Can You Charge Your EV at your Favorite Theme Park? — Theme Park Zero (2024)

I want an electric car, you probably want an electric car. I love going to theme parks, and if you’re reading this, you probably do too. However, what happens if I want to take my hypothetical electric car on vacation to a theme park?

The availability of electric vehicle charging stations at themed entertainment venues is still very much a touch-and-go type situation. However, with the electric vehicle market growing exponentially, and the transportation sector being one of the most significant contributors to global climate change, an important part of Theme Park Zero is to understand how the acceleration of sustainable transportation will affect themed entertainment destinations.

First, let’s take a general look at the state of the battery electric vehicle (BEV) market in mid-2021, the time of this blog’s writing. The global market leader is clearly California-based Tesla Motors, with its four-model portfolio of cars. Other cars that are selling well include but are not limited to the Nissan Leaf and Volkswagen ID.4 worldwide, the Renault Zoe and Volkswagen ID.3 in Europe, and cars from homegrown brands in China. You also have an entire market made up of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), which have a much lower all-electric range than battery EVs but have an internal combustion engine to support them once the electric range is depleted. This blog will focus solely on BEVs, as certain governments are beginning to frown upon PHEVs and they will eventually exit the market like internal combustion vehicles.

Naturally, the European Union is the friendliest market for BEV drivers right now, mainly due to government regulations and incentives. Many global automakers are allocating higher quantities and a wider selection of BEVs to that market, and their sales are taking off as a result. For example, in 2020, more than 50 percent of new vehicles in Norway - full stop - were battery EVs. Norway intends to be the first first-world nation to completely end the sale of internal combustion vehicles by the year 2025, and they are well on their way to do so. However, many consider Norway’s situation to be an outlier in the general market. While other countries’ market share of BEVs is lesser, it is still significant. In the Netherlands, it was 20.5 percent in 2020. In Germany, it was 6.7 percent in 2020. This stands in stark contrast to the US market, where market share in 2020 was a paltry 1.8 percent, though the US market as a whole just handles many more vehicles each year.

How then, does an analysis of the BEV market translate to theme parks? Allow me to make the connection with a single image.

The above image shows four electric vehicle charging stations at EPCOT at Walt Disney World, part of EPCOT’s preferred parking and ADA accessible section. EPCOT has a total of 11,391 parking spaces, according to information released by D23 in 2017. This is a problem.

According to Atlas EV Hub, at the time of this writing, in the state of Florida, there are 2.49 BEVs per 1,000 people. According to the TEA / AECOM Theme Index, in 2019, EPCOT took in 12,444,000 people. With some simple math, we get an average of 34,093 guests per day, which translates to a theoretical need for an average of 85 BEVs to charge each day. Obviously, most of Walt Disney World’s guests are tourists, and most will fly in from outside the state or country, and those who don’t will stay at their resort and take the bus to the park, and not everyone will need to charge all day nor even at all. All those assumptions are likely true, but at the same time, this need will only increase as the years go on.

In fact, EPCOT is not an outlier on the Walt Disney World resort - all four parks only have four charging stations each. Some parks around the world are better than others, such as Efteling in the Netherlands having 196 charging stations in its main parking lot - but that is partially due to the Netherlands’ much hotter BEV market. However, conversely, TusenFryd in Norway only has 6 charging stations despite its market being the hottest in the world right now! While the Walt Disney World resort has its challenges, California’s own hot market has led to higher availability at the Disneyland resort.

Unfortunately, there is also a lack of consistent information on charging availability coming from the parks themselves, with potential guests needing to rely on crowdsourced options such as PlugShare and ChargeApp to determine if they will be able to plug in their car to charge.

The lack of charging availability, in general, is especially a problem for lower-income individuals. Their only ticket into the BEV market may only be a pre-owned BEV from the 2010s, which may have a driving range that was low for the market when new, and degraded since then. Those are the people who really need the charging stations - not a wealthier individual driving their 405-mile range / 650-km range Tesla Model S - yet solely because of their very positive sales numbers, it’s the Teslas that often end up taking all the spaces. This is not a knock on Tesla - obviously, the brand selling the most cars will be the likeliest to be in the parking lot. However, a vehicle that only has 50 miles of range remaining deserves the charging station more than a car that has 150 miles remaining.

