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Electrify America Fast Chargers - Huh?

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Insideevs has an article on EA today. One of the comments (from "BoltUp") says this:

"Interestingly I contacted EA in connection with the station going up a few miles from me. The issue was that each pedestal was centered on the parking stall, yet each pedestal had two charging cords. I thought this odd as five pedestals in a line had 10 cords but could only reach 6 (at max) charging stalls. I was told that each pedestal could only charge one vehicle at a time and that the dual CCS cords were there to ensure any charging port location could be reached, and could not be used simultaneously. Seems like an odd overbuild, but thats why each parking stall has a dedicated two cable pedestal."

So it appears that my first guess was the right one. Seems like a hack, but if the cable is cheap relative to the pedestal then it's not too crazy. I hope they eventually fix their map so they don't list sites like this as having 7 CCS ports - while technically true, the information is not useful to anyone!

It does point out a seldom-appreciated advantage of a proprietary network like the Superchargers: the designers don't have to guess where the charge port's going to be, so they can create a much more elegant solution.
I believe these are liquid cooled cables. I may just work out that shorter is better to make them work right.
 
From Electrify America NEWSROOM
Reston, VA (April 20, 2021) -- On Earth Day, Thursday April 22, electric vehicle owners will get free charging sessions at all Electrify America ultra-fast charging stations.

Electric vehicle drivers can locate a charging station by visiting the Electrify America website.

The company will not charge EV drivers for sessions starting at 12:00 a.m. EDT April 22 on through to 3:00 a.m. EDT April 23.
 
Thanks to a hint via Plugshare activity feed about a complimentary session, I ventured out and it's free. The DC FCs and J1772 are showing complimentary session on them. Been DC FCing my Bolt.

I called them to report a station prob (broken tang on one and other handle that didn't work). They mentioned something about a provider having a global outage or something which is why (some?) stations are set to free.
 
Interesting commentary and infographic which includes EVs and Plug-in Hybrids in the vehicle count. Europe Leads in EV Sales, but for How Long?

In a 2020 survey, 71% of U.S. drivers said they were interested in getting an EV—so why are sales so far behind Europe and China?
In that same survey, 50% of drivers cited a lack of public charging stations as the main factor for preventing them from buying an EV.


1621040806338.png
 
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Thanks to a hint via Plugshare activity feed about a complimentary session, I ventured out and it's free. The DC FCs and J1772 are showing complimentary session on them. Been DC FCing my Bolt.

I called them to report a station prob (broken tang on one and other handle that didn't work). They mentioned something about a provider having a global outage or something which is why (some?) stations are set to free.
PlugShare - Find Electric Vehicle Charging Locations Near You has a report from someone in Pueblo, CO of free juice that day (May 11), as well.
 
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I finally got this data set off the work machine where I'd been collecting it on lunch breaks and I thought some here might find it interesting. It's a history of Plugshare aggregate data for Electrify America stations. Among other things, you can see that the major overhaul of stations they did around Labor Day 2020, while disruptive at the time, really did seem to notably improve the overall system, nearly completely eliminating the layer of flaky 1-4 rated chargers.

All Stations 20210617.png
All Stacked  20210617.png

Nonzero Stacked 20210617.png
Plugscore and Reliability 20210617.png
 
Nice!

One thing to note about Plugshare ratings, and I think this gives Electrify America an advantage in graphs like this, is people generally give a positive checkin even if they had to switch plugs or stalls a few times to get it. I certainly have given virtually all positive checkins despite a lot of annoyance (compared to the Superchargers).

Another thing that I have seen less frequently is people will write "150" or "350" in the max kilowatts entry because the stations deliver either of those as the maximum output. They think Plugshare is asking which type of charger they used, but it's really asking how much power was the charger giving for that session.

Anecdotally, I think they are getting better. More sessions are starting within about 10-20 seconds. In my last 20 sessions, 14 or so gave about maximum power without a lot of fuss (maybe switching stalls once or twice, but I can't recall), 5 gave reduced power (100-120 kW, big difference in time with the inefficient e-tron), and 1 took about 45 minutes to start. This stop included calls to Electrify America and trying 6 (!) stalls. Sessions in late 2020/early 2021 were ugly.

All in all, I am beginning to trust that it will work without much hassle. I wouldn't hesitate to go on long trips.
 
Nice!

One thing to note about Plugshare ratings, and I think this gives Electrify America an advantage in graphs like this, is people generally give a positive checkin even if they had to switch plugs or stalls a few times to get it. I certainly have given virtually all positive checkins despite a lot of annoyance (compared to the Superchargers)...Anecdotally, I think they are getting better. More sessions are starting within about 10-20 seconds. In my last 20 sessions, 14 or so gave about maximum power without a lot of fuss (maybe switching stalls once or twice, but I can't recall), 5 gave reduced power (100-120 kW, big difference in time with the inefficient e-tron), and 1 took about 45 minutes to start. This stop included calls to Electrify America and trying 6 (!) stalls. Sessions in late 2020/early 2021 were ugly.

