As Bob Dylan once wrote, ‘the times they are a-changing’. Like it or not, the internal combustion engine is dying a death. The days of thousands of polluting filling-stations might be over sooner than we thought with plans to build the first UK forecourt just for electric vehicles (EVs).
With a £1billion budget and proposals for over 100 sites, the project promises fast and stress-free EV charging for motorists who have already switched from petrol and diesel cars.
Staying Power
The brains behind the idea are Gridserve, a company who envisages their Electric Forecourts® replacing standard fuel stations by providing the UK public clean, sustainable energy for their EVs.
Forecourt designs follow a similar set-up to motorway services—offering toilets, coffee shops, supermarkets, somewhere to pick up healthy food, and other retailers.
The forecourts will include airport-style lounges with high-speed internet together with EV-related information hubs. These pit-stops will give people a quick and easy way to recharge both their vehicles and themselves.
Gridserve’s forecourts will use 100% renewable, clean, zero-carbon, solar-power energy and battery storage to power each of the sites’ 24 charging bays. Plans are likewise in store for areas devoted to fleet vehicles, allowing charging of buses and taxis, etc.
If they wish, drivers may book a bay ahead of time via an app on their smartphones and use it to plan journeys and pay for extra on-site services like car washing. Gridserve will reward users of the app with their loyalty and referral schemes for using services provided by them and their partners.
Overhauling the current ordeal EV owners go through, the bays will charge most electric and hybrid models within half an hour. And for those with some smaller cars capable of high-speed charging, a recharge will take a mere 10 minutes. The Electric Forecourts® promise prices rivalling those you pay to charge from home. For that, you get the most rapid charge your vehicle can support—500kW for cars and light commercial vehicles, which is the world’s fastest.
Development of the 80 already confirmed state-of-the-art forecourts will take place along busy roads. The first forecourt may be in Braintree, Essex with those in Hull and York—where Gridserve is building the most advanced solar farms in the UK—also starting work by the end of this year.
‘Accessible and seamless’
The present public charging network isn’t fulfilling the needs of EV owners. Gridserve plans to have over 100 operational Electric Forecourts® within five years, which can only be a good thing for the UK.
Toddington Harper, Chief Executive Officer from Buckinghamshire-based Gridserve said:
‘The latest generation of electric vehicles are awesome and ready for mainstream adoption, but drivers still worry about if or where they can charge, how long it will take, and what it will cost.
‘We plan to eliminate any range or charging anxiety by building a UK-wide network of customer-focussed, brand new Electric Forecourts® that will make it easier and cheaper to use an electric vehicle than a petrol or diesel alternative.
‘Our plan is to deliver for electric vehicle charging what Amazon has done for shopping online—make it simple, price competitive, and a great customer experience,’ he added.
Gridserve is working with developers, EV carmakers, fleet operators; investors, councils, and retailers who support their concept. One of Gridserve’s partnerships is with ChargePoint.
Christopher Burghardt, Managing Director, Europe, of ChargePoint, said:
‘The electric mobility revolution is upon us and ChargePoint continues to work to help create an open and accessible network that enables drivers to enjoy an effortless charging experience everywhere they live, work and play throughout Europe.
‘ChargePoint is committed to collaborating with partners like Gridserve to build out the EV charging network of tomorrow and make driving electric vehicles more accessible and seamless than ever.’
Moving forward
Climate and clean air targets mean we must transition fast to cleaner, sustainable, transport. With the population ever growing, a reliable EV-supporting infrastructure is vital. The UK ban on the sale of all new conventional petrol and diesel cars and vans comes into force in 2040. Scotland has the bolder target of 2032.
While the number of alternatively fuelled vehicles (AFV) grew by 30% last year, the amount of AFVs forms a small percentage of the 34.9m cars on our roads. Primary concerns motorists have, include the price of EVs, battery range, and the shortage of charging points causing extended waiting times to charge cars.
People also worry about the burden vehicle charging puts on the national grid, but Gridserve says their Electric Forecourts® will help this situation and IMPROVE both present and future grid issues.
Last year alone, research, design, and development of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging projects received £30million of government funding.
Energy stored in the batteries of EVs can act as mobile storage devices, providing support to the grid during peak hours. During off-peak hours, the battery recharges and is ready for the EV driver to begin their next journey.
As people learn about the upcoming Electric Forecourts® project, all the positive selling points should increase EV take-up and further transform the motoring landscape required for the great British electric switchover.
