Shentucar original
author| dawn
br8span_span_pbr0 this year br8span2p With electric cars, they fought for the “grabbing of charging piles” in the high-speed service area, making the electric cars out of the circle again.
Some stories are circulating, such as car owners lying on the ground holding a charging gun; in order to prevent other cars from jumping in line and dare not go to the toilet; queuing for four hours and charging for one hour; in order to save electricity for the car, the family Sitting on the side of the highway to enjoy the cool.
The embarrassment of the full screen makes the people who eat melons feel: Those who dare to drive an electric car out of the city are real warriors.
However, there is no need to worry about looting the charging pile. The problem does exist, but it is not as serious as you think. Those who drive electric cars back home across the provinces during the holidays are not as miserable as you might think.
Actually, this is not a new phenomenon. In the past few years, during holidays, friends who drove long distances in electric cars had always been "beaten" by charging piles, and they were basically concentrated in high-speed service areas. But reasonable planning of routes and electricity use may be able to avoid these embarrassing moments. It is not common to exclude the extreme situation of people traveling together during the National Day holiday and grab charging piles.
Is the current charging pile enough? Who is to blame for vying for charging piles during the holidays? Should this pot be dumped to power grid companies, electric car companies, or charging pile operators? Can friends who have bought an electric car and want to buy an electric car avoid embarrassment?
Today we are going to talk about charging piles,Shentu takes you to see the doorway clearly.
Are there too many cars or too few piles?
There are insufficient charging piles. First of all, it must be because of the increase in electric vehicles.
How many? There is an indicator called the possession of pure electric vehicles. According to statistics from the Ministry of Public Security, at the end of 2019, the number of pure electric vehicles in my country was 3.1 million and reached 4 million by the end of 2020. At the end of June this year, the number was 4.93 million . At this rate, 6 million vehicles are expected to hit by the end of this year.
There are more and more electric vehicles, and the growth rate is very fast, which is an important reason for the shortage of charging piles.
But we also need to look at the construction of charging piles.
In 2015, the state issued the "Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Development Guide" and plans to build 4.8 million charging piles in 2020. The basis for setting this target is that the competent authority estimated that China's electric vehicle ownership will reach 5 million by 2020. An electric vehicle is equipped with one charging pile, and the number of vehicles is slightly more than that of charging piles.
These 4.8 million charging piles are subdivided into public piles and private piles. The targets for 2020 are 500,000 and 4.3 million respectively. Public piles are generally in places such as shopping malls and high-speed service areas, and private piles are generally in communities.
After five years of running, the actual data is that the number of pure electric vehicles and the number of charging piles are lower than expected. There is a key data here-the ratio of vehicles to piles,The planned goal is 1:1, but the result is actually far behind. Among them, the biggest difference is the private charging piles. The completion rate of private charging piles by the end of 2019 was less than 20%, and the public charging piles had already completed the target ahead of schedule in 2019.
So From the total point of view, what is lacking is not public charging piles, but private charging piles . In other words, many people have bought electric cars, but have not installed private charging piles, so they can only find public charging piles to charge them.
The reason behind this is that there are many practical difficulties in the construction of private charging piles. For example, the residential property is not allowed to install; the car owner does not have his own parking space, and there is no place to install; his own parking space does not meet the installation conditions and cannot be installed, and so on. This is completely different from the situation where nearly 80% of the United States is a private charging pile.
Source/ Unsplash
There is a widely circulated story in the industry. When Tesla first entered the Chinese market in 2014, it was discovered that many property companies did not allow users to install charging piles, and many car owners even fixed parking No bit, Musk was shocked by this. In order to please the property company, he expressed his willingness to use his Twitter to help the property company publicize.
Even today, this situation has not improved much. ideal car stated in its prospectus that as of December 31, 2020, the proportion of households in first-tier cities in China with parking spaces that can be installed with charging piles is only one quarter .
The owner of a company that sells private charging piles in Chengdu told Shentu that it is difficult to sell charging piles now. There are not so many electric vehicles in Chengdu, and the charging facilities are usually high-end communities. "Suppliers call every day to ask if they want the goods."
This is a very contradictory situation. On the one hand, there is a large gap in the number of private charging piles, but the charging piles cannot be sold; on the other hand, the total amount of public charging piles is enough, but the grabbing of charging piles often occurs at public charging stations.
Where is the problem?
Why do you "grab the pile" as soon as the holidays come?
The first thing to emphasize is that most of the extreme scenes of looting charging piles occur in high-speed service areas and during holidays. This is not the norm. The high-speed service area is another special scene.
Electric vehicles are now mainly used for urban daily transportation, and it is not common to run out of the city’s highways, which means that the charging pile users in the service area are scattered and the uncertainty is extremely high. It is idle on weekdays, and it is not enough when it comes to holidays. "Drought due to drought and flood due to waterlogging". This is the dilemma of the service area .
Liu Yuhong, the marketing manager of a domestic charging pile company, told Shentu that there were two reasons for the phenomenon of looting charging piles during the National Day this year. Second, after the epidemic resumed, people's enthusiasm for traveling during the National Day holiday was soaring, leading to a concentration of people and vehicles on the highway .The combination of the two leads to insufficient charging piles in the service area, and the contradiction between supply and demand is more prominent.
According to the data released by the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Transport at the end of September this year, there are 10,836 expressway charging piles nationwide, and 2,318 service areas equipped with charging piles. In this way, each is equipped with charging piles. There are approximately 4.6 charging piles in the service area. If it takes an hour to fully charge an electric car, , then each service area can only charge 4.6 vehicles per hour .
