Hi Jimmy,
I wasn’t really advocating the friendly neighbour solution for mass adoption; it is just what works for me as a stop-gap until the rest of the world catches up. If I could plug in at my unit, I could take advantage of our time of use tariff and choose to mostly charge at off-peak rates and mostly avoid peak rates except when I mean to go out again for a second longish trip soon after returning from the first.
Installing 15A outlets for ordinary, routine, ‘slow’ charging would costs a few 100s of dollars each. Serious fast charging from a three phase supply and a billing system is well into the multiple thousands. You certainly would not put multiples of these in a strata parking area. The supply to the street probably couldn’t cope. Just one would be very nice to have though it would introduce a bunch of issues. None of those are insurmountable but given a choice, I would much rather have an ordinary power point metered back to my unit that lets me charge when and as I like on whichever tariff arrangement I care to have. As an EC member, I would much rather that too – once installed it does not have an on-going need for central administration and maintenance. If something goes wrong with the dedicated fast charger, everyone with an EV will be screaming for access to an ordinary power point.
A big impediment to the uptake of EVs is shifting people’s thinking away from the dedicated ‘filling station’ model that they are so accustomed to from how things work with liquid fuel vehicles. From almost a decade of experience, I can assure anyone who cares to listen that the need for fast charging is much less than is often assumed by people who don’t drive yet EVs. Most people, most of the time, will be happy with an ordinary outlet where they normally park. However, I support councils and businesses putting in charging stations here and there, even though I predict they will not get a lot of use, because it is reassuring to people who don’t yet know that they won’t need them if they buy an EV.
So, fast charging is handy to have access to, for reassurance rather than very much actual usage. In Canberra we have had a trial running with slowish and fast chargers available for free after applying for an RFID card. Aside from trying one of the fast chargers once, just to see that it worked on the relevant inlet on my car, I have not had any reason to use it. I certainly won’t be bothering with it from now on since the local network operator, who installed the chargers, has introduced an access charge as well as a usage charge and I don’t want to pay $120/year for access to chargers that I am unlikely to need. I would much prefer a higher usage charge and free access (like a toll road or petrol station). I do buy petrol a few times a year for when I have trip out of town. I don’t have to pay an access fee to be able to fill up.
That said, a few fast chargers scattered around a city and particularly at edges on the major routes in/out of town and at intervals on highways co-located with places selling decent coffee is what is needed to enable intercity driving. Again, the model should be free access with a charge for actual consumption. Or, you get a plug-in hybrid, which can be purely electric for most of your city driving and only use any significant amount of liquid fuel when you head out of town for a longer trip.