Does this news make you less concerned about switching over to an EV? Are you an EV driver looking forward to these new forecourts? Share your views in the comments.
Why not adapt petrol stations to hydrogen stations. There is no way 2bn car batteries will be available using current technology by 2030 or 2050. Instead of mucking about with cables why not just fill up like we are used to.
I agree, all currant models of cars whether petrol or diesel can run on hydrogen with modifications. Then there would be no need to shut currant factories building cars and engines. The powers that be do not talk about HYDROGEN.
There’s obviously more opportunity for profit in completely ripping apart everything that we have and replacing it with something new. Don’t let anyone tell you this has anything to do with sustainability or the well being of the planet.
because hydrogen infrastructure is expensive, it has to be cooled to be liquid and cant be handled,) the fuel itself is more explosive than current fuels, the cost of production is similar and required bucket loads of electricity.
but appart from that its great
No they can’t – you’re stupidly misinformed. Hydrogen vehicles are completely different to old fashioned internal combustion cars. They convert hydrogen into electricity and use that to power an electric motor.
To date there has been only one major hydrogen fuelled vehicle – the Space Shuttle.
Look at what a disaster that was, and why, and you will have your answer.
I still think hydrogen technology would have allowed a quicker roll out & that one day it will be embraced by governments when they discover we aren’t generating enough electricity to cope. Whilst for local journeys electric is a viable option, for longer journeys finding somewhere to charge & then waiting for the charge to complete, are still reasons not to choose electric.
I agree Keith, you don’t need to transport hydrogen, it can be made on site all you need is water and power.
And how do you make hydrogen from water? Electricity, surely?
Enough electricity to power 2 or 3 EVs for the same distance.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tBHc9u89-nc&feature=youtu.be
Hydrogen has lost. Deservedly so. It’s produced either from gas or electrolysis. It’s way less efficient than batteries. It may have a role in heavy vehicles but is too expensive to be realistic for cars. There are currently 11 HFC stations in the UK. None in Ireland that I know of.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tBHc9u89-nc&feature=youtu.be
And to add to that, hydrogen is a hard cryogen, which means it has to be kept below -250C to keep it liquid. And the molecules are so small they escape between the interstitial gaps in steel.
And it is EXTREMELY bulky.
While the idea is commendable, I would strongly question the maths of being able to supply from solar. On that basis that it is night and or winter, a solar farm will produce probably about 50% of the year, with a very small percentage output in winter when EV’s are at their worst in range / kw.
Even being fairly safe with the numbers, a 60kw charge x 24 bays x 100 stations = 144Mw, even if they only have 40% use that is ~60Mw or roughly 300 Acres of solar farm to produce a portion of that on the good days.
However the big flaw is that we just can’t keep living the way we do, much more thought needs to go into how we work & travel to reduce usage, not just move it across from one source to another.
Has the environmental cost been incorporated with the mining, shipping, manufacture, shipping, install, maintenance and decommission off solar farms. Not to mention the huge areas needed to house them, which reduces our ability to farm that land, resulting in more import of food.
I don’t at all disagree that this is an improvement, but it is certainly not the end of the story, I’m not even sure it’s the beginning of the end, more like a false start!
The reality is that there’s more than enough room on home and factory roofs to cater for all of our solar power needs. The only reason why they use empty fields is that they are the cheapest options. These solar filling stations are going to have battery backups which will save any unused solar during the day and allow cheap power to be stored during the night. The environmental cost of solar farms is always quoted, whereas the cost to mine, manufacture/refine coal & oils stations is carefully hidden. They used to be published but, for some reason, they stopped about 10 years ago . . .
Craig is right: you need to do the maths. The world’s biggest battery wall is the one Elon Musk built in South Australia. It can power 10,000 houses for two hours. Cars use more energy than houses, and Essex has a lot more than 10,000 cars!
I saw a good YouTube video talking about range anxiety and how it’s really only petrol car drivers that have it and I quite agree. I drove to work in my Auris this morning and I know that I need to stop at the garage on the way home tonight otherwise I’ll have to take a detour on the way to work tomorrow, leaving enough time to get there. Then I have the annoyance that it’s probably going to be busy. Unless I’ve recently filled up, If I need to visit family at the weekend, then I will either need to make sure I have enough fuel to get there or stop on the way.
