We’ve Never Seen An EV Charging Location Do This Before!
Now, when we come to a location like this, first thing we do, we go and talk to someone who knows what they’re talking about, cuz these are the guys that are building it. And not everything you can see is instantly visible as to what it is. Here, for example, there are invisible upgrades going on that had we not talked to them, we might not have found out about. I’m Dave. This is Dave Takes It On. Basket complains bland. For those who want to know where we are, they’re the three words that identify this site, but we are at Callley services on the M6 northbound. Now, this channel lives on a constant reviewing of what’s going on. And one of the sources do we do use is the CPOS’s, that’s the charge point operators own website where they tell us the latest news. And we spotted that on the Insta website here and it tells us that there’s a battery going in. So that immediately sparks our interest and we head down at the earliest opportunity to come and see what’s happening here. We are very fortunate it’s at a certain stage and we’ve met up with the site engineer who tells us everything that’s going on. So this is great because we can now tell you all the facts and not speculation about what they’re going to do. Now there’s a lovely comparison here because we’re on the northbound side. If we get up and wander right the way across the bridge to the southbound side, what we can see is this site effectively uh mirrored over there, but as it used to be, they haven’t started anything over there. So over there, they’ve got six um Instavolt 125 kW chargers, which are shared power between two bays. So that at peak times, two cars are pulled in, they will only get 62 uh kilowatts of power. this side obviously they’re going up to 160s and these will each get 160. So that’s the first upgrade. Uh second upgrade they don’t have enough power over that side in order to charge uh to provide the charge for that many charges. So the DNO that’s the grid is going to upgrade the power supply into that. When those went in there were very few cars about. There was things like uh Nissan Leafs and uh just a few cars and 62 and a half kW if they had to share was still quite an acceptable uh level of power. Today it’s hopelessly out of date and InstaVt are uh recognizing that. I still have an issue that these are limited to 160 kW uh which will cover most of the cars but there are an increasing number of cars coming through which are 200 250 300 and above and they seem to be cutting out that market. My own opinion they should have put one or two 300ish kilowatt chargers in here for those who can take it and 160. Uh don’t forget virtually all your budget cars, your Rena 5, your Citroen C10, um what BYD, Dolphin Surf, uh they’re all capped out no more than about 80 or 90 kW and they don’t get that anyhow. Uh so that’s the comparison on that side. It hasn’t uh hasn’t been started yet. So they’re going to rip all of those out. They’re going to get the DNO to put in extra charge. And uh surprisingly enough that side also is going to get its own battery pack and that will be a 425 kWh battery and that is designed to download electricity, store electricity overnight when they get on a cheap rate and then release that gradually throughout the day particularly at peak hours where the the rate goes up to the CPO and they can balance it out throughout the day. One of the things about Instava, they got an amazingly high price well up into the 80 pences. So you never see these absolutely chocker block full. So if they’ve only got three or four cars, five cars at any one time, battery that size is going to cope perfectly well. So here on the northbound side, most EV drivers would not recognize the battery pack if they stumbled into it. And it’s that little building there, the Molive Green building that they’re actually working on. These are not huge things that take up acres. These are literally just another box alongside the uh power supply and alongside the communications. Uh and inside there is a 425 kWh battery as well. These are all programmed these days to do everything automatic. If there’s free power available or cheap power available midday when all the panels, solar panels are working, the wind turbines are going, these can actually take it and they’ll top up the battery automatically at the cheaper rates. If they don’t get that at midday, uh come the evening when it drops into the off peak period, these will charge up and they’re meant to just work as a harmonious unit. Uh, so they will take power from the cheaper source at any one time, but if ever they run out of power, they are grid connected obviously, they can just run straight off the grid. So there’s a built-in backup to this system. But it does mean that for an awful lot of the day, as long as these aren’t absolutely ram jam full of cars all the time, there you are going to be running off the batteries and they will be running off off peak power and overnight uh that power goes really really cheap. So this obviously is motorway services. We have to compare this to Winchester which is a hub uh 44 individual chargers. Uh and over there they’ve got a very different setup. The first thing is the size. They have a battery over there grid connected battery but the size of that