Happy Wednesday. Welcome to Electric Avenue, where we dish out EV news saucier than grandma’s secret spaghetti recipe. 👵🍝

Here’s what we have for you today:

• The EV Product Community Experiment - why you should join! 🧑‍🔬

• Can Blocking Fees Help Solve Charging Station Congestion? 💰

• 3 Links 🔗

• Meme of the week 🤡

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Let's dive in!

The EV Product Community Experiment - and why you should join!🧑‍🔬

Hey friends, Janek and Julius here.

As some of you know we’ve been working in e-mobility and EV charging since 2016/2018 respectively. And for the majority of that time we’ve held roles in Product Management.

During all those years we’ve gotten enourmous value from exchanges with other folks in similar roles within our small, but fast-growing industry. We’ve also gotten feedback from folks in our readership that get similar value from the topics we cover in our newsletter and our personal takes.

So we’ve been thinking about doing a little experiment: A community for our readers to engage with us, exchange ideas and build connections amongst each other.

To start, we want to keep this community small, focused and invite-only. Our initial focus will be on folks that work in the industry - either as Product Managers, or as founders of startups that are regularly involved in Product Strategy decisions at their companies.

If that sounds like you, get in touch and apply here to join:

We’re looking forward to connect with y’all!

Cheers,

Janek & Julius

Can Blocking Fees Help Solve Charging Station Congestion? 💰

Those who have been reading Electric Avenue for a while will remember that we reported on Electrify America's (large high power charging (HPC) CPO in 🇺🇸) introduction of idle fees last year. Two weeks ago, Allego (a pan-EU CPO and among Germany's top 5 HPC players) introduced “overstay fees” at its AC and DC charging stations. Within the press release, there was one paragraph about why those fees are needed:

The press release reads like there are congestion queues at busy locations caused by EV drivers who have charged their vehicles but haven't moved their electric vehicles once fully charged. In addition to avoiding frustrated EV drivers waiting for chargers to become available, CPOs want to optimize the utilization of energy delivered to generate revenue.

So today we'll try to give a definition of per-minute charges, how they work differently, and their pros and cons.

Overstay fee, blocking fee, idle fee, parking fee…. Same, same but different!

In the above graphs, we illustrated an exemplary charging session with three events:

1. The charging session is started by plugging in the vehicles and authorizing the session. The battery has a state of charge (SoC) that is below 100%, ideally between 5-20% to get a nice charging curve.

2. The vehicle's SoC increases at high charge levels and begins to decrease at 80% to protect battery health (see graph below). However, energy continues to flow into the vehicle's battery up to 100% at reduced speed. Most cars will reach 80% after 18-40 minutes of charging. The remaining 20% will take much longer.

3. Once 100% SoC is reached (e.g. after 60 minutes), the vehicle remains connected to the charger until the EV driver terminates the charge session. The end of the charge session is also timestamped in the charge detail record (CDR) used for billing purposes.

Solving congestion with fees: To reduce turnaround times at HPC stations, CPOs want to encourage drivers to move their vehicle once it has been charged to 100% SoC or even once it has reached 80% SoC. Two types of fees have been introduced to educate EV drivers to free up charging stations. Let’s have a look at how they are applied and what are pros and cons:

Blocking Fee / Overstay fee: A per-minute fee is applied after a certain amount of time. The fee is applied even if the car is still charging. As of today, among the top 5 German CPOs Allego (after 45 minutes) and EnBW (after 4 hours) apply such a fee.

👍 Pros

• Easy to understand for the EV driver and customer support to give assistance.

• Low technical complexity to enable such a fee in a CPO’s and EMP’s billing system.

👎 Cons

• Does not reflect vehicle characteristics. Some EVs may take longer to charge to 80% SoC, while others may reach the target SoC after 18 minutes.

• Therefore, setting the threshold after which the per-minute charge is applied is a compromise and is never ideal for resolving congestion.