However, when I get the electric car that I recently ordered I’m probably going to plug it in every night (possibly via 13A plug) filling it to 80% using either power from the solar panels I intend to buy or cheap rate (currently 5p per kWh) overnight electricity. That means I’ll always have enough power to drive from rural Wiltshire and pick up my son who lives in Camden and back (210 miles) without having to recharge. Zero anxiety.
And what about when you forget to plug it in? Every journey needs to be planned with a battery-powered car, which goes against a principle benefit of car ownership.
Given my diesel will do 500 miles on a tank and when I’m not doing much travelling I only need to fill up around once a month I never suffer from range anxiety.
I’m sorry, but that is just nonsense, even when my fuel warning light comes on I still have around 80 miles left in the tank, that is the range of many EV’s on the road at the moment. It’s strange how many Pro EV’s try to twist legitimate EV issues into ICE ones. Charging & Fuelling are not the same and for a very long time never will be.
Yes I’m sure you will be able to charge it at night (although strongly suggest you don’t go for the 13A option) and get there and back, but what is the expected range on arrival home, unless you are buying a Tesla, probably not very much, at which point your 13A charger will take ~20 hours to get you back up there again. Where as an ICE can drive to one of the many thousands of pumps and fill up in a few minutes. Range anxiety does not exist on an ICE.
There are two types of drivers, the short run / commute with the odd day trip where an EV is a good option. The longer commute drivers, where clearly the article was written against, it’s a long way off, if EV expansion grows at the rate it needs too, there will be queues miles long to get on charge.
That also does not solve the needs of the inner city owners who have no driveway or at home charging options available to them.
As an inner city owner these past two years has seen a huge growth in on street charging options, most ingeniously the adaptation of lampposts to allow charging. It’s really not a problem. In addition, they are subsidised to encourage electric car take up. It’s easy and it works
I don’t think range anxiety using fuel really exists. It only takes a few minutes to fill a car up with fuel, much quicker than waiting for a car to charge up, so this is going to slow journeys down. You’ll still have problems with busy waiting time for charging points and probably more so with EV because of lack of infrastructure etc. If you are away on holiday you won’t be able to charge it up overnight unless a hotel or street has charging facilities and there is one available for you to use. Unless you fancy waking up at 4 in the morning to nab the first available point when the first person leaves the charging point free, you will worry about getting to where you want to go whilst eating your breakfast!
“the internal combustion engine is dying a death”. Being deliberately strangled more like, in pursuit of fairy dust targets for CO2 emissions. This would not be happening without our money, dished out without our consent by our clueless politicians. How many charging stations will there be in rural areas? This is all about cities, the rest of us don’t exist.
Check out PlugShare or Zap Map apps. The whole country is covered.
Yes, being deliberately strangled so your children might have a chance of a half-decent life. Not such a bad idea eh? They have my consent. I wish they’d do more and faster. Embrace it , there’s nothing to fear, just a more beautiful, healthy life.
The UK is banning the sale of new combustion engines cars by 2040. Scotland is banning the sale of new combustion engines cars by 2032. I thought Scotland was a part of the UK ( whether the like it or not ).
It would appear that the UK has become the ‘Federal States of the UK’.
I am on my third full EV Vehicle. Since 2014. Charging was free. Now. Can be up to 30 pence a kilowatt. It’s going to taxed like petrol or diesel. Only winner will be the government when we all switch. Around 80p pee litre is tax on petrol or diesel. So will electric Have a lot of tax on every kilowatt we use
Unlikely they will heavily tax electricity as this would penalise those that don’t own cars. To compensate for fuel tax revenue loss, the government will move to road pricing and charge motorists a per mile tax.The software built into EVs will easily handle road pricing which is one reason the government is investing in semi autonomous vehicle technology.
Think you need to consider why the push for smart meters and Internet of Things. It will soon be quite simple to charge a different rate to charge your EV (or power other things) at any time needed independently of anything else running in your house, this needs to be implemented to allow Vehicle to Grid to operate.
Exactly and also, they will have a history of electric use so if it changes, they can accurately see the difference to tax the user on an inflated fuel tax rate.
I still see problems. It was reported that the average motorway services could refuel 280 cars an hour. How big would an electric filling point needing half an hour a car have to be if most cars were electric.
So how’s the national grid going to cope. They struggle now to provide power in winter, what will happen when all these electric cars need to charge??
That will increase the carbon footprint!!
