But it was soon down to business. We got an update from Olivier Paturet, basically Nissan are making the Leaf in the UK and isn't that good, and the ENV200 and that's also good. But, he did say how unusual and good it was to be working alongside BMW, VW and Renault on this project.
We then heard from David Blackmore from Welcome Break, about their commitment and enthusiasm for EVs, they had seen 3 of the 4 rapids in use at Corley that morning, completely unrelated to the launch which is great.
There were then two speakers from OLEV, but they didn't say much of substance.
Next up was Simon Crowfoot from Ecotricity, with some interesting numbers
By the end of 2012, the electric highway had delivered 8,500kwh, from their perspective, nothing. Year to date in August they had delivered 89mwh, across 10,000 separate charging events, and have over 5,900 card holders. They're expecting to deliver between 1-1.5 million miles of electricity this year on the electric highway.
What was also interesting is that it sounds as though RCN knew where they wanted these posts sited, and handed over the cash to ecotricity to make it happen, so they will be ecotricity branded, DBT units, accessed with ecotricity RFID etc, they are just like any other charger in the ecotricity network. Ecotricity were ultimately going to put units at these sites anyway, so why not take the cash?
We had some applause and some bubbly, and then some pictures of the cars using the charge points for the very first time (honest).
I shamelessly cornered Simon and asked a few questions.
RCN says no fees until January 2016, what about ecotricity?
They will charge fees when it makes sense to do so, at the moment the capital expenditure is so massive compared to the cost of delivering the electricity it's not important. The suggestion is that charging will be free beyond January 2016. My opinion is that the cynical "it's a landgrab for commerical gain" folks are dead wrong, ecotricity are
geninely doing this because it's the right thing to do. Yes, it's costing/losing them loads of money. Yes, they're fine with that.
Do ecotricity have to pay for the real estate at the services?
The factual response here is that some landlords are happy for equipment to be installed without monetary compensation, others demand it. My opinion here (only my opinion!) is this tells us a lot about the Tesla deate. If ecotricity are paying for (say) 4 bays at a particular services, and Tesla wanted to use all 4 bays for superchargers with no other hard ware in that bay, well, I can see some friction.
Are ecotricity able to expand the supplies at sites to meet the future demands of a more deeply penetrated EV fleet? My suggested scenario was 30 rapids at a services with 200kw of power each. His answer was "we'll have to", which I think is fantastic. There was a brief breakout discussion of storage and load levelling (the energy being delivered is not a problem but the power is) but as and when they need to make upgrades to site supplies, they will. The immediate focus is on getting units doubled up, and new sites on motorways and A roads. The plan is all motorway services by the end of the year.
Can the existing units be set up to share loads to use both connectors at once?
Yes, they can, but it's not going to happen, because the sharing is a "dumb" 50:50 split.
Are the units really getting hogged by Teslas and BYD taxis?
The data says no, AC sessions are not that common, and don't last that long. Occasionally you may have to wait, at least until all the rapids are doubled up. Simons solution? More rapids. An etiquette communication is coming, but these units are for everyone, first come first served.
There was also some interesting info about how rapidly changing the standards are, the e-up works fine on CCS but the e-Golf is not quite to spec, even though the prototype that came over here for testing worked fine... Seems it's all fun and games for the OEMS
So that was it really!
