Tesla will double its Supercharger network in the Republic by the end of this summer, expanding from 60 across nine sites to 124 charging stations across 18 sites.
However, building charging sites in Ireland is taking a longer than in other locations.
Oliver Dodd, Tesla’s senior regional manager for northern Europe charging, says the average build time on an Irish site “is typically taking between two and three years”.
“I would say 50 per cent of these locations have been about three years in the making. So we’re happy to finally start being able to open them up.”
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“It’s taking a lot longer than other locations. I think there are certain setbacks,” he says.
“Power can be hard to come by just to get an understanding of what is available, and that can set us back a couple of months.” However, he says Tesla has “a great working relationship with ESB”.
“Building sites is perhaps not as straightforward as people think. You might sign for five or six identified locations in a certain town or city or on a road, and you hope that you don’t come across too many obstacles along those that you can’t get around.”
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New sites for Tesla’s Superchargers this summer include locations in Longford, Letterkenny, Mallow, Limerick, Wicklow and Sligo. In Dublin, there is also additional or expanded sites in Blanchardstown, Rathfarnham and on the site of Keeling’s Fruit farm shop at the back of Dublin Airport.
With these in place, Dodd says Tesla will be “75 per cent of the way” towards their desired spread across the country.
There are more plans in place as well. “There are some areas where we’ve signed leases and we have agreements in place with various landlords, like the southeast, in the west around the Castlebar area,” he says. “Our ambition is to have confirmation on those sites for complete coverage this year.”
While he won’t reveal the investment involved in the Irish expansion, he says it would be “single digit millions of euros”, and points out that Tesla received €150 million from the EU Commission in 2023 to build DC public charging infrastructure across Europe. “Obviously, Ireland was included in that.”
Tesla has been an outlier in the car market, opting not only to provide the vehicles but the charging network as well. “We’ve always tried to approach this as a total cost of ownership. EVs are still expensive, and if we can make the charging and total cost of ownership more affordable than petrol or diesel vehicles, then that’s a huge plus for the industry.”
According to Dodd, 10 per cent of the usage in Ireland is by non-Tesla owners, but this should increase with the greater availability. He doesn’t see an increase in other EVs using their network as a constraint to service. “At the moment, in the UK, we’re over 35 per cent non-Tesla usage, and we haven’t seen a dramatic effect in our network.”
Tesla’s Superchargers currently have outputs of 250kW, which is lower than rivals such as the ESB network, which offers up to 360kW offered at some high power charging stations. Dodd doesn’t see maximum output as an issue at present, given the limited number of EVs can only accept between 150kW and 250kW, and only for a brief moment before tapering back to a lower rate of charge.
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However, Tesla has started to roll out 500kW chargers in the US and Dodd says he expects some new sites in Europe to be fitted with this level of power from next year.
That’s where Dodd sees the limit right now, despite reports BYD and a few others are working on 1,600kW “flash charging” stations, with claims of being able to fully charge a car’s battery in about five minutes.
“Do we need flash charges everywhere? Probably not. I think it’s a specific use case, possibly in fleet or taxi use.”
He says the Irish grid could support flash chargers, but you could only offer it with a lot less availability of stations. “If it’s just one megawatt charger, you know you’re just having potentially one bay, which could cause a lot of problems, particularly if a driver decides to spend more than five minutes in the shop getting their food,” he says.