Improve the technology in hydro power and keep the internal combustion engines going.
At present the outer reaches of scotland dont need heavy cables but generation in northern scotland , as being projected, will mean the need for recabling/ transformers especially to supply power for cars south of the border
Hydro power requires water flowing down a mountain. Countries like Switzerland and Norway have this natural resource. We don’t, so it is out of the question.
I drive a hybrid car and have done for 2 years, and I’m glad it has the petrol engine. The country hasn’t got the infrastructure to cope with charging just now. In the county I live in the 1 and only rapid went down 7 miles to my next one. It was also out of action.. next was 9 miles away . I wasn’t going to travel nearly 10 miles for a 35 ev journey. The government must be having a laugh. It all sounds good then.
I done a fire course, one of the guys on it had visited the Tesla factory and asked if the car goes on fire what’s the best way to put it out. The reply he got was, walk away quickly as that will go off like a bomb. So the safety aspect kicks in..
Now I’m looking at going back to diesel Volvo v60. Great on fuel, with plenty of room for the dog cage in the boot.
A lot of what the EV pushers say doesn’t make sense but you have to cover four miles on a unit of electricity to make it equivalent to a petrol car but Tesla are only claiming to cover three miles on a unit and their new car doesn’t have the range claimed. So it’s much less than 3 miles/kWh. Bear in mind that government haven’t started taxing EVs yet, which they can with smart meters. They’re stuck with the standard 5% electricity VAT for the moment!
Any other factual info about EVs is welcome.
Given the consumption you state and the range which Tesla state (nearly 300 miles in ideal conditions), 80-100kWh may be needed. Given a kWh is perhaps 15 pence, up to 300 miles may cost £15 before greater electricity usage necessitates investment the grid to cope with greater demand. Electricity will also have a selective fuel tax surcharge which even SMART domestic meters will differentiate.
The idea of a brave new electric world is not sugar coated and it will economically backfire in the future…
I live in middle norfolk and now run a Nissan eNV200 Van for my business had it 4 months done 7.5k miles been to Bognor regis and back in a day charged 4 times for 20 to 30 mins time fitted in nicely with food and other breaks I have a real range of 150 to 160 mls anymore sometimes just depends on how I drive itI don’t have range anxiety as I plan my journeys typical; example Norwich to clacton apron 80 miles each way get to clacton on normal time return to colchester nissan charge up for free 30mins do some work drink 2 cups of coffee for free get back in drive home get back with min 1/3 battery on a 40w battery charge to full overnight at 9p/kw plus vat 160 mile round trip costs me £2.40 plus vat never had a problem charging and save on average 450kg CO2 a month one very relaxed EV Driver by the way off from the lights like stuff of a shovel if I need to. also EV is inits infancy look backk to 1910 and the cars then and petrol cars today E.V is developing at a much faster rate need I say more!
Good to get charge ups and coffe for free, thought there was £5 connection fee plus cost of electric on top. Tesla stopped free chargers some time ago?
You’ll have to let us know about the free chargers, my friend is on his second leaf(must have upgraded) and took twelve hours to Gatwick each way. Charged at Capel at Mary for about hour and a half and then three hours at clackett lane(slow charger) and only drives at 50mph to keep it above 4 miles/kWhr. Costs £8.50 per charge as it’s£2.50 for the electric and £5 connection charge. Free chargers would be wonderful and if they’re fast chargers, you’d spend less time charging than driving, plus the free coffee!
I plan to be an EV driver later in the year so this will be welcome news. The quicker thay get more than one the better
People forget that it takes a shed load of electricity to produce diesel and petrol – one refinery uses as much juice as two cities. Then there is the hidden energy cost of finding the oil, extracting it, transporting (and heating it) before it even gets to the refinery. Then there is the military cost of fighting wars over the stuff. In fact the CO2 produced by an ICE car driving 100 km is much more if you include the CO2 produced getting it to the petrol station pump.
I drive about 18,000 miles a year, including to Paris and Malaga – and my next car will be an EV (Kia E-Niro I think). I have 6 Kwh solar panel on my roof which means most of the time my electricity is free. 90% of the time, 90% of cars are parked, so my EV will also be useful in the evening using vehicle to grid technology, which means free electricity in my home as well. If I do need to go on a long journey, I will have to stop every 240 miles, which I will do anyway to have a pee.
Here in Brittany, there are now charging points in very village, so about every 5 kms.