According to the statistics of the State Grid, from the perspective of the daily charging capacity of expressway charging facilities, the charging capacity of expressway charging facilities reached 1.4292 million kWh on October 1, which is close to 4 times the normal daily charging capacity, a record high . Therefore, on holidays like the National Day, it is almost inevitable that charging piles are not enough in some service areas.
However, this is only a problem that occurs in a specific time period and in a specific scenario. " Because of the holiday, the traffic flow intensively broke out, which magnified a not very serious problem ." Liu Yuhong said.
source / Unsplash
In other words, if you drive an electric car on a daily basis, even if you are driving a long distance across cities, you will not necessarily get a charging pile.
However, the shortage of public charging piles is indeed a real problem. In addition to the relatively small amount, the charging is slow, the quality is poor, the location is remote, and the parking spaces of public charging piles are occupied by fuel vehicles.It is an old problem that has existed for a long time before.
Liu Yuhong believes that the current more prominent problem is the need to improve the efficiency of the use of charging piles. According to him, a charging pile with a utilization rate of 15% is already a relatively high level in the industry. This means that has one parking space per pile, and it is good enough to charge it for 4 hours a day . However, it is difficult to increase the utilization rate of charging piles by relying on the centralized demand of holidays. "This is a long and flowing thing."
Many car owners find that most of the time, it is not that the charging piles are not enough, but the useful charging piles are not enough. Especially in some places that lack maintenance, even zombie piles appear. This exacerbates the charging anxiety of electric car owners.
The quality of domestic charging piles is also uneven. The boss of the charging pile sales company mentioned earlier told Shentu that the technical threshold of charging pile equipment is not high. "In my opinion, it is the same as a mobile phone charger, except that the voltage and some parameters are changed, and it is easy to produce. "
"In many cities, charging pile companies blindly expanded early to get subsidies. After expansion, they did not pay attention to operation and maintenance. After they broke down, no one repaired them, which led to the emergence of some zombie piles." Liu Yuhong said.
So, who is building the charging pile? Who determines the supply in the market?
Who is building and operating charging piles?
The charging pile industry is recognized as a trillion market. From the perspective of the division of labor in the industrial chain, the charging pile industry can be divided into three major links-equipment manufacturers, construction operators, and overall solution providers. The most critical one is the construction operator.
Private charging piles are mostly tying-sold by car companies when selling cars, or supporting construction by real estate developers. Since they are one-for-one use and do not involve public supply, the construction operators compete for Public charging pile.
public charging piles are now a three-legged pattern, with special calls from , star charging , and State Grid are among the top three, occupying more than half of the market share . Their current profit model is also very simple, charging a service fee for charging electric vehicles.
This is the result of the industry reshuffle over the past ten years. At the earliest time, the construction of charging piles in China was completely dominated by national teams such as the State Grid. Later, they were gradually liberalized to allow private capital to enter, and the state began to subsidize them.
Similar to the development of the new energy automobile industry, under government subsidies, a large number of charging pile companies entered the game, and the subsidy subsided later. The industry quickly shuffled. The number of charging pile companies in China has risen from the peak of 1,000 Many, down to less than 100, the market is concentrated to the head.
It is the brutal expansion and disorderly competition in the past that have brought about the problems mentioned above. The utilization rate of charging piles is not high, and many piles have become decorations.
The difficulty lies in the difficulty of grasping the pace of charging pile construction. Because charging piles are supporting facilities for electric vehicles, they are completely dependent on the growth in the number of electric vehicles. If there are too many piles and less cars will be idle, there are too few piles and more cars but not enough. This is a dilemma similar to "the chicken or the egg" .
If we raise our view, we will find that the construction of charging piles is a systematic project, it is like laying a net, and reasonable planning and layout is the key. More charging piles are not necessarily related to a better charging experience. The industry focus of charging piles has gradually shifted from investment and construction to operation.
There are many risks in blindly expanding public charging piles. First, the range of electric vehicles continues to increase, which will reduce dependence on charging piles in some scenarios; second, public charging piles and private charging piles have a complementary relationship to a certain extent. If the scale of private charging piles in the future is Up, it will replace the use of some public charging piles.
At present, for electric car owners and prospective car owners, there is no need to worry about not being able to get a charging pile or charging, and there is no need to laugh at those electric car owners who are trapped in the service area. This is a pain that will inevitably be experienced in the development of electric vehicles. The construction of charging piles across the country takes time and is a long-term process that requires some patience.
Pile grabbing is a special case of pile peaks during holidays, just like the morning and evening peaks in Beijing, you cannot refuse to travel because of crowded crowds.
What car owners can do is to plan ahead during peak holidays. For example, fully charge the car in advance, plan charging sites in advance, and don't go to sites with concentrated traffic to join in the fun, and so on.
A number of electric car owners who have been in contact with each other in a deep way, went out of the city from first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen during the National Day this year. They did not experience the situation of vying for charging piles in the service area or "squatting" in the middle of the road in the news. "has an accurate estimate of the true battery life of the vehicle", "avoid the peak of the flow of people one day in advance", "find some small charging stations for charging" are their suggestions.
Of course, if you want to drive an electric car to the Northwest, you need to do more preparations. The stories of some car companies in their promotional videos, relying on charging stations along the way, driving electric cars around the northwest and crossing deserts and grasslands, may not be suitable for most people, nor is it suitable for the moment.
So, don't be misled by the propaganda of the car companies, and don't be scared away by the snatches.
Knowing this, will you still drive an electric car to travel?
*The picture of the title comes from "People on the Road". At the request of the interviewee, Liu Yuhong is a pseudonym in the article.
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