263 - The Canopy Episode

Hi. I'm Gary and this is episode 263 of EV Musings a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

On the show today we'll be looking at canopies.

Before we start a quick reminder that my ebook ‘So, You’ve Gone Electric’ is in its third version. If you have purchased an earlier version make sure Amazon sends you through the updated version automatically

If you don’t have have it the link’s in the show notes to buy it.

You’ll know it’s the new version because it has a shiny red EV on the cover!

Our main topic of discussion today is Canopies.

Let me set the scene:

It's late in the evening in spring with the typical British weather - which means it's blowing a gale and the rain is coming down in stair rods (look it up, GenZ).

You pull into the brand new Instavolt charging hub at Three Maids Hill in Winchester ready to charge your EV.

Plenty of available chargers, a lovely-looking Starbucks beckoning to you, and even a doggie rehydration station for Butch, the black lab that insists on coming with you wherever you go.

But first, you need to get the car charging. You plug in, swipe the card and the system errors. With Instavolt you're supposed to authorise the payment first then plug in. So you go to replace the cable on the charge unit - but it's locked in so you need to retrieve the keys from your pocket and unlock it. Then you need to start again. Authorise with your payment card.... wait for the system to process the payment... wait for the charger to acknowledge the payment... plug in….wait for the charger to make the handshake.. then, eventually, the charge will start.

This might have taken a couple of minutes. In the middle of the morning on a calm spring day, this isn't too much of an issue. But this is Britain. It's quite dark for long chunks of the winter, the wind is blowing and - as we've already said - the rain is pouring.

These two minutes now mean that you are cold, windswept, and soaked through to the skin. But why?

Because this brand-new superhub - with 44 chargers, drive through bays, excellent access, on site facilities and everything you would need from a charging site - is missing one thing

A canopy.

Why is that? I mean every single petrol station you go to has a canopy, right? But - with only a number of exceptions - most charging sites don’t have canopies.

Today I want to talk about why that is and what the CPOs say about it.

But first let’s set some parameters.

There are over 75,000 charging sites across the UK at the moment. A huge number of those are AC only - and a lot of them are single sites such as lamppost chargers, or a couple of connectors attached to a car park bay somewhere.

Likewise there are a large number of DC sites that have one or two chargers located in the car park of somewhere like a Starbucks or a McDonalds.

I’m not talking about them.

I’m talking about the hubs - of which there are now 673 in the UK. Large sites, custom built by CPOs to entice EV drivers to their location.

And this is where the issue starts. Because there is no consistency amongst CPOs regarding the provision of hubs.

Let’s take bp Pulse, for example. They have a great DC ultra rapid charging hub at the NEC. It has great canopies over the top. As does their newly converted Cromwell Road site in West London. But the next largest bp Hub by number of units is actually in Stafford and it has - zero canopies. Nor do any of the other hubs in the West Midlands. (I know, bp invited me up there to film them last year).

In fact the bp Hammersmith hub - which was one of the first hubs in central London, and is located less than 2 miles from the Cromwell Road site - has 5 units all sitting in the open air, despite the petrol pumps - located 20 yards away on the same site - being covered with a canopy.

Then we look at Shell. Most of their locations are extensions to existing fuel forecourts - which already have canopies. But do the Shell chargers at these forecourts have canopies? No. The only major one that does is the Shell Forecourt at Fulham. This is a converted petrol station so it had a canopy already prior to it being converted. They pulled that down and built a different one. There are one or two other ones with canopies cross the network (I was passing the Shell garage in Borehamwood recently and noticed they had one), but generally they don’t

Then we look at Instavolt. They have several major hubs - Stroud Park and Winchester spring to mind. They took greenfield (or brownfield) sites and had pretty much full reign for what they could do there. In Winchester they got planning permission for a huge solar array, on-site battery storage, a brand new coffee shop as well as the 44 chargers.

But did they get a canopy? No.

Gridserve: we all know them as the company that took over from Ecotricity and did such a great job with the charging at the motorway service areas. I can give them a pass for not putting canopies over the one or two units they inherited and upgraded from Ecotricity. But they’ve since embarked on a large slate of new installs at the MSAs - often up to 12 units at a site - and none of them have canopies (Despite the fact that they are all on locations with wet fuel dispensers that have canopies.)

However, when they’ve gone for their Electric Forecourts (of which there are 4 open and at least 1 in progress) they’ve put fantastic canopies on there.

