As you may know by now, I went on a little cleantech tour of the Netherlands last month. Spending a few days in Amsterdam, Holland, I got to see dozens of plug-in cars parked and driving around the city*. If parked, they were generally parked at or near an on-street EV charging station.
I learned a little bit about these EV charging stations from a few of the cleantech experts I interviewed during the week, but then I got lucky on the evening of my last day there and actually saw a guy pull into one of these charging spots. I interviewed him about the process on video as he plugged in to charge.
I was also lucky to interview the cofounder of an EV charging station company, Blue Corner. Hans Verwijs has been involved with electric vehicles for decades and there probably aren’t too many people who know the Dutch EV market better than he does. He told me a bit about Blue Corner and EV charging in the Netherlands in the part of the interview featured below.
The coolest thing I think I discovered — mentioned by Karel Beckman of EnergyPost.eu (who hooked me up with Hans and other cleantech experts for my tour) as well as the VW Golf GTE driver who I met — was that people can request from the government EV charging stations on streets where they live, work, etc., and the government will install them for free in a relatively short time.
So, below are the two videos mentioned above, followed by a bunch of pictures of electric vehicles charging in Amsterdam.
*Electric vehicles actually account for about 6% of new car sales in the Netherlands now (1 out of every 16½ or so cars). I think that puts it only behind Norway in terms of EV market share. If the Volkswagen Golf GTE were its own model (not a subset of the VW Golf), it would actually be the 13th best-selling car on the Dutch market.
So, if you go to the Netherlands, aside from enjoying the wonderful bike culture, see how many electric cars you can spot!
Pictures by Marika Shahan & Zachary Shahan | EV Obsession | CleanTechnica (CC BY-SA 4.0)
I finally know where your Model S photo is from. On a separate note, the fortwo electric really does seem like the perfect city car.
As an Amsterdam citizen working in electro mobility I may have something more compelling to add. Everything is roaming and interconnected in the Netherlands. So we have a single chargepass system for all public chargepoints in the Netherlands; we have an open system where you can see chargepoint location as well as availability and an fully-accepted payment model. These items are crucial – it adds a profit model behind chargepoints, thus motivating the installation of infra.
True, that’s great.
But the tariffs are totally unclear and often wrong and different on the various apps.