In the Netherlands, City councils usually forbid to put charging cables for electric vehicles on public pavements.
And- to charge your electric car, of course you want to use your solar panels and connect your EV directly to your own domestic power grid.
But what do you do when your municipality forbids you to lay the charging cable across the sidewalk to your car?
My municipality has passed a council resolution whereby you can order a charging station through an external party, and so then you can have a public charging station installed nearby. Provided there isn’t already a charging point within a reasonable distance. In my neighborhood there are hardly any charging points, and the only one I have been able to find niche about 400 meters away, consisting of 2 AC charging points where two cars are always charging.
In my search for possible solutions to still make it possible to get to the car via the public sidewalk so that I do get to charge the car at home, I have come across several solutions. Of those solutions, only one is really useful, because all solutions with cable trays or cable protection over the sidewalk can still lead to liability issues if someone trips over the cable or is otherwise inconvenienced by the cable over the sidewalk.
The solution of using a hinged cable tree placed high on your facade to get the cable across the public sidewalk directly to your car is a pretty eye-catching solution. But- the sidewalk remains free of obstacles and no one is bothered by it. Except perhaps for the fact that it doesn’t look very pretty. I wonder how the municipality would want to and can- prevent this solution. After all, similar things like flags on the public sidewalk at a sufficient height are not enforced either. If that is even possible by law.
In terms of principle, it looks like this:
The lever can be moved upwards after use. Then the whole tree falls away into the vertical holder. Very nice, just a pity that the link to the supplier doesn’t seem to work anymore.
For my home situation, I prefer to place the lever on the facade. With a hinge point, the lever can then be moved away nicely against the facade after use, where you can attach the lever.
Below is an example of a company that makes these levers for hanging welding shields in factory halls. They also exist in extendable versions up to a length of 6 meters.
When you create such a solution, it must of course comply with all the rules and regulations, and the design must be such that it fits in with the surroundings. The choice of color and material is also a matter of concern, and it must not cause any inconvenience, such as clattering against the facade, etc. And the structure must be professionally grounded.
I do expect resistance from the local authority because they assume that electric vehicles are still in the minority and that there is therefore no need for a serious solution for home charging in public parking spaces.
The world is changing so fast towards electric personal transport, the sale of new cars already consists for 10% of electric cars. Of course the subsidy schemes help with this too, but all those cars sold are just going to drive and need charging spots.
Given the fact that people that already installed solar panels at their home are also the first people to drive electric cars, these people also want to use their installed solar panels for their electric transport. And as long as the net metering regulation for the return of energy is still in force in the Netherlands, the pressure on necessarily wanting to charge the electric car at home will not be very great. But with the rising energy prices suddenly making public charging much more expensive than charging at home, the pressure on wanting to charge at home using one’s own solar panels could become much greater.
VEHICLE TO LOAD
In addition, the latest development to run your home on your car battery is suddenly serious, because all brands now supply electric cars with a vehicle to load connection, which means that you can also use your charging cable to feed energy back into your home. This means that during the day you can charge your car from your solar panels and in the evening you can use the energy from your car battery. An average family consumes 8kWh in the evening and the car usually has about 50-70 kWh available. Most private solar panel installations start at 8 panels and that is exactly enough to fully recharge the car for the use of 8kWh per day on an average day during the 8 so-called sunny months of the year. And the months of November through February? You will still have to ‘buy’ electric energy during these 4 months. Preferably with wind energy from a green supplier, of course. When you drive your electric car to and from work every day, recharging your EV from your solar panels for those days is obviously not true. But when you regularly work at home, the story does apply for those days, as well as the periods during the weekends when you are plugged in at home.