All in all, I am beginning to trust that it will work without much hassle. I wouldn't hesitate to go on long trips.
I'm definitely in the same boat of rating a check-in positively as long as I was able to charge with only one or two attempts, which has been my experience most of the time in my Niro, so I'd definitely say it's worth treating an 8 or 9 as a truly reliable charger. However, I've also gotten to the same point with EA of not worrying as much about checking chargers. It looks likely they'll remain on track to hit their goal of 800 locations open in the US by the end of 2021, which I wasn't necessarily expecting last year given the unending succession of black swan events and then the decision to focus on ripping out and rebuilding so many of their stations, but I think the results speak to those being good calls. In spite of the diversion of effort, new builds stayed on track and overall network reliability seems up in the Plugscore data, in my personal experience, and in other anecdotal data, even if it's not yet as seamless as I'd like.
 
I'm definitely in the same boat of rating a check-in positively as long as I was able to charge with only one or two attempts, which has been my experience most of the time in my Niro, so I'd definitely say it's worth treating an 8 or 9 as a truly reliable charger. However, I've also gotten to the same point with EA of not worrying as much about checking chargers. It looks likely they'll remain on track to hit their goal of 800 locations open in the US by the end of 2021, which I wasn't necessarily expecting last year given the unending succession of black swan events and then the decision to focus on ripping out and rebuilding so many of their stations, but I think the results speak to those being good calls. In spite of the diversion of effort, new builds stayed on track and overall network reliability seems up in the Plugscore data, in my personal experience, and in other anecdotal data, even if it's not yet as seamless as I'd like.
I missed that one. Why did they rip out and rebuild stations?
 
I missed that one. Why did they rip out and rebuild stations?
I believe all of the affected stations were made by Efacec. It must have been a hardware problem with their chargers. However, it appears from Plugshare pictures that they are still still Efacec units because all the other brands have the holsters in the front of the pedestal while Efacec units have the holsters on the sides.
 
I missed that one. Why did they rip out and rebuild stations?
Hardware issues, I think relating to cooling? I don't know for certain, and in some cases they seem to have left the actual stalls in place, while in others they replaced them entirely (Herkimer, NY is one such as you can see before and after the work). I just know they did a lot of station reworks last fall, and as a result the percentage of stations with a plugscore under 5 has plummeted to basically nothing.
Article on the old, troublesome eFADEC stations which have now been largely replaced:
 
I finally got this data set off the work machine where I'd been collecting it on lunch breaks and I thought some here might find it interesting. It's a history of Plugshare aggregate data for Electrify America stations. Among other things, you can see that the major overhaul of stations they did around Labor Day 2020, while disruptive at the time, really did seem to notably improve the overall system, nearly completely eliminating the layer of flaky 1-4 rated chargers.

View attachment 674372View attachment 674373
View attachment 674375View attachment 674377
The graphs look interesting and something seems to be improving, but I don't know what I'm looking at. Could you please provide an explanation? I see dates but I don't know what any of the other numbers mean.
 
Problem is we don't know what Tesla's Supercharger cost structure is so we can only speculate. I think Tesla should charge customers directly for the use of the network. Either or both a vehicle charge and/or use surcharge. So long as their vehicle is compatible it would open the network to all those who wanted to participate and I predict that the SC network would continue to be the largest. Maybe the Tesla interface would become the standard like the gasoline nozzle.
Strongly disagree. Tesla’s network is valuable BECAUSE it is a network. Metcalf’s law say the value of a network goes up by the exponent of the number of nodes. Tesla has invested billions in their network with thousands of nodes. A large multi-million $ license fee plus significant per vehicle fee is needed, plus patent sharing.
 
The graphs look interesting and something seems to be improving, but I don't know what I'm looking at. Could you please provide an explanation? I see dates but I don't know what any of the other numbers mean.
Sure. For about the last two years, I've been keeping a data set of how many Electrify America stations are listed on Plugshare, and how many fall into each Plugscore tier. Plugscore is a Yelp-style review of how reliable the station is, with something like 10 is "don't worry about driving up and getting a charge quickly", 7 to 8 is "you might have some issues but should be able to get a charge" and by 5 or 6 the station may be acting up in general or for specific models, and should either be avoided or have an alternative in mind. Stations are rated 0 when they first open until they get several (like, 5-10) reviews, and AIUI it's hard for a station that's actually been reviewed to get any lower than a 1, so a 0 almost always means "new, not yet rated".

These are plots of the recorded breakdowns in the station scores--the plot on the upper left labeled "Overall" shows the simple plot of how many stations are rated 10, then above it how many more are rated 9, then how many are 8, and so on down to 0, with the top line being the total number listed on Plugshare, basically just a stacked plot of this:
1624028282544.png

If you look at the upper left plot, you'll see the bottom band on the right is about 330, then above it the second band ends at (334+90), the one above that is (334+90+76), and so on--so you can see both the overall growth, and also how the different band of Plugscore contribute to that.

