bob. Not that I’m particularly bothered, myself – call me very relaxed about it – but can you justify that to… say someone like TheFinalNail or ItsUsername?
Why should I “justify” to them? Maybe I missed their POV’s on EV’s, but I doubt they object to mine. They read comments and are free to do so…
Why?
Well, they appear to believe there is a, crazy as it sounds, climate crisis.
As I said…. me? not bovvered….
Or, not drive to those cities. What a choice.
Would be nice to know how much charge (percentage-of-battery-capacity wise) 45 minutes of charging at a “typical” Allegro charging station provides to a “typical” EV car on the road in Germany.
If it’s 60-80% great! . . . if it’s 10-15%, yikes!
Also, what prevents an EV driver after, say, 44 minutes of charging at one stall from just moving his/her car to the next available charging spot to get another 40-45 minutes of charging at no “overage” cost?
Is “Big Brother” monitoring each and every EV via VIN or license plate tracking? . . . watch for it.
I think the problem they’re trying to solve is people leaving their cars at the charging station while they go about their day — basically using it as a free parking space.
The Tesla charging station near me has about 8 chargers and there are always 2 Teslas parked there. I think the owners work at one of the nearby businesses and use them as parking spots for the day. Once in a while I see a third car come in to charge.
You’d have to be naive not to see this coming.
Almost like shoehorning everyone into EV’s is just another avenue of absolute control over their lives.
No thanks.
If you want a fair measure to accomplish the state goal, the start the clock with the battery charge tops off.
I can appreciate holding other people up with frivolous behavior, but if a driver needs more than 45 minutes to charge, that is not frivolous.
The really basic question is: for a given country, say the UK since lots of data is available, add up all the GWh equivalent used in gas or oil home heating. Then add to that all the GWh equivalent used in car and truck transport.
Then compare this total to the amount being delivered today by the national electricity grid. It will dwarf it.
Then we can tell what sized grid capacity will be needed for the Net Zero millenium, and we can also then estimate how much wind and solar we will need to deliver it reliably and consistently.
Anyone know where someone has done an estimate of that?
Thought not…
So, doing the sums with the aid of perplexity.ai.
Current demand is about 300Twh. Convert heat and transport to electric and you would have:
transport – +90 TWh
Heat – +428 TWh
total – +518TWh
Current grid has a peak capacity of about 45GW and delivers about 300TWh. It would require almost tripling the size of the present grid, at the same time as it is converted to wind and solar.
Its obviously impossible. Its impossible even to run the present demand on wind and solar. Trying to do that while more than doubling its capacity is pure fantasy. You’d need multiple TW of wind capacity, and multiple TWh of storage.
Royal Society estimates you need one third of annual demand in storage or backup. So they estimate 100TWh to meet current demand in a Net Zero world. What would it be for an extra 518 TWh demand? 200 TWh? 300? Its academic, they are all equally impossible and unaffordable.
To put those storage numbers into context, battery storage costs ~$300,000/MWh, a TWh is 1,000,000 times larger, so $300,000,000,000/TWh, multiply by 100, and that’s $30 trillion just to back up current demand, which is 10 times the entire UK GDP.
Another small fly in the ointment is that the planet only produces ~ 2.5TWh of batteries each year, so for the higher estimates, we might need the entire global battery output into the middle of the twenty second century.
Impossible, in fact, even 1% of what we need is impossible.
Michel,
Thanks for the quick estimate. Now, try to get any academic, politician, opinion maker or NGO manager to listen and understand this.
R.E_Jim,
I tried at the last [UK] General Election.
May as well have saved my breath to cool my soup.
And both major party candidates are reasonably numerate!
Auto, buying candles.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy
If I’m reading it correctly, about 2,000 TWh in 2023, or 230 GW average load.
If I recall correctly, the Royal Society report estimated 300 TWh annual power demand, and a backup of 100 TWh necessary to support it if wind and solar were the sources.
Whatever, this is the sum that needs doing, and I’m sure you are right, there’s probably not enough battery capacity in the world to supply what the UK alone would need.
The Royal Society concluded battery storage was out of the question, and so advocated 900 caverns, to be evacuated, sealed, and filled with hydrogen. A large amount of which would have to be stored for years or even decades to cope with the seasonal calms which happen every few decades.
Was this a deliberate reductio ad absurdum of the whole mad scheme?
Rube Goldberg comes to mind.
300 TWh is the electricity demand, if you’re talking about the actual power demand (which I thought was your point), it’s about 2,000 TWh
Yes, right. And I was indeed talking the total power demand after the conversions. The estimates of that were from perplexity.ai, which I find very helpful, though you have to be wary of just accepting what it offers and check carefully with its sources.
Here in Cleveland Ohio there is a charging station with 20 bays. The most I have seen is 2 cars charging at one time, most of the times I have passed by it there were no cars charging.
Rationing is way more politically dangerous than raising taxes as leftards will be OK with it for a better grid or equity.
In a sane world once you see something isn’t working you stop doing it. Government takes a little longer but eventually will move in the right direction. Always remember we have a government problem not a climate problem.
I remember the EV evangelicals selling the notion that long charging times meant you could relax by shopping or dining while you waited. Guess not. Not only do you now get the stress of having to find an open charger, but also make sure you don’t exceed your 45 minutes. Another fun and relaxing addition to your busy week.
All European CPOs have a blocking fee listed in their tariffs, not just Allego.
Wow, that did not take long for the electric car charging market to go unstable.