Sure, ChargePoint will send the drivers notifications to their phone when their car has been fully charged, but why would someone interrupt their vacation day to go all the way out to move their car for the next person, and potentially be forced to park in a space that may be a further walk from where they originally parked? How inconvenient is that? There is an argument to be made that by the time a car has been fully charged, there will be other spaces close by that will have been opened up by guests who have left the park early. But if a parking lot only allows one-way driving down the rows of parking spaces, the driver may have to make a full loop of the parking flow route multiple times before finally finding a space. Then, with no notification system to alert the “next” driver, the charging space might be left unused for the rest of the day.

With all this in mind, how do we proceed in an equitable way?

I’m not going to try and convince you that I have concrete answers - yet. However, here is what I’m thinking…

• There should be designated “staging” parking spaces near the bank of charging stations, for vehicles waiting to charge, and for vehicles to move to after having been fully charged.

• In conjunction with the above, there should be significant idle charging fees for vehicles that have been fully charged but remain plugged in, and parking enforcement for vehicles taking up the charging spaces but that are not plugged in. The people that use the spaces should be the ones that need them, not the ones who only want to take advantage of the easy parking. This is probably my most controversial opinion here, but if it deters people from unnecessarily using the spaces, it should happen.

• Charging stations should be constructed in a section of the parking lot and in such a way that allows for easy parking in either direction (head-in or back-in).

• Banks of charging stations should not be located directly adjacent to ADA accessible parking spaces, for fear of unintended cross-pollination, though there should be a quantity of ADA accessible spaces with charging stations.

• There should not be any brand-specific charging stations - all charging stations should work regardless of vehicle make or model. A Tesla Supercharger, for example, only benefits Tesla drivers, which is not appropriate.

It should be noted that states, cities, and theme parks may already have one or more of the above suggestions in place as actual rules or laws.

The number of charging stations a theme park should have is still an open question. In the short term, there should be many more stations available. It may be prudent to base the desired number of charging stations to be based on the projected market share of BEVs in the park’s home state, region, or country, to ensure that most people who need to charge their vehicle can do so. Perhaps a good consideration would be to look at projected market share in ten years, considering how slowly construction projects move in the themed entertainment industry. There needs to be an element of future-proofing so that when the stations are eventually built, they will meet the needs.

However, as the electric vehicle market grows, and driving ranges get longer, and home / resort charging becomes more accessible, it will likely no longer be necessary to charge specifically at the theme park for most drivers. In that case, the solution might be to continue to maintain the above-desired number of charging stations (based on the above-projected market share projections). The idea might be to then price the charging station rate to be low enough as to not be completely cost-prohibitive to guests, but high enough so that the only people that would hypothetically use the charging stations would again only be the ones who really need them. Another potential solution for theme parks and charging station providers might be to charge “rate A” up to a certain number of kilowatt-hours (kWh), and then a higher “rate B” above that. This might help to alleviate costs for those lower-income drivers who might have electric vehicles with smaller or degraded batteries mentioned previously.

As with the adoption of any growing technology, everyone will take their own approach and we will eventually understand which approach sticks. Whatever that approach ends up being needs to be the guideline moving forward. It’s how we make electric vehicles normal, and that’s what we all want.

Now, why do we have to always use automobiles to get to themed entertainment destinations in the first place? I’ll save that one for a future blog.

Sources:

Reuters. “Norway's EV Sales Rise to Record 54% Market Share.” Automotive News Europe, 5 Jan. 2021, europe.autonews.com/automakers/norways-ev-sales-rise-record-54-market-share.

“Electric Vehicle Share in the US Reaches Record Levels in 2020, According to IHS Markit.” Business Wire, 19 Feb. 2021, www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210219005468/en/Electric-Vehicle-Share-in-the-US-Reaches-Record-Levels-in-2020-According-to-IHS-Markit#:~:text=--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Electric,in information, analytics and solutions.

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Netherlands EV sales data: https://www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/2021/03/Statistics%20Electric%20Vehicles%20and%20Charging%20in%20The%20Netherlands%20up%20to%20and%20including%20February%202021_0.pdf

D23 EPCOT information: https://d23.com/epcot-by-the-numbers/#:~:text=The%20park%20is%20305%20total,are%20available%20over%20141%20acres.

USA EV market share data: https://www.atlasevhub.com/materials/state-ev-registration-data/

TEA / AECOM Theme Index: https://www.teaconnect.org/images/files/TEA_369_18301_201201.pdf