After driving an EV at possibly the busiest Australian road-tripping time of the year (Easter), in the middle of a global fossil fuel crisis and concomitant surge in local EV sales, I decided it was time to make good on my claim that resilient planning by individuals could benefit all drivers.
In practice, this means new trippler settings to avoid unnecessary consumption of scarce charger resources:
- maximum charge setting to limit charging to less than 100% in order to maintain a higher average charge speed for both drivers and chargers,
- vehicle maximum charge power setting to reduce unexploited charger power in plans, given that not all vehicles can get the advertised power from all chargers,
- charging at stops en route, to reduce the charging load on public chargers (and private charging will generally be preferenced by plan optimisation),
- trip plan optimisation based on charger density (lower average distance to nearby chargers), to preference in times of peak demand stopping in localities where there are more chargers available, and hence reducing contention for isolated chargers where other drivers have mandatory stops.
And, of course, continuing to make use of the core resilience built into trippler, which allows drivers to plan to skip any individual charger on their road trips, should it be malfunctioning or just too busy.
These features all support things individual drivers can do to improve charging for everyone, even without coordinated system-level optimisation. (Improved charging drives further electrification, improving resilience for fossil fuel consumers too)
In the absence of system-level coordination, we rely on individual altruism to make use of these features. But altruism is right now a viable strategy, as even at the busiest and most isolated chargers, like Cann River, we saw people willing to make adjustments to their own plans to help each other out, and we did likewise. Maybe some social reinforcement features will come next, but we can rely on PlugShare and even analog methods for now…
Cann River absolutely packed on Easter Monday, Tesla drivers waiting 1.5hrs to charge. We waited about half an hour for the foxcharge. Legends organized a bit of paper to keep a list of people waiting to keep the queue ordered.
PlugShare user Rc