It’s Time To Deploy Power Points In Every Car Park

We need more EVs charging during the day. Not just fancy charging stations – plain power points in every car park will do the trick.

It will offer huge benefits, drawing cheap solar energy when its plentiful and freeing cars up to discharge back to the grid at night.

Why Is Charging EVs During The Day So Important?

Daytime EV charging means electric vehicles can make the most of cheap solar energy. Whether it is taking the opportunity to charge while working from home or rolling out more charging points at workplaces, a shift to daytime charging offers huge benefits to the grid.

Charging during the day means that not only are EVs soaking up energy that otherwise goes to waste – it also frees them up to export power back to the grid at night through Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G) technology, making a liability into an asset.

Overseas you find shops incentivise customers with free electricity, albeit for fossil fuelled reasons. We should do the same for train stations.

How Do We Shift Thinking Around Charging Electric Cars?

Petrol is cheap compared to bottled water, but if petrol was something that fell on the ground, ran down the gutter and disappeared into the drain, I’m damn sure people would devise ways to soak it up and get it into their car.

It wouldn’t matter if it was a slow drizzle, when your car is parked for 8+ hours during the day, it might as well be doing something useful.

And if it made the air cleaner, the streets quieter, and it cost 70% less than going to the petrol station, why wouldn’t we rally in the street to demand more charging points at workplaces to make it a reality?

Seems we have Stockholm syndrome from queuing at petrol stations if they offer 10% discounts.

These people should be pilloried. Failing that legislation needs to be passed to force them into providing a good for the public, seeing as the public already pays for the road that brings them their customers.

Banging On For Years

I’ve been making this point for a long time, including in a piece a couple of years ago:

“Encouraging daytime EV charging is like hitching a ride on a wave of cheap solar energy flooding the grid. It’s a smart move, and it means we’re making the most of the huge battery storage capacity sitting in our rapidly growing fleet of electric cars across Australia. It bolsters the stability of our power networks during minimum demand events and, as Vehicle To Home rolls out, is set to provide increasing support when our infrastructure is under strain due to the evening peak. Your employees can tootle home and siphon off some ‘fuel’ to cook tea, run the TV and keep the fridge cold.”

Which reminds me that we still haven’t prioritised EV charging at my own workplace. I must write a sternly worded email to the landlord, he should be told his electrician is hopeless.

SA Power Networks (SAPN) are already planning what the network needs.

EVs Are The Answer To Falling Feed-In Tariffs

I’d like to reframe EVs primarily as super storage: packed full of technology but more importantly, bursting with sunshine.

When disgruntled home solar owners are braying like donkeys about how little they’re paid for solar exported to the grid, they need to realise EVs are the daytime demand we all need, to make feed-in tariffs worth while and lower evening peak demand.

I’ve been banging on about using type 1 charging for EVs before. It’s easy to control 2kW with a simple switched circuit.

Write to your local member, we should have these available absolutely everywhere our cars are parked during the day.

Daycharging and V2G Can Work Together

I sadly missed out on a recent evening with electrification royalty, where renewables advocate Saul Griffith and SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock debated whether the push for V2G was a distraction from the rollout of regular EV charging points that Australians can access during the day. For me, these two priorities actually work best when deployed at the same time.

Daycharging means you can come home with a nearly full battery, then your EV can power essential loads in your house.¹

The technology is so simple, the Australians who developed it aren’t even pursuing a patent.

While home batteries are getting cheaper, fully automated bi-directional Vehicle to Grid technology isn’t – yet.

We really need some overarching legislation: all EVs for sale in Australia should offer V2L or V2G without voiding the car warranty.

Utilising the vast battery capacity of an electrified transport fleet is a no brainer, but flogging comparatively small home batteries to charge large EV batteries isn’t really clever.

Ructions About Road User Charges

The latest bit of populist politics has been floating plans to introduce a road user charge for what might be 10% of new car sales and only 1% of the fleet. We really need more EV uptake before there’s a threat of new taxes.

EVs pay rego and insurance like any others, they aren’t getting off Scott free. Early adopters of new technology take a hit on depreciation but their investments pay dividends for all of us as the market matures and prices fall.

I’m all for a road user charge, so long as it makes trains attractive, (because trucks are dangerous and expensive) and the health costs of tailpipe emissions and brake dust are paid for.

Any extra revenue should be siloed for rolling out better EV charging infrastructure.

Change Is Ever Present

There was a time when shops provided hitching posts for horses and public authorities provided water troughs to slake the thirst of our transport workers, the bullocks and horses.

We’ve already invested in solar and wind, billions in large and small-scale generation that gets switched off when conditions are great simply because there’s nowhere to store or transmit the bountiful yield. It’s energy down the drain.

What we need now is a roll out of power points. They don’t have to be fancy, they just have to be available and easy to use.

More importantly the local authorities need to get out of the way. We want sockets put everywhere. They might raise a few dollars or they might just draw customers, 5 hours charging, 65km for less than the cost of a tin of beer.