one is significantly greater. In fact 10 times the size. Winchester has a 4 megawatt battery. This is a 425 kWh battery. So this is Winchester is roughly 10 times the size. Also here motorway services are really really strapped for space. Uh you can’t just put a solar farm or a wind farm anywhere handy. So in Winchester they have a different uh option and over there there is already a solar farm in. So that grid connected battery, the 4 megawatt hour one will be powered predominantly from the solar farm which is literally just around the corner. Uh and that means you’re getting true green energy. As always, you’ve got the backup. You can switch to the grid at any time if you want to. So you’re never going to run out of power. It’s just whether you run out of green energy or whether you just go back into the grid and run whatever they are. And today the the grid is more than 50% green anyhow at any particular time and 60 or 70% green at certain times of the day. Now for those techies out there you may wonder what’s what. Well obviously from the right hand side that’s the battery cabinet. Uh that’s all the batteries 420 kwatt hours where the engineer in yellow has got his back to us. That’s the communications cabinet. So that will deal with the internet. It will deal with payments. um being able to update the app and that sort of thing showing uh vacancies and occupancy. The third cabinet there, the green one, totally empty at the moment, but the power has been upgraded to this location. So, there’s going to be a whole pile of new uh power gear going in there, switch gear, and everything else. So, that explains how a particular location works. This also is linked to CCTV cameras over and above, and some of those will be overhead lights as well. So, all in all, that’s the rundown of this location. Now, that upgrade over there is vastly overdue because prior to that, they had some really slow ones averaging about 60 kW. Uh, and here they just had two of the grid serves. These will be the 60 kW dual bay shared power and that uh you can see here totally full on this occasion. Four bays, four charging. they’ll be getting 25 30 kilowatts each. So that installation is well well overdue. Just of interest here we have uh cars. These are all CCS2 cars. So these will be CCS2 chargers. On the uh Instavolt side uh one of the bays is designated as CCS2 and Chado. You can choose either one. Not both but uh either one. So they are thinking of the leafs and the zoies and whatever else uses uh chedo. Uh over there also there’s one bay which is set aside at an angle and that’s a a accessibility bay. Uh it gives them much more space sideways so for getting uh wheelchairs and people in and out uh without being crammed together. Uh and it’s designated as a disabled bay. Now, it always amazes me when people pull into chargers, they always look for the highest power charger they can find. Often a 300, 350 kW, or even a 400. And yet, when you actually go and look at what they’re getting, it will surprise you. This obviously is a Mercedes EQE. This is a pretty top- end car. And let’s have a look at this. It’s plugged into an Instavolt. And what we’re getting here is Oh, it’s not charging. I was looking earlier on and this was getting 72 kW. That’s it. Now, if we move on to the next one, this is a Kona. I just had a chat with the owners of this. Very, very happy with it. They are fully aware that these are as good for them as uh any other charger. These are 125 kW shared bay. So, they only get 62. But when I had a look just a few minutes ago, this was pulling 43 kW. This is a VW uh GTX and this one at the moment is pulling uh 74.7 kW. So when people tell me they need 200 300 kW chargers, they don’t. Let’s have a look at this one. What have we got here? We got Volvo. No, we got a Polestar. Uh this one is 43 kilowatt. 43.7 and we’ve got another one just going to be plugging in here. Now, the last of the chargers we got here, the seventh one, uh we just happened to catch a gentleman just plugging it in and getting charging. He had a couple of false starts where the two didn’t talk nicely. It’s working. So, but now it’s working. So, what we’ve got here, this is a and we’ve got a Vauxil mocker uh and a mocka e and this one’s pulling 60.5 kW. So really, this just backs up everything I’ve been saying is that while most people think they need 200, 300, 400 kW chargers, most of the time, me included, we’ll be charging well under 100 kW unless we absolutely take the battery down to lowest state of charge we can and precondition it. Then you’ll see amazing figures. uh up mines goes up to 150 on occasions, but for the normal charge, these will these are 62 kW hours shared. Uh but that one’s now pulling 60. Now, the few hiccups that the guy had, it didn’t have an unable to charge situation, but it did take actually four attempts before the two talk to each other. And that could actually well be one of the reasons why these are going to be ripped out in the next month and replaced with those that we’ve seen on the northbound side which are the 160 kW brand new BYD chargers and that should overcome the compatibility issue. Huge amount going on. Think about it like computers. is if someone’s got an old Windows computer and someone’s got a brand new Apple Mac and someone’s got a new gaming uh