CircleK Chargers

I 100% agree that the price is high, no doubt. But it's more or less on par with Easygo, 70c, Applegreen, 68c, Ionity, 70c, and until recent price drops, ESB who were charging 68c.

The private companies will charge whatever the market will bear. If the market decides charging needs to get cheaper, that's what will happen. If we collectively want to see prices drop then be sure to use these chargers as sparingly as possible, only ever fill enough to get you back home or to a cheaper charger.

With price put to one side, I have to give credit where it's due as well. The chargers are very easy to use. Nice long cables, they seem reliable, quick tap on the credit card to get started, tap again to finish, receipt displayed on the screen after a charge, not sure if there's a pre-auth as payment seems fairly instant.

Also I don't think I've seen a station that can charge less than 4 cars at a time and Chademo support means that regardless of the EV you drive you can confidently go there to fill up regardless of the car being used

They seem to be ridiculously slow at getting their chargers up and running. ESB networks have done their end and whoever they use as their own contractors in CircleK seem to be the ones holding it up.

How do you know ESB networks have done their end?

I'm involved in fit-outs of new commercial buildings, and by far the biggest obstacle to the buildings opening is ESBN. Currently have several industrial units open for 6+ months running solely on diesel generators, because ESBN still haven't done their necessary works, despite being informed over 2 years previously.

Delete

I would say it is most often the fault of the ESBN.

They held up a solar PV project for six months where I work while we waited on them to do some paperwork. There was zero infrastructure changes needed, charged almost 8k for some documents.

No charges on Plugshare, last update from May says they aren't active yet

I used Circle K chargers for the first time today in the M9 services near Carlow

Have to say, I was pretty impressed in general. Rolled up and all 6 chargers were free, plugged in, tapped my debit card and a few button presses and off we go

Ramped up to 100kW fairly quickly, charged for about 10 mins up to 45% then finished up and left

I like that you need to tap your card again to unlock the screen so someone can't come along and accidentally stop your charging session

They took a €25 deposit on my card and it'd be nice if they were a bit quicker about refunding it, still haven't gotten it back.

The price is also pretty steep of course, but if that's what it takes to have 6 high power chargers available then I'll suck it up and pay

I assume that the supermarket chargers piggyback on the shops existing grid connection, so there isn't much upgrades needed

They're also generally installing cheaper equipment, those 300kW units favoured by Circle K are over €100k each AFAIK

I guess that feeds down into the price

And unlikely that many of them are selling at a loss

I'd be surprised if they weren't profiting at 70c, might take a while to make back the build costs I'll admit, although the same could be said for petrol and diesel

Tesla build their own chargers at their factory in New York and use them worldwide, there's economies to scale happening there before you ever install anything which helps as well. Ionity are owned by 3 or 4 car manufacturers so in theory should be cheaper than Tesla in that regard. The network was originally built for the Model S and X cars so profits from them likely went into the network but that day is long gone in Ireland at least

I think Circle K make more profit from an EV charging than from a coffee. I'd say it's just a case that they can charge 70c/kWh so no motivation to charge less

I dunno, they're undercutting most of their competition (Ionity, Applegreen and Maxol) and generally installing more capable charging equipment

Maxol and Applegreen don't have the same financial reserves as a big multinational like Circle K, so presumably they can't afford to lose money on charging

I don't think they've a huge profit margin on charging, otherwise they'd be starting to compete more on price

Ionity might be subsidised by their owners, but they've been pretty clear that they're trying to run a profitable business. The former VW CEO was also complaining that they wanted to invest more but the partners weren't willing to put in more cash, hence why they were shopping around for investors a few years ago

Anyway, back to Circle K, they definitely have buying power and probably don't rent parking spaces from themselves, so there's definitely some savings there. However they seem to be aiming higher per site which will add upfront cost

Despite this they've set their price just below the others. They're obviously trying to give the appearance of value for the least cost, but I also don't think they're a massive profit margin they can afford to cut into

I think the next couple of years will be interesting to see with more chargers along the main routes they might start trying to compete with each other