Hello and welcome to your daily Charge Smart blog! Today, we will be talking about a major petrol company setting up EV charging stations.
Above: From petrol stations to EV stations
For those of you who still have ICE cars, do you remember the last time you stopped to fuel up at a petrol station. Apart from the fuel, did you happen to buy anything? A nice pie or a chilled drink perhaps because it is summer. Or did you stop at the station just because you felt like a coffee? Well, that’s how these stations make most of their money, from people stopping by and buying their overpriced stuff. And you don’t need to have an ICE powered car to take part in this activity but if you own an EV, you can’t recharge while you enjoy your steak and cheese pie.
However, times are a changing and petrol stations figured that there has to be some kind of value to attract EV drivers as well as ICE ones. So, they have created a solution to please everybody, especially themselves because as long as you keep buying pies, they keep making money.
Now Total, the French oil giant are working on an electricity station, that’s our term for the EV equivalent of a petrol station.
Anyway, the purpose of these stations is so that you can recharge your car and yourself. The Metropolitan Region Amsterdam Electric or MRA electric for short has just awarded Europe’s largest concession contract for EV charging to Total. The agreement states that Total will install and operate close to 20,000 brand new charging points in the Netherlands. The stations will be concentrated in 3 provinces- North-Holland, Flevoland and Utrecht.
Above: Radical change for the big oil company
The idea behind this contract is to help aid the rapidly growing demand for EVs in the Netherlands. The new charging network will cover a region with 3.2 million people who make up roughly about 15% of the nation’s EV charging demand. Total’s Dutch operation is already the largest EV charging operator within the MRA electric area, they currently operate around 4,500 charging points across the region. This new contract however, is the largest to ever have been signed in Europe because of Total's success with their current EV charging points!
Some of the terms of the contract include the fact that all the electricity supplied to these new chargers will come from renewable sources and generated within the country. Total have also committed to sourcing some of the electricity from within the MRA region meaning that local EV owners can charge their car up with local and sustainable energy. The sources that they will be using to power their new stations will mostly be wind or solar based and while solar power still needs to improve its efficiency in generation, Total have committed to be a part of that through research. Total have also agreed to develop and implement their own smart charging tech which will iron out surges in the electricity grid to manage consumption and rates. Total’s end goal is to own and operate 150,000 charging points across Europe by 2025, a plan that will help them become a major contender in the electric mobility sector.
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