Windows computer, trying to get the three of them to talk is amazing. And the fact that these can talk to each of the cars and find out, yeah, we can charge them and what what power and they talk about power sharing and everything, I find it quite amazing. And then when they finish charging, they just get in touch with your bank and they tell your bank how much this the session has cost and that’s what it is. out of interest. The uh pre-authorization fee on these is advertised as £15. And £15 if they keep that when these are upgraded. That’s going to be a good rate because a lot of people particularly on holiday might end up charging two, three or four times during the whole day, maybe more. Uh and if these are 60 as as BP has just gone up to, uh that’s quite a a chunk if they don’t release straight away. Now, the really interesting thing we find here, just little snippets of conversation, the site manager from over the other side uh just casually mentioned that the units going in are BYD. These are Chinese units. And at a recent Birmingham exhibition, we saw a lot of the Chinese units rated right up at 1 megawatt now. So, the future is Chinese chargers. Over here, we’ve had a look on these. We don’t know what make they are. These are old ones, we’re told. They are 125 kW capable, but they’re dual base. So, if two cars are next together, like they are at the moment, they’ll only be getting a maximum of 60 kW at any one time. When they go over to the BYD 160 kW units, each one will have dedicated power. And 160 kW, to put it in context, uh that’s more than my car, Tesla Model S, admittedly 10 years old. Mine’s capped out at 150, but a brand new Model E, uh, Model E, a brand new Model 3 or a Model Y, they’re capped, base model at 175 kW. So, one of these, if you can’t get to a Tesla charger, which is about a quarter the price, um, these will charge almost as fast as a Tesla Supercharger. Well, to round all this up, the one thing that strikes me here more than anything is that it’s competition. Now, when EVs first started, when the charger networks were going in, you could pretty much go anywhere. Any CPO could go anywhere and they’d have a monopoly. And that’s why you find the grid serves at every motorway services. Tesla’s got their own thing, their monopolies. But, uh, you would never ever find more than one CPO at a particular location unless it was two pretty defunct grids serve ones, which was way past the best, and a new Tesla or Apple Green or something went in. As more and more charges go in, uh, CPOS, that’s the charge point operators, are not going to be able to find those virgin sites where they can go in, have a monopoly, and charge whatever they want. On this particular location, we’ve got Instava here, and these are priced up at the moment at, I believe it’s 82 p. Over uh just over there, we’ve got some brand new apple greens going in. From the groundworks, it looks like these took the place of older ones. I’ve just been told by someone who uses this uh charge allocation regularly. They’ve been stood like that for 3 months. So, that looks like a DNO problem, but you’ve got two choices. You’ve got the Apple Green and they’re usually 77p. You got the Instavolt here, but you’ve still got two of the old grid serve right at the other side, and they’re either 85 or 89p depending on how much they think they can get away with. So, we’re going to start getting uh competition. And when those are open up at 77p, who in their right mind is going to come here and charge at 80, I think it’s 82p, um out of choice. And either they don’t know there’s a difference or uh they don’t care about it. So, it’s interesting to see that what we’ll have in the future is something that motorway services have never offered us before. If you go to motorway services, I guarantee there’ll be one petrol station and it’ll be a Shell or an ESO or whatever brand it is and that’s it. That’s the only fuel you can buy. Over the next few months and years as more charges go in, you’ll be turning up a motorway services and you’ll find three, four or five CPOS all offering the same electricity. It all comes out the grid and they’ll all be at different prices. So over time, if EV motorists get a little bit savvy, they’re going to find that yeah, if I charge here, it’s going to cost me 10 per kilowatt hour more than over there. So just move over there. And that will build up on this particular services a competition between uh them and we’ve seen this happen in uh with with Tesla and grids where they operate together. So, coming back to the theme of invisible upgrade, once this side is finished and the other side is finished, for the average EV motorist, they’re not going to see the batteries. They’re not going to see the increase in power. Many motorists will just pull up, plug in as if it was never changed behind the scenes. There’s an awful lot going on. So, it looks like Instavolt is getting ready for the future. I do have an issue. I think 160 kW uh that needs to be upped at some point in the future. Uh but for now with all the budget cars coming in, these are perfectly adequate for most the motorists. So don’t always look at a charger and think ah nothing’s changed behind the scenes invisibly. There’s a lot going on. [Music]
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