Part 1 of a new series.
The background is that Malaysia aims for EVs to account for 15% of the total industry volume (TIV) by 2030 and 80% by 2050, aligned with the Low Carbon Mobility Blueprint (LCMB) and the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR).
The temporary tax reprieve, road tax waiver, and other steps such as bringing in Tesla under the EV Global leadership initiatives have jumpstarted the EV market in Malaysia in 2023. While urban and the upper 40% of the population are able to afford TVs, the mid and lower market are still shut out without EVs below 100K. That’s a story for another time because I want to focus on infrastructure because I feel it is more important than giving one-off tax breaks or purchase incentives.
Let’s not even talk about East Malaysia but Peninsular Malaysia still have some ways to go in terms of overall simplicity, convenience and accessibility. The west coast of the peninsular probably has it best but improvements need to be made. Here are some of my pet peeves after going 3,000km up and down the highways.
- App this and App that. You’d need an app for each Charge-Point Operator (CPO). We’d probably need some “roaming” or cross-share agreement so that a user can stick to 1 or 2 apps and be able to go anywhere.
- Highway charging. Understandably, power lines are complicated enough in urban areas, what about rural and along stretches of highways. Here, EV Connection and Gentari have done some magic with grid & solar battery energy storage to allow rapid charging at rest stops without sufficient grid capacity. Great, until the battery depletes. In today’s IOT world, the app needs to know the state of the battery and give users advance notice that it’s low and they can avoid skip it. Of course, this goes back to the fact that we need more charge points across the highway system.
- Mix of Fast & Slow. Fast DC charging is great for toilet or coffee breaks. The mindset here is to charge when you’re having a break and not longer. 10 minutes to grab a coffee, stretch your legs and perhaps get another 10% of battery charge is sufficient. Some rest-stops can augment this grid-hungry fast DC charging with slower AC charging as there’s also need for folks stopping for lunch or prayers so why not?
Not all cities have great charging locations but it needs to get better to enable Malaysia to reach their 2030 and 2050 goals. I’m more interested in the low-carbon, low emissions objectives anyway so one initiative that can hit two targets would be to massively deploy solar battery energy systems across all the highway rest areas – after all, humans still need a roof and any additional shade is always welcome. My back-of-napkin caculation walking around a smaller rest-area like Behrang or Pedas Linggi can easily accommodate easily 1000m² of solar panels, giving us with a ballpark 250w per m² at 250kWh at peak.
Anyway, more thoughts after another 3,000km.
Original article shared on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thoughts-green-mobility-malaysia-eugene-khoo-meimc/
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