As electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids become more and more popular and increase their market share, the debate around charging infrastructure and range anxiety continues. Dr Brian Caulfield, Associate Professor and Head of Discipline in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at Trinity College Dublin joined RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime to talk about the latest research on the best locations for community electric vehicle charging points. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above.)
"We did the research to look at the constraints around transferring all of our cars over to electric cars, there are these big targets set up by government constantly in this area. One of the constraints is, where are these cars going to charge? That's what we looked at in Dublin. We looked at lamp posts, population density, public car parks, private car parks, to see where we could have all of these charging units."
The research found we could have over 3000 of these locations by 2030, but the number of charging points we will need will be vastly higher than that by 2030, he said. "It's a chicken and egg situation. We realise now that we need to have the charging infrastructure there quicker. By 2025 in Dublin we could have almost 50,000 electric vehicles and at the moment we've only got about over 400 public charging points. That's not that's not going to cut the mustard in terms of people being able to charge."
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Government and SEAI recently said that 80% of people charge their cars at home. "Nationally, that's probably the figure but in Dublin it's probably going to be closer to about 60%, because the vast majority of people that live in our city don't have a driveway. So we need to come up with alternatives."
The 400 charging points that are currently in Dublin are a mix of both slower and faster charging points and are "nowhere near enough" what we need, says Caulfield. We've got about 12,500 EVs currently in Dublin and that number is only going to get higher, so we need more of these charging points. Dublin is constrained by its size and with that we'll need to come up with clever alternatives to get people to charge."
What are the barriers to installing new charging points?
"Outside of the research, the easiest thing to do is to put a charging point into your house and to get one of those you need to have a driveway, obviously. But outside of that, the community charging would be facilitated by, say, ESB networks and they would put in these charging points. Or, we haven't done them at scale yet in Dublin, the lamppost charging. So that would be down to the local authorities," says Caulfield. "There's a bit of civil works and then obviously a bit of electrical engineering work to be done, as well, but it's not massive."
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"But the scale of the amount that we need to do in getting these charging points across Dublin is similar to other things about, how many houses do we need to retrofit? How many EVs do we need to sell? The scale of the problem is huge. A lot of the research that I focus on is the constraints. It's all well and good saying "this is what we should do", but is it feasible? And is it feasible in the timeframe that's been set out?"
How far apart should charging points be spaced to reach critical mass?
"The network that we showed of the over 3000 locations that they could be put in. If they were put in by 2030, about half a million Dubliners would be within a five minute walk of one and then over 2 million would be within a five minute cycle of them. That's what we were looking at in terms of the network and coverage," explains Caulfield. What we need is slower, overnight charging rather than the fast charging, because slower, overnight charging would use more renewables and it's a greener product that we get at the end of the day, he says. "So if our citizens are within a five minute walk or cycle to these charging points, it makes it a much more feasible option."
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Caulfield said there could be an argument that 100% electric cars should have priority over plug-in hybrids for the public charging points at the moment, but that the majority of those more expensive cars are being sold in households that have driveways, so the need for public charging is less.
"The thing that we're seeing in Dublin at the moment is not "range anxiety" but "charger anxiety" - that when you get to the charging point, that you'll actually be able to use it [due to long queues]. So I suspect somebody that's got a diesel or petrol hybrid is very unlikely to wait to charge at a public charging point."
