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CMA investigating Ecotricity monopoly at MSAs

4K views 34 replies 21 participants last post by  srichards 
Someone wrote on another thread a few days ago "range anxiety is over but charger anxiety is a real thing". Even 8-rapid sites (Banbury instavolt, the Dundee rapid hubs) can sometimes involve a queue at peak times.
At the moment, large multi-charger sites are quite rare, and many EV drivers are wary of going to a small site and risking unavailability (whether faulty or in use) so they will gravitate to multi-charger sites. They all need to be multi charger.
There will be no such thing as too many rapids at a motorway site over the next 20 years.
Quite - think of the car park in a typical MSA now on a busy day. 20 years on, many of those cars will be electric, and most will want to be charging. It's going to be very different from now.
 
We do not have multiple petrol stations at MSA and they seem to have a monopoly by virtue of space,resources and their infrastructure. So can the same come about for charging ie the first one has a monopoly of a type. Sure not preventing further suppliers if the power supply exists,space exists, a market exists but to compete on an encumbents space is not good business sense because there must be loads more sites to invest. So a monoply of a type perhaps.
Some diversity is necessary at the moment because they aren't all the same. Tesla do their own thing for Tesla drivers (yes, I know that's changing). Ionity do CCS only while other chargers do Chademo and AC charging, so unless Ionity change their policy they can't be the only ones at an MSA. We already have both Instavolt and Ecotricity at Corley on the M6. I don't see a problem with this. In the rest of the services area, there are typically many different vendors of food and drink too, no monopoly there.

That said, I could see EV charger providers being allowed exclusive access to a MSA if their service standards were all regulated to make sure they were doing their job properly.
 
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