This Saturday (22nd July) the EV Charging Network in the UK is set for another big test as experts predict a significant increase in demand which has been dubbed as ‘Surge Saturday’
Predictions have been made that over 350,000 EV drivers will be out on the roads over the weekend due to the summer holidays kick-starting as motorists look to get away for a well-earned break. Routes on popular holiday destinations such as the South West, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland and the North East are bracing themselves for queues outside well-known EV charging destinations.
Service station provider Moto is expecting to record one million EV kilometres in charging and acknowledges that queues will be unavoidable at some service stations. Charge point providers Tesla and Gridserve are teaming up with Moto to provide marshals at key sites to ease the flow of traffic.
Marshalling at charging sites isn’t a long-term solution, instead, seeing the charging network continually grow is the way to avoid queues, but hopefully, this will silence a few critics and stories that may develop over the weekend.
Aside from the likelihood of queues forming. It will be interesting to see how the UK infrastructure will cope with the potential increased use of chargers across the country. As more and more EVs enter our roadways charging parks across our roads will be used more frequently. At present it’s quite common to see half the chargers at any one charging site in use, in the next 6-18 months this will rise quite considerably and it won’t be too uncommon to see charging parks with every station in use at once.
Because of the time of year, the rate at which your car will charge shouldn’t be too affected. Car batteries need to be at a certain temperature to charge at their ideal rate. If we were experiencing freezing or extreme heat conditions the rate at which motorists can charge would be dramatically affected whilst the battery either warmed up or cooled down to that ambient temperature needed to charge efficiently – therefore adding time onto the charging process.
The only limiting factor that will come into play is the load balancing facility in place at each site, along with the number of EVs charging at once, trying to draw the same amount of power.
For any EV drivers making a trip this weekend, our advice would be to have a Plan A, B and C and as ever consult apps such as Zap-Map and PlugShare which gives users real-time up-to-date information on which charging stations are in use and the tariff charges in place to use them.
We’d like to hear from any EV driver that uses the public charging network this weekend, especially at motorway service stations. Let us know how your experience was! Did you have to queue? Were the stations easy to use and were they accessible? Did you have to travel to a different station to avoid the queues at your preferred pit stop?
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