Re: Filling station power requirement
"charging stations can be more decentralised than petrol stations, but what they *can’t* be is the eco-warrior fantasy of one per dwelling or even at the end of each road. It doesn’t fit."
So what. Does it fit a block of flats with shared car parking? Does it fit a commercial organisation with a fleet of small or medium size round-town vehicles? Are there a significant number of such applications in parts of the UK?
I'm writing this in a forty year old development of a few dozen flats. Like many (most?) similar premises, each apartment has a 240V 100A feed. 100A is perhaps surprisingly large, but there is no mains gas on the premises so heating and cooking is all electric here. Diversity says that the flats will never ALL need full capacity at the same time, and the same might well apply to any EV charging capacity that was installed. Are many new blocks of flats still being built with mains gas?
Like many similar developments, this development has its own dedicated onsite substation, which is fed by 3 phase 11kV.The substation has been upgraded in the last few years; previously it was still the original 1960s transformer, fuses, switchgear etc, on the network side.
The upgrade spec was changed mid project for various reasons, one of which was to allow for EV charging capability. The details aren't clear to the occupants but in principle the forty or so flats and their occupants and visitors could share a handful of three phase charge points, just as they could in a variety of similar shared premises. The actual work would cost more for 11kV, but if someone else is paying (eg that nice Mr Musk) it might still make sense,
The upgrade project took longer than planned because team that did the upgrade works kept getting called away to do similar installations and upgrades elsewhere (where developers etc were paying for it; this one here was part of a freebie done for regulatory compliance reasons).
A mile or so from here. a local pub has just had three publically accessible 11kV chargers installed in its car park. Paid for by Tesla, connected to an 11kV supply (so not the kind of thing that your average domestic sparky would/should be messing with). A little tiny bit further away, Asda have had EV charging points (and a petrol station) for a while, and Morrisons are in the process of having a couple of EV charge points installed.
Most of these charge points, and a whole load of others and their associated info, are on zap-map.
Those are some of the facts I see. As you rightly point out, the correct answer is generally “an appropriate mixture of several solutions”. Or as the Amercians used to say, YMMV.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
