91–100 of 205 posts
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Buc-ee's/@29.726694,-98.07...
http://seguingazette.com/news/article_6dd61114-989d-11e1-b79...
My house has a 100A 240V service which is barely adequate as it is. I’m sure it could handle a single EV if I charge it overnight, but what happens when the rest of my family switches to EVs?
If I remember correctly, a charger for a Tesla requires a 50A 240V dedicated circuit, which would be half the capacity for my entire house just for a single car. Additionally, many homes don’t have such a circuit, so one would need to be installed.
This can be easily solved by upgrading my service, but that’s another cost.
In the end, it’s not a show stopper, but it’s certainly another hurdle that will cause a slowdown in adoption rates.
Perhaps codes should be passed which require the garage of new homes to have such circuits installed by default
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about people who park curbside? Will their cars be spending 2 hours/night at the charging station?
There's no particular reason you can't install curbside chargers. It's just a matter of convincing the powers that be to allow it, and that is just a matter of EVs becoming common enough for there to be demand for it.
These are not insurmountable problems, but they are expensive, or very time-consuming ones.
You also can't just run a power cord from a wall outlet to the street. You'll need to tear up the sidewalks, to connect the charging stations to the grid. In many places, power isn't underground, so you'll have to bring it down from the power lines to the underground - maybe through the buildings?
This quickly starts running to far more then $1000/charging station, and closer to $10,000/charging station.
This is what curbside parking looks like where I live:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6236671,-122.3252994,3a,73.2...
It would cost a fortune to wire that up. Better yet, if only half the streets in the area were wired up, due to the saturation of parking spaces, it would be close to worthless.
Deep eye roll at stuff like this.
I hope the author realizes that at some point there wasn't a network of gas stations across the country, there wasn't much of an electrical grid, or a highway system for that matter.
Some of the solutions to these potential challenges are related to public investment, many can be solved by private investment and there is a profit opportunity, thus solutions will come. Better solutions in my mind.
Here's the most missed point I see in all this infrastructure discussion. The most costly piece to next-generation recharge infrastructure already exists, and it is the natural gas "grid". It's massive and empowers much cleaner (than coal) local electricity generation. Today you can buy a small plot of land alongside the highway, pour a concrete pad, install a natural gas generator, purchase gas at bulk rates, and charge EV's for $$$. Even the smallest towns in America have NG lines running near or through them. The highest cost I've seen to have a bulk gas line brought on to a business' property was in the low tens of thousands. You can spreadsheet this, there's profit in this model and it requires NO improvements to the electrical grid and suffers practically no energy loss.
Most of what the author sees as problems others will see as investment opportunities and solve. In fact I think I'm going to go take a look at the map of supercharging stations right now...
You find this guy to be "brilliant"? I only skimmed the article, but it's just the same old, tired, ignorant anti-EV talking points I see from Luddites and oil industry shills every time I come across some kind of anti-EV rant. This article is just better written, but it's the same crap. If I were being extremely generous, I would just say that it's obviously not written by an engineer or anyone who really understand…
This is not the type of in depth though that I expect from this author, whom I usually find to be brilliant. These are first-level concerns of somebody who just realized electric cars exist and is looking for the "problems", however in practice most of these are mitigated by tech curves, and the true problems are going to be far different.
What are the true problems? I find Jacques' concerns to be well thought out, showing that he has actually dug into the numbers. However, I'm interested to know what you see are even more significant problems.
Oddly enough for HN, its a scalability problem (LOL). If you turned the entire known planetary stock of economically useful lithium ore into present gen batteries with 100% efficiency (LOL) and eliminated all competing uses (LOL), depending who's goofy numbers you use, you could give every human on the planet roughly one electric car. Once. There on its relying on recycling, or the market absorbing dramatically more expensive sources of lithium, or income inequality making a car lifestyle unavailable to most people, etc.
Its a kin to the argument of take the amount of copper in the infrastructure of the USA and divide it by the number of people in the USA and multiply that by the population of the undeveloped world, and you end up with more than the worlds known copper reserves. Africa, for example, will never be electrified at least as we in the west understand electrification. Perhaps new technologies or new ways of looking at things... but just picking up the plans for the TVA and dropping them in the 3rd world is literally not physically possible with existing known metal reserves.
Universal EVs are no problem for every status signalling coastal yuppie, theres just not that many of them. If the developed world retains hegemony we MIGHT be able to switch as a culture completely to EVs. But "the world" is not switching to EVs unless the global population shrinks to fit the global resource limits or ... ?
Note that my numbers assume 100% of the world supply is mined AND 100% efficiency (LOL) and there are no limits. I'm not claiming that 1% of that is realistic, but I am claiming its the very hard upper bound is too low even in some kind of star trek post singularity magical handwave world. Maybe you could fuse hydrogen atoms into lithium in a fusion reactor for a hundred years to make the worlds most expensive battery...
I'm not even sure we can pull it off with low range lead acid batteries in low range cars. When discussing infrastructure type stuff, there are only so many pounds of "stuff" currently economically available given current refining technology per human being. There IS enough iron to give us all cars (maybe not crude oil, but at least iron won't be the limiting factor) but there is literally not enough economically lithium recoverable on this planet, at the current technology level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a simple function of the total power required to get the current levels of transportation converted to electrical use. Whether that's 1 trip of 200 miles or 10 trips of 20 does not matter, in the end it is the total number of miles driven by everybody multiplied by the energy consumption per mile. That's a substantial amount of power, and I did what I could given the data that I could find to put a figure out th…
But in most cases it is very easy to arrange charging when you are not running your electrical dryer or air conditioning, mainly in the late evening or night. It would be trivial to control your charger such that the total electricity drawn by your house connection never exceeds a set value.
Recharging a drained car battery would use as much power as running a large AC unit for 15 hours, but if the car has driven only a small distance it will use much less power. It all depends on the distance the car needs to drive (logically...).
Can somebody explain how are EV, and especially Tesla, batteries different from, say, my laptop batteries, which normally degrade to the point of being unusable within 4-5 years, and have to be replaced?
This was why I thought the Chevy Volt had the right idea; having a gas-tank there as a backup, but depend on electricity 95% of the time. But, in my opinion, the best thing to do is to move to a big city and use the trains, or campaign for a good train system in your city, which obviously can't work for everyone.
Chevy Volt goes a step further and has the gas powered engine hooked up to the wheels. I prefer the approach taken by the BMW i3 where the (optional) gas powered range-extender is purely used to generate electricity, but there's room for both in the transition period and PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) seems like it might be an important market segment.
Using a gas engine just to generate electricity, and then running that through some conversions and battery storage before using it to run drive motors just isn't as efficient as using the ICE to drive the wheels directly. Or maybe GM does a crappy job of it, but the fuel economy figures speak for themselves.
This was why I thought the Chevy Volt had the right idea; having a gas-tank there as a backup, but depend on electricity 95% of the time. But, in my opinion, the best thing to do is to move to a big city and use the trains, or campaign for a good train system in your city, which obviously can't work for everyone.
To compete with car ownership, the possible solution should be: — available end-to-end (no waiting for the train and changing lines) — allowing for some privacy (in a car, I am always in good company; not so much in trains) — protect from the elements (riding a bike uphill in cold rain is less than pleasant) Trains, buses and bicycles are quite inferior options in this regard. Only Uber provides a tolerable alternati…
But generally speaking, I agree. To convince the average person of a public transit/driverless/generic-alternative-to-driving, privacy and end-to-end-ey-ness is probably important.