It is necessary to issue regulations on charging stations and charging pillars
The electric vehicle market in Vietnam is developing rapidly with the participation of manufacturing, assembling, importing and supplying charging services enterprises. Charging systems are deployed in a variety of ways, from manufacturer charging networks, agents, public places to workplaces, parking lots, and service areas. Currently, a large network has developed about 150,000 charging ports, with a capacity of up to 360kW nationwide.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade believes that current regulations on charging station management are still scattered in many different legal documents. The absence of a specialized technical regulation leads to the situation that investors deploy charging stations based on their own standards or foreign standards that have not been compatiblely tested.
Many large capacity charging stations are installed in spaces such as apartment basements, shopping centers or centralized parking spots without standardized safety distance, lack of heat dissipation systems and specialized fire prevention and fighting plans for lithium-ion battery incidents.
On the other hand, many domestic and foreign suppliers are participating in the market for equipment, software, payment, operation and maintenance.
From the above practice, the Ministry of Industry and Trade emphasized that the promulgation of regulations is necessary to create a mandatory management framework at a minimum level, as a basis for entities to carry out design, investment, import, installation, operation, inspection and post-inspection.
Electrical safety standards must be put first
Talking to Lao Dong about the standards for charging stations and electric vehicle charging poles, Mr. Nguyen Huu Khoa - lecturer at Ho Chi Minh City Electricity College - assessed that the priority factor currently is ensuring sufficient power supply capacity.
According to Mr. Khoa, in some areas, when charging stations are installed, the capacity of existing transformer stations does not meet the needs. In this case, investors must invest in new transformer stations. This is an urgent issue to ensure sufficient power supply capacity for charging stations.
The second factor is that the area for the charging station must be sufficiently large. Mr. Khoa believes that a charging station should not only arrange one pier with two charging guns serving two vehicles, but needs to be larger in scale.
For example, a station can arrange about three pillars to serve six or more vehicles at the same time. Thus, the level of exploitation is effective. If each place only arranges charging points for two vehicles, it will not be suitable. Instead, there should be charging stations that can serve from 5-10 vehicles at the same time and to do this, appropriate area is needed" - Mr. Khoa analyzed.
According to Mr. Khoa, power supply capacity and area are two infrastructure factors that need to be concerned first. For the charging station itself, because the equipment is installed entirely outdoors and is often affected by sun and rain, electrical safety standards must be put first, along with requirements for fire and explosion prevention and safety.
When installing charging pillars, it is necessary to conduct tests and experiments to assess whether the equipment meets safety standards or not, such as whether the grounding and grounding systems meet the requirements or not, and whether electrical leakage appears or not.
Regarding fire prevention and fighting, Mr. Khoa said that charging stations must ensure compliance with regulations, in which it is necessary to pay attention to the distance to residential areas, equip batteries and fire prevention and fighting systems. At the same time, there needs to be a monitoring plan in times when there are no people or vehicles at the station. The installation of camera systems is also necessary to promptly detect and handle incidents that may arise at night.
Regarding smart charging management, according to Mr. Khoa, there are two factors to note. The first is the charging frequency, which depends on the number of electric vehicles in each area. If the number of vehicles is large, it can lead to "overload" in the sense that there are not enough charging stations to meet the demand. In fact, at some charging points, taxis have to queue to wait for their turn to charge.
The second factor relates to the electricity use time frame. According to Mr. Khoa, in the near future, if the new peak hours are applied from 5:30 PM to 10:30 PM, the electricity price during this period will be high.
Therefore, taxi business units as well as households, if choosing fast charging, can switch to charging after 10:30 PM. In other words, between 0:00 AM and 6:00 AM, when entering the off-peak hours, many people can choose to charge their cars during this time" - Mr. Khoa said.
