"Every time I hear the owner complain to me about the difficulty of installing the charging pile, the mood is very heavy. In 2021, WM delivered more than 40,000 cars, but nearly 20,000 charging piles distributed with the car could not be delivered. Shen Hui, founder, chairman and CEO of WM Motor, expressed helplessness on his Weibo.
There are charging piles but can not be sent out of the situation is not only WM car. However, the reason why the charging pile cannot be sent is not that the owner is unwilling to want it, but because of various reasons, the installation of private charging piles is full of problems. The charging problems caused by a series of charging piles such as "the distance of public piles are long" and "the installation rate of private piles is insufficient" have once again attracted public attention.
At present, the rapid development of new energy vehicles, the data shows that in November 2021, the penetration rate of the domestic new energy vehicle market rose to 21.7%. Some analysts believe that the market penetration rate of domestic new energy vehicles next year will be about 30%. However, the installation of charging piles is not in place, and the charging anxiety of car owners needs to be alleviated urgently. If the wishes of users and "Shen Hui" are met, all charging piles are sent out, and the ideal state of "one car and one pile" is reached, can the problem of replenishment be solved?
Private pile installation is challenging
According to data from the Head Leopard Research Institute, as of 2020, the growth rate of the number of charging piles in the country is only about a quarter of the growth rate of new energy vehicles. Among them, public charging piles account for 42%, and the main suppliers come from special calls, star charging, state grid and so on. The beautiful vision of "one car, one car" is not easy to achieve, what is the reason?
According to the survey results of the China Charging Alliance, the three factors of the group's users building piles by themselves, the lack of fixed parking spaces in the place of residence, and the non-cooperation of the property in the place of residence are the main reasons for not building charging facilities with the car, accounting for 48.6%, 10.3% and 9.9% respectively, totaling 68.8%.
"We don't have a fixed parking space so we can't install a private charging pile, and the first thing we do when we come back from work every day is to look for a nearby public charging pile." Finding a pile is a matter of luck, and it is often the case that there is no free charging pile or equipment failure. A new energy vehicle owner said.
In fact, even new energy car owners with parking spaces cannot successfully install private charging piles.
Generally speaking, the installation of charging piles often requires the property to first issue an installation license certificate and stamp, followed by the on-site investigation of the power grid staff to see whether the power grid capacitance at the charging pile wiring site meets the conditions, and finally also need to consider the cost of installing the wiring and pipe of the charging pile.
However, from the experience shared by car owners, the first level has prevented many people from having private charging piles. "Our community is relatively old, and the residential property cannot install charging piles because of safety and other reasons, so it has been half a year since the car was lifted, and so far there has been no charging pile installed." Another new energy vehicle owner also talked about his troubles.
The installation of private charging piles in the community does have objective reasons for insufficient capacity and high costs. Taking the community of 500 households as an example, the original is equipped with 3 transformers, the total power is 3000kva, the capacity of each household is 6kw, and the slow charging pile is 7kw, "one car and one pile" is equivalent to adding more than 500 additional residents to live, and the original power grid cannot afford it.
If the capacity of the cell is expanded, the expansion cost is not a small amount. In simple calculations, the cost of a transformer is about 200,000 yuan, coupled with the need to rearrange the cable and other work, the expansion cost of each transformer is as high as hundreds of thousands of yuan. How to allocate costs and how to carry out safety management are real problems facing the residential property.
"So the process of installing charging piles is really difficult to coordinate with all parties such as the property, the power grid and the 4S store." The above-mentioned new energy car owners helplessly said.
"Car companies + real estate" explores a new model of piling
If new energy vehicles want to develop rapidly, the charging problem is bound to be solved. In particular, charging pile problems such as "public piles are far away", "public pile failure rate is high", "private pile installation is convenient" and so on need to rely on social coordination and technological development, optimize the allocation mechanism of energy replenishment resources, multi-party cooperation, and multi-point flowering in order to be effectively solved.
At the policy level, more and more policies have been released. For example, Shanghai proposed to build fast charging piles, the principle of first piling and then driving, and making every effort to solve the problem of charging piles; Beijing also put forward the idea of "private pile" sharing, and at the same time required old residential areas to build parking spaces and charging piles.
At the property level of the community, how to meet the needs of residents for the transformation of the capacitors of the old community is a problem that requires multi-party coordination, and secondly, the process procedures such as confirmation of charging conditions, installation with telegraphs and construction of facilities should also be streamlined.
However, if car owners have a better charging experience, car companies, charging facility service operators and other parties in the industrial chain are also a key link. Especially for car companies, providing users with charging piles is only one aspect, and it is also necessary to consider helping users land from the perspective of how to smoothly install charging piles.
It is worth noting that WM is trying to cooperate with real estate developers to make private charging piles enter the community more quickly. Specifically, WM has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with one of the shareholders of its D2 round of financing, Agile Group, a well-known high-end real estate enterprise in China, where the two sides will cooperate in the construction of charging and supplementary systems, further deepen the layout of private charging piles, and ensure that 100% of its new residential buildings are equipped with parking spaces or reserved construction and installation conditions in the future, and the public charging area of the newly built residential area is planned. Moreover, the data shows that Agile's property management service sector has covered 31 provincial-level administrative regions and 199 cities. This means that Agile with the advantage of community contact points can also try to coordinate resources to help WM users build charging piles in the community, avoiding many problems in the process.
In addition, in line with the idea of better utilization of resources, WM has been laying out the field of public charging infrastructure. At present, the public charging network applicable to WM has covered 361 cities in 32 provincial-level administrative regions, providing users with more than 440,000 public charging pile services.
In fact, many electric vehicle companies are also considering introducing public charging pile data in the brand's App to ensure the user's charging convenience. Through self-built charging piles or third-party cooperation, as well as a variety of flexible energy supplementation methods such as slow charging, fast charging, and super fast charging, electric vehicle companies are "showing their magic" to solve charging problems.
The multi-angle exploration of the charging pile layout reflects the continuous innovation thinking of electric vehicle companies. However, it should be noted that in order to truly solve the charging problem, it also requires the wisdom of all parties, and it also tests the ability of social coordination. It is believed that with the popularization of new energy vehicles and the joint efforts of all parties, the problem of energy replenishment will eventually be solved, and the travel of new energy vehicles will be more worth looking forward to.