I have initiated a plan to try and get as many as 2.4 Million charging stations mapped in Australia for the owners of Zero Electric motorcycles.
And we have already added our first entries.
How?
Simple.
There are an estimated 240 million regular old 10A power points in Australia, which is all a Zero Motorcycle needs to run our on board chargers. If a mere 1% of them give their public blessing to allow you to plug your Zero Motorcycle in for a recharge then I’ll list them on my map and promote their generosity for free. I’m kind of crowd sourcing a free charging network, specifically for Zero Motorcycles.
Particularly ideal for ev friendly businesses, or anyone who generates clean, low cost solar electricity I can add your logo, web site and contact details and soon I’ll have a range of stylish plaques that you can put somewhere on the building too, to promote your participation.
Obviously, outdoor, 24hr accessible powerpoints are preferred but not essential.
So far, there are less than a hundred bikes scattered around the country (and growing) so you won’t be inundated, but you will be personally contributing to improving the accessibility of charging points for these fantastic machines.
A typical Zero has 11.4kWh of storage so if we assume the worst case (they are dead flat) and the average rate of $0.28 kWh it’s a cost of around $3.19 per recharge. Typically, it will be around half that amount for average daily riding so around $1.50 per recharge. Out of courtesy, a gold coin donation from the chargee to the charger would be considerate and respectful I think.
Of course if you are a business as a low cost promotion, it’s nice. If you happen to have things like cakes, coffee, sandwiches or light beer, it’s even nicer because while we are recharging, we’d be delighted to take a breather from our high speed electric motorcycling world and get a snack in.  So we’ll spend some money at your place and lift your sales too.
We would also like to encourage ev friendly homeowners to participate although generally I would see these points as emergency night time re-charging stations when people are most likely to be home.
Our (completely untested) theory is that before long we will organically build a fast growing network of charging stations that are ideally suited to the fact that Zero have their own chargers on board; all we need is your outlet – no hardware and no investment. As time passes, our chargers will get more powerful and we’ll preference locations that have (for example) 32A outlets suitable for coffee machines allowing us to get in and out quicker with faster charges.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that before long charging infrastructure will be embedded on vehicles rather than requiring big charging stations although of course, if they are available to compliment my network of 2.4 million stations, it’s a bonus.
Interested?  Follow this link to the map, enter your details and shazam.
Source: Solar Business Services. Reproduced with permission.