Originally Posted by
Jantar
The comment I made about Milford got me thinking about other rural areas around New Zealand. In many cases the lines infrastructure to rural towns is not sufficient to allow for more than only 1 or 2 charging points. Consider the feeder line running down the West Coast of the South Island from Hokitika to Haast. It is 33kV 3 phase, and from memory has a 40A rating. This allows it to supply 1.5 MW and at times is already close to being full.
But let's imagine that it is only at half capacity and that there are 750 kW of power available for charging stations. At 50 kW per charging station that would allow 15 vehicles to charged at any single time all the way from Haast to Hokitika, a distance of close to 300 km, and most vehicles will need to charge up at least twice along the way, taking around 30 - 40 minutes each time.
Compare that to petrol and diesel The stations at Haast, Fox, Franz, Whataroa, Harihari, and Ross can between them fill up 30 vehicles at a time taking 3 - 4 minutes each, and on avearge vehicles will fill up once along the way.
This means that even at maximum capacity the West coast highway could only handle around 5% of the number of EV vehicles compared to the current number of vehicles using that road.
EVs may be the way of the future, but the infrastructure to handle them will require a bit more planning than simply installing charging stations along the routes.