Osprey charging: A similar story to Instavolt. Some sites installed where canopies may not have been appropriate, but they also opened their own site at Strawberry Fields in Devon and didn’t put a canopy there for planning reasons.

But some locations do have canopies as a matter of course.

Most of the MFG sites have canopies. Again this is probably due to the fact that their chargers are usually colocated at wet fuel sites that already have canopies. Although they do have several sites (particularly one in the A3 near Wimbledon), that has no canopy - but that’s at a car wash, not a wet fuel station.

Fastned are the other CPO that tend to put canopies on most of their locations - but not all. The Angel Of The North near Newcastle is a stand-alone set of chargers in a lay buy near the statue. No canopy (and - according to Chargesafe when they went to evaluate - no lighting after dark!). but it is an exception rather than a rule.

But they’re not all like that

lready a canopy there back in: 2008

This policy of adding unit-specific canopies is something that a couple of other CPOs have gone for in a couple of sites. I can think of Arnold Clark Charging as an example.

So, of course, the question that comes out of all of these situations is ‘Why don’t CPOs add canopies to their charging locations?’ I mean, as I mentioned earlier, just about every wet-fuel station has a canopy to cover the pumps. Why not chargers - or, at least, charging hubs?

Let’s hear what a couple of the CPOs have to say about this.

Last season I spoke with Andreas Atkins from Ionity about their charger hubs/ He told me:

ANDREAS: Of course, we have tested a few. We don't have any in the UK. I guess it's does the customer, are they really asking for this? I would never install a site that's isolated. We always work with site partners. There's always the opportunity for the customer to go inside the building, the site partner that we're working with, whether it's the Starbucks drive-through, the hotel or a retail park. If there is this question mark, is it actually what the customer wants? There's always a trade-off between that and extra costs. Every site is like a business. It's a P&L. The lower that we can keep the costs, the more advantageous we can be on the end price for customers and particular work that they pay.

Gary: We also had Tom Hurst - country manager from Fastned - on the show back in season 7, Episode 140

Tom: So since day one, Fastned as a company has been building and designing and delivering and operating what I can only call, I simply call petrol stations, but for electric vehicles. So you'll recognize our solar canopy with the yellow wing trim, is fully timber framed, for example, and that canopy sits on top of ultra rapid charges today. I mean, it started with 50 kilowatt charges back in the day, but now we're talking essentially high power hubs with several ultra-rapids from day one. again, since the mission that we had then is still the mission that we have today, and it's just as relevant, it's all about getting you on the road again as quickly as possible. And that's the area that FastNet plays in, right? We exist to allow you to complete your journey, whether you're carrying out a long, irregular journey or a regular commute, whatever it might be, get on the road again as quickly as possible and as comfortable as possible.

And so for us, part of the story then is it's sitting underneath the canopy, for example. Why should you, as an EV driver, feel any less comfortable than a driver of a petrol vehicle who literally, as a given, expects a canopy, for example?

Gary: What’s apparent from the discussions and comments I’ve just played is that there are different views on canopies between CPOs themselves, AND between CPOs and customers.

Andreas basically questioned whether we actually need canopies? you’re not standing outside in the wet’ except, of course, as in the example I quoted at the top of the show you ARE standing out in the wet. The fact there’s a Starbucks on site when you’re connected and charging doesn’t obviate the need for covers while you’re doing that important bit. This is especially important if you’re a disabled driver who might need to extract a wheelchair from your vehicle, transfer into it, grab the cable, place it on your knee, pay for the charging, navigate around the charger in your wheelchair carrying a potentially heavy and cumbersome cable, and connect it to the car in a limited time period before the charging session resets.

There’s also another aspect to this which feeds into the bigger charging narrative about cost.

Simply put “Would you rather have hubs with canopies on them, or would you rather have hubs where the price of the canopies is put towards reducing the cost of charging?” I’ve heard a CPO say that to me at one point. On the face of it that seems to be an appropriate trade off. But, in reality, none of the CPOs that have installed canopies have increased their prices at these sites, nor have they reduced their prices at locations without canopies.

What do we think? Canopies at a set price OR no canopies and lower pricing? Would you go for that?

Linked into that is the related question which is ‘Given a limited budget for putting in a hub would you rather that budget went toward installing more chargers at a site or installing fewer chargers but with a canopy over them?’ That’s an interesting trade-off.

