For the past couple of years....battery cars (E-cars) have been hyped up a good bit. One of the dozen-odd negatives that Germans often bring up....is the limited number of public recharge-stations around, when you travel beyond your local region.
So Focus (the German magazine) brought this up today.
One of the public recharging station operators is this German company....IONITY.
They pay to put up recharging stations. And they get paid for the 'service'.
Well....the newest rate coming up (at the end of January)....is 79 Euro cents for each Kilowatt hour. You can do the math, but this comes to being ten times the normal rate. With a 100 kWh battery a complete and absolute charge? The experts say it'll add up to around 80 Euro for a charge. More cost than for a tank of gas or diesel? Yeah.....but don't bring this up with Germans.
Deserving of this? This is the problem in terms of you (the company) getting the parking spot, bringing electricity to the point, running the financial charge business, and being reliable. You have to sustain x-amount of profit. Presently, I'd take a guess that some of these recharging stations are getting fewer than two customers a week.
It got brought up last year.....with a public TV news crew that went out and talked to a McDonalds 'boss'.....asking about the recharging station about 100 feet away from their parking lot. It wasn't their recharger, or their property. But the question was....in the whole past year....have you ever seen anyone parked there? The manager gave the response.....NO. They'd never seen anyone there....ever.
Last year, around mid-October, Germany stood up and admitted around the entire nation....in terms of public recharging points....there were 34,639. I would suspect that if you asked about usage......the numbers might show a fair number of these with almost no use throughout an entire year.
The problem here is that capitalists put the money up....invested probably 5,000 Euro for the parking spots (usually two to four), and put up the charging stations, with an anticipation that a dozen of these would pay back x-amount each year. And the sad truth is that they are likely making only half that amount.
So will this extremely high cost on recharging lead to some stupid regulation efforts by the Bundestag? Eventually....yeah. At that point, the implementation effort will drop like a rock, and you will see a two-year slow-down, with almost no one interested in putting up more recharging stations.
As stupid as it sounds....this is the path where this whole E-car thing is riding upon, and will mean constant regulations, and continual efforts to convince the public it's a smart idea to go electrical.
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