JOLT: Hesitant Expansion of Urban Fast Chargers Endangers E-Mobility

From the perspective of the people of Munich, the municipal fast-charging initiative should include three key points:

• New rules for procurement processes: The award and tendering practices for public locations must change very quickly. Instead of lengthy and often legally uncertain city-wide tenders, JOLT calls for the recurring award of smaller location contingents in public spaces. This practice is already being applied, for example, for wind and solar power plants. Such an approach promotes rapid private-sector solutions and would break the previously often prevailing monopoly positions of municipal utilities and local authorities.
• Mandatory three-month deadline for grid connections: Finished fast-charging stations often cannot be put into operation because the periods until grid connections are approved are far too long. "Sometimes we wait up to twelve months for grid connections, that cannot be the much-cited German speed," says Maurice Neligan. JOLT therefore urges municipalities to put more pressure on their local grid operators, mostly their own municipal utilities. Any request for a power connection to the charging infrastructure should be completed within a maximum of three months after the application is submitted.
• Closer cooperation between municipalities, municipal utilities, and charging network operators: To remove local obstacles and provide their citizens with a secure and reliable fast-charging network at highly frequented inner-city locations, JOLT suggests that municipalities initiate round tables with municipal utilities and other municipal companies, as well as charging network operators (CPOs). In this setting, the prevailing information deficit, another obstacle in the expansion of the fast-charging network, could also be eliminated. Because the enormous differences in charging speeds between AC, DC, and HPC charging are often unknown to both political decision-makers and the general public.

At the charging stations of the provider, drivers of electric cars can charge up to 100 km of range within five minutes due to the high charging power of currently up to 320 kW. The charging points form a combination of charging station and battery storage from the technology partner ADS-TEC Energy, so that the HPC charging technology can also be possible with a connection to the universally available low-voltage network, as advertised. Due to the massive increase in charging speeds, the size of the battery in the vehicle and the sheer number of chargers will matter less and less in the future, but rather the charging power, the company advocates.

"No one wants to hang around one of the thousands of AC chargers in Germany for hours. People want to charge a few hundred kilometers of range in minutes and continue driving. Charging has to become as simple and fast as refueling," Neligan, an early adopter of electric mobility, is convinced.