Planning for a charging hub or site is a complex process and needs input from many different people. If energy needs to be brought in from the grid a substation will likely need to be built. This needs to be included. Cabling needs to be planned for as well as the on-site facilities such as shops and additional parking.

All of these things are common across all charging hubs. But when you then start to include things such as totems and canopies it throws the planning into a different level.

For canopies you have the additional issue of site lines and foundations.

I know when Osprey Charging put their site in at The Paisley Pear near Silverstone they originally wanted a canopy but were unable to add one due to the nature of the ground on which they were wanting to put it. There were things under the ground that couldn’t be disturbed when putting the canopy support foundations in so they had to abandon the idea.

I’ve also been told that as soon as you add a canopy into a plan it immediately lengthens the planning process by an additional 9 months. For CPOs who need sites to be up and running ASAP to start repaying the capital investment, a nine-month delay can be an issue. It’s often quicker and easier to not add the canopy.

But I wonder how much of this plays into sites where there are already existing canopies but the chargers are installed out in the open? There’, obviously, the cost issue. But how much does planning come into this?

Let’s take a good example. I’ve already mentioned the bp Pulse site on the Cromwell Road. This was an existing wet fuel station that was decommissioned and converted to a charging hub. As a wet fuel station it already had a canopy. But this canopy was removed and replaced with a different canopy design in a slightly different location. My understanding from speaking with members of bp Pulse is that because the canopy was there the planning permission was almost built in for the new canopy. They had to justify why it had been moved, and the new design had to be approved, but it was less of an issue than adding a canopy at a site where non existed previously.

I suspect this is the same thing that happened with the Shell Recharge site at Fulham.

Incidentally these two sites also have the large totems in place indicating that these are charging stations not petrol stations. This was also because they existed in the ‘old’ site and their placement couldn’t be changed. At the Cromwell road site, for example, the totem is placed at the exit of the site rather than the entrance because moving it further forward to be near the entrance would have caused other sight line issues, apparently

So we know that sites with existing canopies can have new canopies added - or, at least, get those canopies replaced. So why - in places such as Watford Gap which has both a petrol station canopy and a drive-thru Costa canopy - do the Gridserve chargers there not have any covering?

I contacted Gridserve for comment and they did not provide a response before we wet to record this episode:

It’s something of a marmite question, this. Some people want canopies because they’re used to them from petrol stations. Some people want canopies because they’ve been caught out with chargers that don’t work and they’ve spent to long in the rain trying to get them to work.

But some people think the money that we could spend on canopies could be better spent reducing tariffs. Or improving charger reliability so that we can all charge first time every time with no issue.

So:

What’s your thoughts? Canopies or not?

It's time for a cool ev or renewable thing to share with you listeners.

For many people a 30kWh Nissan leaf will have been their first foray into electric vehicles. Fantastic cars, really reliable and great for pootling around town. But the limited range (around 100 miles on a really good day) meant that they weren’t much use for anything else unless you wanted to spend more time at chargers than you do driving.

But an enterprising young man home mechanic decided to change all that and he did it by swapping his Nissan leaf 30kWh battery out for a newer Nissan leaf 62kWh battery.

And he did it all on the driveway of his house in about 3 hours.

It’s pretty impressive, he ended up doubling the range of his car and loves the result.

Check out his YouTube video showing what he did and how he now appreciates slower moving vehicles on the road as it helps him get better efficiency from his new battery!

I hope you enjoyed listening to today’s show.

It was put together this week with the help of Andreas Atkins and Tom Hurst. Many thanks for their help.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me I can be reached at info@EVMusings.com

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Check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles.

I know you’re probably driving or walking or jogging now. But if you can remember- and you enjoyed this episode drop a review in iTunes, please. It really helps me out. Thanks.

If you’ve reached this part of the podcast and are still listening - thank you. Why not let me know you’ve got to this point by messaging me @musingsev.bsky.social with the words [Is it canapé or canopeas? #ifyouknowyouknow] Nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know he’s sitting this one out, I reckon.

Thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know his latest entrepreneurial initiative is a mobile canopy for people on the electric unicycles. Keeps them dry in wet weather and shelters them from sun in hot weather. I have to admit I was sceptical. I mean a canopy on a unicycle- surely that’s very close to being a completely different sort of vehicle, isn’t it. I mean does it work? Can I get to see one in person?

He told me

Andreas: Of course, we have tested a few. We don't have any in the UK.

Thanks for listening. Bye…