The upper right plot is the same data, but normalized--so instead of simply saying there's 334 stations that have a score of 10, it says there's 334/629 = 53% of the stations that are currently rated as ten, so you can see more clearly how each band contributes to whatever the current total is without the change in total swamping the differences.

The lower left plot is the same method as the upper right, but excluding all of the "0" rated stations (so the total is 629-44, not 629 for the most recent data point). Stations hang out at 0 until enough people come by to rate them, which can mean a working station in a low-traffic area waits a long time at 0 before suddenly jumping to its proper score--especially with fewer people traveling for holidays during the pandemic. Excluding those gives some useful data, so I also plot the stacks this way.

The final chart is a weighted average. Basically, it multiplies each tier's value by its relative frequency in the data set (e.g. 10*0.53=5.3) and then sums those values to give the "average" station's plugscore for the network as a whole. I calculate this both for the entire network (the blue line) and for the network excluding those stations rated 0 (the green line), which again as noted are mostly just stations which haven't gotten enough reviews to be rated yet. The red line is the percentage of stations with a non-zero plugscore below 5 (e.g. 3 of 629 in my 6/11 data point). This number of "flaky" stations being low indicates stations are generally in good working order and any persistent issues are being resolved and not building up.

The TLDR is that EA continues to open an average of about 0.5 stations per day (about 3/week), while also making improvements in their overall network reliability. They have continued room for improvement, but the situation continues to improve.
 

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Sure. For about the last two years, I've been keeping a data set of how many Electrify America stations are listed on Plugshare, and how many fall into each Plugscore tier. Plugscore is a Yelp-style review of how reliable the station is, with something like 10 is "don't worry about driving up and getting a charge quickly", 7 to 8 is "you might have some issues but should be able to get a charge" and by 5 or 6 the station may be acting up in general or for specific models, and should either be avoided or have an alternative in mind. Stations are rated 0 when they first open until they get several (like, 5-10) reviews, and AIUI it's hard for a station that's actually been reviewed to get any lower than a 1, so a 0 almost always means "new, not yet rated".

These are plots of the recorded breakdowns in the station scores--the plot on the upper left labeled "Overall" shows the simple plot of how many stations are rated 10, then above it how many more are rated 9, then how many are 8, and so on down to 0, with the top line being the total number listed on Plugshare, basically just a stacked plot of this:
View attachment 674831
If you look at the upper left plot, you'll see the bottom band on the right is about 330, then above it the second band ends at (334+90), the one above that is (334+90+76), and so on--so you can see both the overall growth, and also how the different band of Plugscore contribute to that.

The upper right plot is the same data, but normalized--so instead of simply saying there's 334 stations that have a score of 10, it says there's 334/629 = 53% of the stations that are currently rated as ten, so you can see more clearly how each band contributes to whatever the current total is without the change in total swamping the differences.

The lower left plot is the same method as the upper right, but excluding all of the "0" rated stations (so the total is 629-44, not 629 for the most recent data point). Stations hang out at 0 until enough people come by to rate them, which can mean a working station in a low-traffic area waits a long time at 0 before suddenly jumping to its proper score--especially with fewer people traveling for holidays during the pandemic. Excluding those gives some useful data, so I also plot the stacks this way.

The final chart is a weighted average. Basically, it multiplies each tier's value by its relative frequency in the data set (e.g. 10*0.53=5.3) and then sums those values to give the "average" station's plugscore for the network as a whole. I calculate this both for the entire network (the blue line) and for the network excluding those stations rated 0 (the green line), which again as noted are mostly just stations which haven't gotten enough reviews to be rated yet. The red line is the percentage of stations with a non-zero plugscore below 5 (e.g. 3 of 629 in my 6/11 data point). This number of "flaky" stations being low indicates stations are generally in good working order and any persistent issues are being resolved and not building up.

The TLDR is that EA continues to open an average of about 0.5 stations per day (about 3/week), while also making improvements in their overall network reliability. They have continued room for improvement, but the situation continues to improve.
And when you say three stations per week, do you mean sites or plugs.
 
And when you say three stations per week, do you mean sites or plugs.
Sites, since Plugshare doesn't report plugs per site in an easy way to aggregate (at least for a regular Joe user). I've thought about starting to track the number of plugs they have through the Alternative Fuels Data Center, but I'm uncertain how often they update their data. However, in general the typical Electrify America station has about 4-6 stalls, so that'd be about 12-18 plugs per week.
 
Is there a way to see where upcoming stations will be located?
The EA app has some "Coming Soon" locations shown. However, the new one closest to me never showed up in the app until it was open.
Plugshare also has a "Coming Soon" status that will show the wrench icon in the pin and filter settings to show or not show sites with that status.
 
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The EA app has some "Coming Soon" locations shown. However, the new one closest to me never showed up in the app until it was open.
Plugshare also has a "Coming Soon" status that will show the wrench icon in the pin and filter settings to show or not show sites with that status.

Thanks, yeah I see. The focus on cities is frustrating IMO.

I see Denver has almost 20 EA stations, with about 6 more on the way. Meanwhile there are many big gaps across the country.
 
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