In today’s EGEB:
A new bipartisan piece of legislation which aims to repair highway infrastructure in the US includes billions in funding for projects that include reducing carbon emissions and installing electric vehicle chargers along designated highway corridors.
The five commissioners making up the State of New York’s Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities in the state, have told Tesla that unless it opens up its Supercharger network to other vehicles, its stations will get no relief from demand charges on the electricity rates they pay. Instead, only newly built stations that use “commonly accepted non-proprietary standardized plug-types” will get relief.
The commissioners clarified that Tesla could continue to offer its proprietary plug, but would have to offer equally powerful non-proprietary plugs at the same spot to get rate relief. This means that Tesla’s made-in-Buffalo V3 Superchargers will be discriminated against in their home state.
The Department of Energy (DOE) reports that the US now has over 20,000 electric car charging stations with more than 68,800 connectors.
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Yesterday the Maryland Public Service Commission approved a proposal from three Excelon-owned utilities in Maryland to deploy 850 charging stations on public-use land. The percentage of those that will be DC Fast Charge stations has not yet been determined.
Kentucky is now the latest state to find that Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCSs) are exempt from utility regulation. Had Kentucky’s Public Service Commission (PSC) decided otherwise, it would mean that EVCS charging costs would be regulated just like your home power bill. But it would also have had heavy consequences, deterring private investment in EV charging infrastructure.
Exciting news for California EV drivers tired of subscriptions and apps.
In the next couple of years, you should be able to use any public charger in the state with nothing more than a burner flip-phone and pre-paid Visa.
One of the first questions from a prospective electric car buyer is: “sure I’m not buying gas anymore, but how much will my electric bill go up?” The answer, just about everywhere, is that an electric car is cheaper to drive, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out by how much.
It’s a complex question to answer because of different electric rates around the country, time-of-use rates, and fluctuating gas prices as well. But last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested that Tesla could build software into their vehicles to answer just that question – and to help owners save money as well. The idea came, as many have, in a late-night answer to a tweet.
Range and recharge times are perhaps the two biggest issues currently facing electric vehicles. But StoreDot is ready to solve at least one of those. The company just showed off its fast charging batteries by topping up an empty electric scooter battery in just 5 minutes.
Two weeks before Christmas 2017, US Charging network Chargepoint filed a patent infringement suit against its competitor SemaConnect. In its request for a restraining order against SemaConnect, Chargepoint claimed that its patents gave it the exclusive right to sell and operate networked EV charging stations in the US. Obviously this has large implications for the Electric vehicle market…
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Tesla warned in a filing this week with the DC Public Service Commission that its customers could be excluded from reduced cost charging in the District of Columbia. This is because Pepco, an Exelon company and the electric utility in DC, proposed to the Commission on May 13 that “any public electric vehicle charging station for which Pepco provides make-ready infrastructure must permit readily accessible charging by a broad range of EVs”. This would mean Tesla Superchargers would be ineligible for the wholesale electric rate that would be available to other private operators like Chargepoint & EVgo.
Is that fair?
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Petro Canada, formerly a state-owned oil company in Canada but now part of Suncor, becomes the latest oil company to get involved in electric vehicle charging.
They are starting to deploy their own electric vehicle chargers at gas stations – and they are not kidding around when it comes to the charge rate.
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Nissan and EVgo are today launching their new east coast fast-charging route along the I-95 enabling EV drivers to travel between Washington D.C. and Boston.
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One of the biggest complaints with GM’s Chevy Bolt EV is its limited fast-charging capacity.
Now GM is working to remedy the situation for future EVs through a partnership with Delta Americas to develop a 400 kW charging system for 180 miles of range in less than 10 minutes.
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The electric vehicle charging infrastructure industry is evolving at a high pace as it is trying to keep up with the growing deployment of electric vehicles.
Now a manufacturer is trying to push the boundaries of charge rates by unveiling a new station with a record capacity of ‘up to 475 kW’.
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The oil industry is seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to electric vehicles and several oil industry giants have recently made significant investments in electric vehicles.
BP has been one of those oil giants and now it makes another move in the same direction by buying the UK’s biggest electric vehicle charging company.
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The advent of electric vehicles is expected to increase the demand for electricity, but EVs also offer some advantages by controlling the power load.
A new study values those advantages in the billions of dollars and it would enable the grid to take better advantage of renewable energy.
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A massive new plan to deploy DC fast-charging stations powered by grid-scale batteries throughout the UK to create a network with a 2 GW capacity – the world’s biggest – moves forward with backing from the National Grid.
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ABB, a major Swedish-Swiss multinational technology company, is involved in several major electric vehicle charging networks. The company is now unveiling its own full 350 kW electric vehicle charging technology, which it claims can add 200 km of range in 8 minutes.
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Telekom, a large European telecommunications company headquartered in Germany, confirmed that they are putting in place a massive plan to more than double the current electric car charging infrastructure by converting their distribution boxes.
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Arizona’s utility regulator, Andy Tobin, proposed a new energy modernization plan which will update Arizona’s policies on clean energy, storage, biomass, efficiency, vehicles and more.
The sweeping plant, seems to be an intelligent look at the most modern techniques, combined with pragmatic decision-making – to clean a power grid.
BP, the British oil company, announced today an investment in a US-based electric vehicle charging station manufacturer in order to trial charging technology at its own retail sites by the end of the year.
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California is already leading the U.S. in terms of electric vehicle charging infrastructure and are likely going to keep that lead at the pace they are installing stations.
Now, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a major electric utility in the state, is launching a new program to significantly increase the number of stations.
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BMW and Porsche are already working together and with other major automakers, like Mercedes and Ford, on the major Ionity ultra-fast (350 kW) electric car charging network in Europe.
But now they want to lay a path to improve that charge rate to 450 kW in order to enable quicker electric car charging.
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