I think this is the larger issue. Right now there isn't enough demand for charging infrastructure and there isn't a viable business model for charging infrastructure.
A CHAdeMO charger costs >$10k -- yet people gripe about paying $35 for a charge. How is this supposed to work?
Let's say on average people charge 50kWh (and stay over an hour to do so). If you are extremely lucky you can get an average of what - eight charging sessions a day (that seems outrageously optimistic). The cost of electricity will be about $5 - let's say you charge $20 per session (let the howling begin) that means per day you can MAYBE create $120 in revenue... now you need to figure in the cost to maintain this, billing overhead, the opportunity cost for the parking spot, etc, etc.
I see no way in which this is a viable business.
So we may all continue to be upset about the lack of fast charging availability, but until we are willing to pay some serious $$ for it, it won't happen.
+1. But here's the thing. Unless you can install stations that can be relied upon, people are going to be very hesitant to use them. And installing a single plug simply doesn't cut it because your odds of getting to a station and finding it busy is extremely high. Just look at the
Capacity of Superchargers Using an Erlang-B Model thread.
Cottonwood's example there doesn't cover a single stall situation, but if you use his 2% chance of being blocked, a single stall can only be used 29 minutes a day before you exceed that threshold. Let's be generous and bump that chance up to 10% and now you're up to 144 minutes/day. For LEAF usage that would be 5 charges a day. With QC rates varying from $5/charge to $10/charge for a 30 minute session, that's only $25-50/day. Charge up a couple Teslas for an hour each and you're only doing a couple charges a day before it gets too busy to rely on.
Note that this assumes that people are equally charge at any time of day! In reality, there's probably less than 12 hours of heavy use, which means that 144 minutes/day would be
great if you can maintain a 10% blocking rate.
But add a 2nd plug (Blink's dual plugs don't really count, more on that later), and now all of a sudden you can charge 792 minutes/day - 5.5 times more capacity while only doubling the hardware cost and picking up large efficiencies in labor/install costs.
So in reality, if these network providers want to create a viable business model, going around and installing a single plug is completely the wrong way to do it. They would be far better off installing more plugs in fewer locations. IMO 2 stations should be a minimum unless they are only expecting it to be used once a day for the next 1-2 years. And each location should be stubbed out so that installing more plugs at a future time is simple and just a matter of installing additional hardware.
Currently for those Quick Charge stations that do have more than one plug, isn't only one plug active at a time? Aren't most Quick Charge stations only 40-50 kW? Splitting the capacity in half would sort of defeat the purpose of a "Fast" charger.
Yes, Blink QC stations have two plugs, but only one car charges at a time regardless of how much power is being delivered. IMO ideally even a 50 kW station would be able to power split since there are going to be a lot of lower-power cars out there like the LEAF that only charge at 50 kW for a brief amount of time (like the Model S only charges at 120 kW for a brief amount of time). If you build the 50 kW QC stack like a Tesla 120 kW stack where demand could be split in 10 kW chunks, then even if you only get 10 out of 50 kW at first because the other plug is in use, that is still far better than getting nothing as it lets you plug in and leave to go eat/whatever rather than wait around to plug in. If cars in the future are commonly able to consistently pull 50 kW, IMO it'd still be worth having multiple plugs, but you just increase the number of stations so that 2nd plugs are there more for overflow use to avoid getting completely blocked. 10 kW is still a lot better than your typical ~6 kW L2 station!