On the occasion of World Electric Vehicle Day, the second phase of the trial run of electric vehicles was conducted on the Delhi-Jaipur Highway, covering 278 km, by the National Highway for Electric Vehicles (NHEV) under Ease of Doing Business (EoDB).
The first phase was conducted in 2020 on the Delhi-Agra highway, covering 210 km.
The NHEV is a pilot project, which aims at promoting the electrification of India's transportation systems. It is led by the country’s leading piloting prototype agency EoDB Services, conducting the Ease of Doing Business Program for industry and the federal government.
Sputnik interviewed Abhijeet Sinha (National Program Director of EoDB) and the project director of NHEV, about details of the tech trial run and the prospects of Indian highways becoming e-highways in the near future.
Sputnik: You have recently carried out the second phase of the tech trial run of electric vehicles from Delhi to Jaipur. What were the key testing parameters in this trial run?
Sinha: The key parameters which we are testing in the second phase of the tech trial run are more commercial and less technical. These commercial trials are focused around the users of electric mobility.
When it comes to inter-city travel particularly, the users have certain expectations from the electric bus or car which they are using to travel. These expectations need to be vetted or checked before the entire electric mobility ecosystems are delivered or handed over to the public for use.
So, we tested breakdown services along with the cost of one seat of an electric bus for an individual or the cost of an electric car which one hires to travel from Delhi to Jaipur or Delhi to Agra. We also calculated per 100 km cost as well as per trip cost while analyzing the cost of an electric car.
Also, from the perspective of investors, since it's commercial, it is very much important for people to understand how much this upgrading of the highways is going to cost.
What we understood from table to table working is that upgrading one kilometer of highway to e-highway will cost around INR 5 million ($63,178) but we wanted to do it on ground zero to get an understanding that is this amount sufficient, or we need more.
So, these were the key parameters which we tested and most of our areas of concerns have been covered. We are going to get interesting and detailed data after this one month trial.
Sputnik: The first phase of the trial run was conducted from Delhi to Agra. What were the main accomplishments and did you manage to incorporate them during the second phase?
Sinha: The first phase of trial run was of 210 km on Yamuna Expressway between Delhi and Agra from November 25 to December 25, 2020. However, it did not conclude on December 25 because a few more technical aspects hadn't been tested yet.
The four takeaways from the first phase were that if a vehicle gets shut down on an e-highway out of the city, then how much time, technically, will it take to reach out to the vehicle and give them a backup, roadside assistance or repair? Because repair is a different matter when it comes to EVs. It’s not like a normal diesel or petrol car that a nearby mechanic can work on.
Secondly, fleet operators were very reluctant to start electric services outside of the city. So, if a fleet operator is starting the service, how much is it going to cost? A vehicle can be provided to them on 70 percent payment, which is the payment of the vehicle excluding the battery, because they are getting it on a subscription basis. This was the second technical aspect which we tested in tech trial 1.
The third aspect was utilization of a charger. On average, we have 3-5 percent utilization of chargers in India. These highways, in the relay model, usually end up having utilization of 30 percent from day one of the charging infrastructure, particularly the charger.
The fourth aspect was about financing. Banks, NBFCs and investors are not too interested in funding or financing an EV charging infrastructure. They are fine with financing an electric vehicle as a product or vehicle but when it comes to charging infrastructure they are very reluctant. A lot of banks did not even read the infrastructure charging proposal.
Therefore, we tried to ensure that every penny spent from investors’ pocket on these e-highways is reaching to break even in 36-40 months. So, these were the four aspects we tested in the first phase, and they went very well.
A couple of aspects which were not the excel sheet exercise or transactional exercise and were technical exercise like road side assistance, geofencing and anti-theft were tested again in the second phase.
Sputnik: How soon do you think the Delhi-Jaipur and Delhi-Agra highways will become "EV-ready" for the public?
Sinha: Calling it EV ready highway and having a charger which does not support you or doesn’t help you at the time doesn’t gives a confidence. This actually happened during the trial run when one of the chargers that were supposed to be used by our fleet did not work.
The Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) didn’t work, the software could not read the vehicle so the charging didn’t start. When we tried to reach out to the service company, static or 24/7 customer care, they couldn’t respond.
So, one of our technical teams had to go back. We took this decision to send them into an auxiliary fleet. We were running the trial vehicle and we were also having extra vehicles running with us. So this doesn’t gives a confidence that people can say these highways are EV ready.
EV ready highway means if you are going to a certain destination, you are reaching there on time and if something wrong happens you should get assistance. A user should have satisfaction.
NHEV is not only meant for installing a couple of chargers and then pushing fleet and people to deal with these problems. NHEV means safety, satisfaction and solution.
There would be safety requirement, there has to be satisfaction for consumers and if in case something goes wrong, there has to be on ground solution to it and to ensure all these things it is very much required to conduct trials, read out those issues which are coming from ground and then going ahead with this.
So, by next one month we will complete this trial and start allocating charging stations on preferential basis to public sectors and private players. Whoever wishes to be a part of this, they can come, partner and start building them.
By end of next one quarter of 2023, you can see all these stations will be ready, working full-fledged and then all these issues discussed above can be resolved. People can go non-stop to Jaipur or Agra city. However if they want, they can stop at any of the charging stations.