But what do you estimate the life of an EV is. I would suggest about half of an ICE. No one will be buying a 6 year old EV with duff batteries. So even ignoring the huge mining operations to get the battery components in the first place, I think we all know how clean and environmentally friendly that is!. We would be scraping an entire car not long after 6~8 years, an ICE would happily run twice that before being scrap value.
I accept they will pull the batteries and use them in a power wall or similar, but at the end of their time you get a a recycling headache again .
I go back to an earlier statement. We need to change the way we live, not change from ICE to EV
CHARGEPOINT CHARGE 35p a kw, what will Gridserve charge?
Some of the comments on here are certainly similar to when horses were replaced by internal combustion vehicles!
Battery powered EVs are the future (for now) so get used to it. The oil companies keep pushing hydrogen as they can continue their business model – big hydrogen generating ‘refineries’, transport by tankers to filling stations, pumps to dispense to vehicles. Only problem is it’s not economically or environmentally viable, otherwise you can bet your boots they would have done it by now to fight off the threat of battery EVs making them redundant.
Let’s hope something does come along to replace batteries but whatever it is I bet that electric motors will still be the technology driving the wheels.
Was that on hayprices.com, don’t think I was around then!
Here’s what I want in order to change to a pure EV:
A vehicle range of at least 500 miles – with the heating on in winter
A purchase price for the vehicle which no greater than petrol or diesel vehicles
Running costs which are no more than petrol or diesel vehicles (this may be so now)
A charge time of less than 5 minutes
Charging stations where I don’t have to divert from my journey for them – with a guaranteed supply (see other comments about infrastructure)
And I don’t want to walk down the street having the climb over trailing leads from everyone’s houses. This means that we’ll need to be innovative about getting cars next to houses in many older areas of towns and cities!
All your requests can be granted by using replaceable batter ies.
Before anybody says it’s impossible they are already doing it in India with a system which is so automated you don’t even have to get out of your vehicle, and which is quicker than filling a petrol tank.
Interested, link?
I know they do it for rickshaws and mopeds but never seen it for cars.
I struggle to believe all of the manufacturers could agree on a single pack design that would fit into every car. We are obviously many years away from that solution anyway, so the challenge continues
Craig: Go to YouTube and search for sunmobility + bus. You can watch a short video of the batteries being changed for a bus, obviously bigger batteries than for a car.
Search for sunmobility + tuktuk and you can watch a short video of a simpler system for light vehicles.
Battery design will have to be standardised, probably by the government, just as petrol specifications are. Imagine if every make and model of car required a different grade of petrol!
Remember that multiple small batteries, linked in parallel, are just as good as one big battery. Perhaps they could be grouped in canisters.
Spot on and what about people who live in blocks of flats, how will they charge their cars even when some developers who build them have made no effort to even provide parking spaces for residents so they are all parking on the road, up the kerb and on grass verges around the local area.
So, you need a car with the capability to drive from John O’Groats to Lands End then on to Reading (1000 miles) with a break of no more than 5 minutes. Why?
Use solar to create hydrogen, once installed it’s foc. Then use hydrogen to power internal combustion engines until hydrogen/electric gains ground. I’ve used lpg fuel for years it’s only a small step to use hydrogen. 30 minutes to charge and that’s if there’s a plug available, it’s a joke.
Afraid it’s not only a small step. LPG can be kept liquid at room temperature by pressure alone. Hydrogen needs to be cooled to -250C, a non-trivial task.
Also, liquid hydrogen is VERY bulky compared to LPG.
I have already decided my next car will be electric, my wife’s too IF somebody makes an electric MPV style vehicle that can be converted to wheelchair accessible.
I am aware that there are many plans for more charging stations, but plans will not persuade the undecided to make the change. I realise it is a Catch-22 situation, more charging points when there are more cars that need charging.
One scheme I have heard of which may have legs if the tech can be sorted is for homes to have rapid chargers available to the public for which they get paid on a cost plus a couple of pence principal.
In house rapid chargers can’t possibly work. Houses don’t have suitable supplies to run them. It would be a push to run two (his and hers) 7kw chargers from a property. Forget rapid in houses, never going to happen.
Love the idea, and the sooner the infrastructure is in place to remove one of the anxieties the higher the take up of EV’s will be. I like the idea of mobile storage too, subject to there being cheaper recharge if the grid uses your storage.