The Gas Stations Hidden Battle

[RSpanner]

Very interesting article, and I am still picking through it again.

The Gas Station’s Hidden Battle to Survive

Electric vehicles are changing the way Americans fuel up. Will it mean the end of the gas station?

www.politico.com

 

[RTPEV]

Yes, interesting, but somewhat dumbed down to the point where important details are missing or glossed over at the tail end of the article.

For example, this paragraph:

Kum & Go knows the pain of this math. Ken Kleemeier, its vice president of fuels, gives the example of a 150-kilowatt charging session with a $6 demand charge. Six dollars times 150 kilowatts means the electricity bill is $900. But “we charge the customer $10,” Kleemeier said. “That’s a $900 loss. That’s where the demand charges are painful. There’s no feasible way to pass that along.”

A casual reader is going to read that and assume that it costs $900 per fast charge and that stores are losing $890 each time a car charges up. Well, it doesn't work like that...the $900 is shared among all users that month. Sure, demand charges are expensive, and if you have low traffic/utilization, the number of customers that you have to spread that charge out among drops, but it's certainly not as bad as that paragraph makes it out to be.

And there are things like on-site storage that can mitigate the demand charges, but that wasn't covered until the end of the article with this overly simple statement:

Kum & Go, for example, next year will try deploying a battery next to a charging station. Its stored energy could be poured into cars at peak charging times and give the fueler a measure of independence from the utility, perhaps even allowing it to wring a small profit like it does with gas.

which doesn't directly state that the battery can directly reduce those demand charges.

 

[moa999]

As sensible as saying $500 tanker delivery fee,
And we only charged this customer who loaded up with gas $50.

Yep those demand chargers suck in the early days, particularly for low utilisation/ high speed chargers. But get more EVs on the road and it's a non-issue.

 

[RTPEV]

As sensible as saying $500 tanker delivery fee,
And we only charged this customer who loaded up with gas $50.

Yep those demand chargers suck in the early days, particularly for low utilisation/ high speed chargers. But get more EVs on the road and it's a non-issue.

Well, it's still a tough problem. The throughput of EVs at charging stations does have practical limits that are far below gas pumps, meaning the maximum number of drivers you could conceivably absorb the demand charge cost out over a month is much lower than a gas station.

Ideally you would want your site to be as heavily utilized as possible to minimize the per user share of the demand fees. But this is going to be terrible experience for EV drivers if that utilization factor frequently hits 100% (technically above is there is a line to use the chargers).

But not all hope is lost. On-site storage will come to the rescue, particularly helpful in the sense that it can scale up appropriately. For a lightly used site, the storage needs are modest, and as more usage builds at the site, storage options can expand appropriately.

And even without on site storage, charge sharing schemes that allow for very high speed max speeds while the site is lightly loaded, but permit charge sharing across multiple stalls (ideally the whole site) allow the operator to cap the site draw from the grid while mostly offering high speed service for the majority of time. And statistically, those worst-case scenarios are not going to be that common. The paired stall concept that Tesla V2 Superchargers and EVgo 350kW stations use were good first steps, but the V3 Supercharger concept is even better, taking the sharing to the site level.