Sputnik: What are other major challenges that you foresee in setting up EV infrastructure at the national level?
Sinha: Talking about the EV infrastructure at the national level, if you look at the ecosystem of electric mobility when it comes to city bus operations, when it comes to intercity bus operations, the electric bus buyer is the government. We will have to work on this that the government cannot be the biggest buyer or alone buyer.
Private players will have to enter the space and they will only enter this space when government will focus on the things which private players would not do and that too not on the pocket of the government budget. But on the PPP model so that more and more people who will be able to operate buses and fleet on these highways. That is where NHEV is focused around.
If you will travel in an electric bus, you will enjoy the services which are better than the diesel bus at lower cost. So next time you will repeat, you will again seek the booking into that same electric bus rather than diesel or petrol.
This will help the fleet operators in getting advance bookings and when a bus is regularly getting bookings in comparison to a diesel bus then the operator, he will look forward to buy an electric bus.
This is how private operators will get into the business and once they start to buy then the load which is being thrown on government will shed.
The reason why this load has to be taken off from the government is that it already has several departments to run. And it won’t be interested in opening another department where it has to only spent ending up having a state transport type of facilities where people don’t like to sit and then you say it failed like any other technology.
Our focus is to bring an ecosystem which is very high in standard. A foreigner, a diplomat, a coporate guy or a person who travels on flight or metros feels comfortable traveling on electric vehicles.
Apart from this, people who are not too well-off can also travel on electric buses and it will only be possible when this 500 km trial will become benchmark to build another 5,000 km e-highway across the nation in next two years.
Sputnik: Apart from the two aforementioned highways, what are some other highways where NHEV is planning to conduct trial runs?
Sinha: I would prefer not to comment on that at this stage of time. We have been absorbed into completing the pilot program first. And we are in conversation with many state governments and many state authorities, corporate houses and investors who are willing to take this prototype and extend this 5,000 km within the next two years.
Once the report about the trial is out, we will be able to disclose the names of other highways also.
Sputnik: What was the response and support of the federal government and various state governments i.e. Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan regarding EV initiatives?
Sinha: Haryana EV policy has recently came and it helped us in deciding how many stations we want to increase. The result of which is that we already have two of the largest charging stations of India based in Gurugram city, Haryana .
The trial run was conducted on 500 km highway passing from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi, Delhi to Haryana and Haryana to Rajasthan. All these states have given very good response when it came to getting national permit for electric buses and many of them have already given the exemption, saying no such permit will be required.
When it comes to giving land, Federal Ministry of Road Transport and Highways earlier this year had given clarity on a model that how unused land on highways can be used for setting up charging stations.
Federal Ministry of Science and Technology has also been kind to give us clarification and non-commercial support on giving guidelines for charging electric vehicles, OCPP and other communication standards which are required for charging stations. Apart from this, India’s think tank NITI Aayog has also been very supportive.
However, despite successful trial run between Delhi to Agra, land has been an issue with Uttar Pradesh state government. I look it as a problem within Yamuna Expressway, which is under insolvency. Very soon we expect this to be resolve and we will start construction of charging stations on both these highways.
Sputnik: Are there any gaps in your work and if there are, how are you trying to overcome them?
Sinha: If you look at gaps, then I would say that we have overlooked two-three important parts in developing such an ecosystem.
Primarily, you cannot expect someone to buy electric vehicles, which are very costly, without having the confidence in technology and to gain the confidence we will have big institutional changes. We cannot compare an electric car with a diesel car until we have similar type of infrastructure.
Since the infrastructure is not similar, there is no point of crying and going to the government that you develop and give it to us. If it is a profitable model, people need to know that electric mobility is not a very complex and difficult to deploy model. It's a very simple and sorted model.
Vehicles are very sorted as they are very predictable as to could be the reasons for a possible breakdown. If we look at the infrastructure requirement, which is the backbone of electric mobility, it would only be possible to implement or construct such infrastructure when we look at it the way we look at the petrol pumps (fuel stations).
When we look at the petrol pumps, we look at it as a profitable business because if you have a license you will be able to sell petrol. The only time gap is the time of construction required to set up petrol pump.
Once you are open for vending you start earning but in charging stations, things like layout, design, safety protocols etc. are not simply available as compared to petrol pump.
So this is one of the major gaps, why people are not opting for setting up a charging station. However, as per Federal Ministry of Power it is a non-licensed activity. You do not need to have a license to set up a charging station in India.
Secondly, one doesn’t know who is going to finance him while setting up a charging station. If there is no funding or procurement model, it is really difficult for us to convert 5,000 km of normal highways into e-highways.
So, we need to bring all the stakeholders together to solve this issue.
AHEM (Annuity Hybrid E-Mobility) has served the purpose in NHEV. It’s a proven model inspired by Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM) which has been appreciated by Moody’s, IMF, World Bank etc. They all have said that it is a very good model for constructing highways.
Last but not least, nobody knows how much one earns from a charging station. How much revenue, return on investment (ROI) one gets on investment.
While when you look at the petrol pumps, gas stations, everything is in public domain. One can predict on the pretext of usage.
So these are three major gaps which NHEV has filled and people will be able to compare apple to apple. I'm not saying that charging stations will become as profitable as petrol pumps overnight but definitely this has started drawing equivalence between both of them.