Mobility

Opinion - Electric cars are easy to charge when you have a charging point at home. It's more complicated when you depend on public outlets. Brussels wants to make the challenge even tougher as from 2025.

Will there be a new type of exercise? Taking your car for a walk before going to bed? Sibelga, responsible for the installation and management of public charging stations in the Brussels region of Belgium, wants to introduce a rotation tariff from as 2025, RTBF reports. After a certain period, free parking will no longer be guaranteed. You'll have to pay for the connection, in addition to the cost of recharging. A surprising decision, to say the least! Firstly, because at 11kW (average AC speed of models sold), it often takes several hours to sufficiently recharge a battery of between 40kWh and 80kWh. Secondly, because people in Brussels rarely have the privilege of a 4-front, private driveway or garage. They have to rely on on-street charging stations for their electric cars. It's already unpredictable. And now they'll have to rotate every x hours to avoid blowing the charging card budget. A superb incentive for electric cars, which will potentially become compulsory in Brussels by 2035...

Two and half hours?

Sibelga, the organization in charge of managing the electricity and natural gas distribution networks for the 19 communes of the Brussels-Capital Region, is keen to improve access to charging stations. It's all well and good to avoid the problem of car-hoarding. Analyzing the cause of this behavior would be smarter. All the more so as a charging time was given as an example by the manager to RTBF. He was surprised that cars charged after two and half hours (in other words, with a charge of around 25 kWh, giving an average range of between 100 and 125km) were still connected. They would have to be connected for an average of six and a half hours. Maybe people's lives can't afford this? It's not always possible to do everything in two and a half hours, or even four hours. Or even to plan the duration of an appointment, a dinner, a show or a visit. This is already the problem with time-limited parking zones (blue zones). And sometimes you want to leave Brussels with a full battery, so you don't have to waste any more time at a fast terminal on the outskirts or on the freeway. 

No sleep

What about those who return home at the end of the day? In some areas, parking isn't free until late evening (9pm). So they'll have to worry about paying extra for the misfortune of going to bed early and letting their car recharge. That's if the regulations allow them to leave their car plugged in all night “free of charge”. After all, a 60kWh battery would love to have a good night's sleep so that it can start off on the right foot, full of autonomy, the next day. And even if some of you are night owls, you may not be able to put on your pyjamas before the turnaround time, after waiting at home for 2.5 hours. It's better to stay in your daily clothes to move the car after putting the family meal, a game, a movie or a soccer match on pause!

Transfer of deficiencies

Sibelga - and by corollary the Brussels authorities - are making citizens pay for their inability to put in place a sufficiently dense infrastructure. At the start of 2025, there are almost 6,800 terminals in the Brussels region. Yet Brussels wants to ban access to non-electric vehicles by 2035. To be ready, it plans to offer 22,000 charging stations on its territory. Brussels has a car fleet of almost 500,000 vehicles. A good proportion of them certainly have private parking. But the ratio remains staggering, especially as we also have to add on visitors from outside. It's a fact that not everyone needs to recharge every day, but an electric car with less than 10% battery power almost always needs to be plugged in; we would need 5 times as many charging points! With 100,000 sockets, there'd be no need for a no-rotation penalty. That's what the authorities should be working on instead of finding a new form of fee. In any case, the plans announced by Sibelga, even with the good idea of integrating sockets on public lighting poles, won't be enough when neighbors and tourists are vying for the all-too-scarce electrical outlets available. After the dog walk (in pyjamas?), there'll be the one to take your electric car (not forgetting your license). Clusters of zombies pulling out the plug and spinning in a stupid merry-go-round in search of unconnected space before going to bed... later and later. Have a nice evening!

(MH with Olivier Duquesne - Source: RTBF - Picture: © Olivier Duquesne)