Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Ottawa-Gatineau

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by roger1818

First of all, from what I have heard, EV adoption in the UK is considerably ahead of Canada. This article says that as of September, "pure-electric models accounted for 6.7% of total new car registrations," I can't find Canada's Q3 EV sales, but in Q1 and Q2 light duty ZEVs represented 3.8% and 3.3% respectively. That is about half, making us about 3 years behind by my estimation.

We may be 2-3 yrs behind, but I would also argue that it's odd that we haven't built any fast chargers at all at service centres on literally the busiest expressway in the country, in the most populated region of the country. There's at least a case for the small 6-8 stall stations like Tesla builds.

Originally Posted by roger1818

Secondly, if you watched the Fully Charged episode, Gridserve isn't expecting to make money on it in the short term, but want to get a foothold in the market early. The ONRoute stations already exist and are popular, so they can afford to wait until there is a larger deployment of EVs and they can see a return on their investment faster.

Gridserve had to build the whole service centre. Not just the chargers. And they won't have to many ICE drivers providing revenue by stopping at the service centres. They also chose to build their own solar farm to source green electricity. That's a substantially more expensive business model than simply installing chargers at an existing service centre. But the model is different. Gridserve is planning 100 locations in the UK. This seems less like a highway service centre building than some hybrid of gas station, service centre and auto dealership. I'd like OnRoute to copy the EV charging part. Don't think we need the rest of it.

Originally Posted by roger1818

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, in June 2029, all 23 ONroute centres were sold, "to Arjun Infrastructure and Fengate Asset Management. Arjun is a British company which is the minority shareholder in the similar Welcome Break chain of motorway service areas in the United Kingdom." It will be interesting to see what they do, if anything, regarding EV charging.

I'm not holding my breath. They are an infrastructure company that also owns service centres in the US. They also resorted to high leverage to make the deal. So they are really gonna want top dollar from any network wanting to install chargers there. I hope I'm wrong, but their service centres in the UK aren't anything special and do the absolute bare minimum for EV charging. Though, I guess that's better than what we have now... We'll see I guess.