Idle Fee / Congestion Fee / Parking Fee: A per-minute fee is applied once the battery reaches 100% SoC and no energy is charged. Tesla is the only top 5 CPO in Germany, that applies such type of fee as of today. Transferring the known user behavior from gas stations, Tesla argues that “ICE driver would never leave a vehicle parked by the pump at a gas station and the same thinking applies with Superchargers”. Tesla goes one step further and introduced a Supercharger Congestion Fee, that EV drivers pay when a Supercharger site is busy, and the vehicle’s battery is above a certain level (e.g. 80% SoC).

👍 Pros

• This fee-type structure reflects vehicle characteristics and is more effective in resolving congestion.

• The “congestion fee” encourages drivers to charge only as much as is needed for their trip, rather than to 100%. This increases the availability of chargers so that other EV drivers have access when they need it.

👎 Cons

• For the fee to be effective, it must be communicated transparently before and during the charging session. The EV driver must be informed of the current battery SoC in real time to avoid the fee.

• In an interoperable EV world, obtaining relevant information from the charger or the EV is more complex than in a closed ecosystem (like Tesla’s). For example, OCPI 2.2.1 (the protocol used for peer-to-peer roaming between CPO and EMP) allows the transmission of real-time updates on the charging session and the transfer of consumption data & timestamps (parking_time) in the CDR, but many CPOs (or their backend system) do not support full data transfer.

Three Thoughts 💭

1. Fees foster learning Charging Etiquette: The hard truth is that only financial incentives will make the majority of EV drivers willing to learn charging etiquette. To avoid long lines of frustrated drivers at peak times, fees are probably the best way to go.

2. Fees need to be Transparent & Fair: For the time being, static "overstay" fees may be sufficient to solve the congestion problem. However, the EV industry needs to move towards more transparent and fair pricing structures, and again Tesla is leading the way with their implementation of the idle and congestion fee structure. However, we must not forget that EV charging has different use cases based on customer preferences. Different location setups (e.g. chargers co-located at a shopping mall) require different fee structures to make it convenient to use the chargers while protecting the economic interests of the CPO. A static overstay fee of 90 minutes might be more appropriate to offer a nice customer experience.

3. Innovation beyond Fees: Even before vehicles become autonomous and move themselves once fully charged, there are solutions to mitigate congestion. Recently, Electrify America launched a pilot where charging is limited to 85% SoC (btw. Tesla does this per default but users can overrule it if needed via the vehicle or app). And even if grid capacity is limited, location throughputs can be optimized by distributing the power dynamically to more charge points or extending the location’s peak capacity by installing on-site batteries. Of course, this requires the space to be available to install more outlets.

3 Links 🔗

• eTruck Charging Network in Germany 🚛🇩🇪: Last week, the German government started a tender for a nationwide eTruck charging network along the main routes. What is new is that the German government is placing orders for the network capacity with the distribution network operators, even if the site is built at a later date.

  

• Dedicated swapping network for Firefly from Nio 🔋: The Firefly brand (a subsidiary of Nio targeting the small car as well as micro car market) won't be able to use Nio's existing battery swap stations, it will have dedicated smaller stations, William Li (founder & chairman of NIO) said last week. However, we expect that there will be location synergies with the current infrastructure for the rollout at existing locations.

• Honda’s V2X Suisse Project 🇨🇭: V2X Suisse is a project in which 50 Honda-e vehicles in the fleet of car-sharing provider Mobility have been aggregated in a decentralized and virtual energy storage system to provide grid services (via V2G) and save energy costs (V2H). The results of the project are twofold. Technically, V2X is possible. On the commercial side, about CHF 600 (€ 617 / $ 668) was generated per vehicle. However, with the current double taxation of grid fees (to be changed in Switzerland in 2025) and the high cost of the bi-directional charger (Honda Power Manager), the pilot didn't prove commercial viability.

Most-clicked link last week: Was the video lecture at MIT by Mate Rimac, the founder of Croatian EV technology company Rimac Automobili (Link)

Meme of the Week 🤡

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