Following on from the article last week about public charging stations to be installed across Greater London, another report popped up in the Motoring Weekly inbox.
This is a similar project based in the Netherlands for a company called Nuon and McDonalds, the burger joint. The joint venture is part of McDonalds CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility – plan that aims to reduce their carbon footprint. Nuon is a subsidiary of Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company that is wholly owned by the Government. Their main geographical markets are what I used to call the beer drinking countries of Europe (when I managed the same patch decades ago) being Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK!
The plan is to install the first fast charging station by the end of this year and the remaining 167 restaurants will get theirs over the next three years. Every McDonalds restaurant will get two stations fitted and they will use as much green energy as possible from wind turbines already operating in the country. It is a great idea and one that will help McDonalds reduce their carbon footprint, on paper at least.
The stations will provide a healthy top-up in 30 minutes and that is enough time for a customer to go in and buy something! In Vattenfall’s press release, they state that the volume of fully electric cars in the country has grown by 60% this year over 2017 to 22,000 and they say that not all cars have the range to get the drivers to their destination. It is a relatively big country albeit mostly flat and I could imagine that most drivers would travel a similar distance to other city or town drivers in other European countries which wouldn’t be a huge problem for charging. It would be a problem though to get to the outer reaches in one or two hops, so this extra network will help.
Electric vehicle charging is going to be a competitive market and will dramatically change the concerns around range anxiety and fast chargers should help with road safety as well because drivers will have to stop more often on longer journeys.
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