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http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2vrlzx/japan_has...
Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#12Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline? I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and I'm not too sold on that idea yet.
My understanding is that ecological impacts were more of a problem with older battery chemistries (lead-acid, nickel-cadmium), whereas lithium-ion packs are relatively benign. For instance, the batteries used by Tesla are mostly composed of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, and lithium, and none of these things are especially toxic.
Mining these different metals may have some negative impact, but it's pretty easy to recycle li-ion packs, so in the long term it's a much more sustainable solution compared to gasoline, where you have to keep drilling for more and more of it forever.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#13Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline? I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and I'm not too sold on that idea yet.
Battery recycling is a thing and it works well.
Tesla[1]
The main battery recycling firm[2]
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#14I would be real happy if employers would focus more on adding reserved parking with chargers instead of reserve parking for mid level management. It would send a much better message. It might take something akin to handicap parking to convince people to think different. I would use the carrot method, get better parking with your plug in (hybrid or otherwise) instead of taxing the other to death.
There are companies that reserve parking for mid-level managers?!?
I agree: that sends a terrible message.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#15Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline? I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and I'm not too sold on that idea yet.
In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle and adding them to street level atmosphere, so that is an immediate bonus that batteries would seem to win on, especially in the built environments in which we live.
Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes, but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is much less abundant than lithium or silicon.
However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#16They count charging stations in homes, not just public ones.
Would be hard to fit a petrol station in everybody's home though. edit - was also thinking that providing extra plug-in points on the side of your property to sell rooftop solar or grid at a premium, as part of a global charger sharing network, is probably going to happen eventually and has a good business plan in there somewhere.
I don't think it is that hard, it just isn't as useful. I have a tank in my basement that holds 300 gallons of heating fuel (basically diesel); and it is pumped to my boiler. Instead of diesel it could easily be gasoline to a car; but why worry about delivery, etc. when there is already a large infrastructure to fuel my car and the marginal benefits are tiny.
Whereas, if I bought an electric car; having the charger would really be a necessity, because having to wait 30-60 minutes for your car to charge is not going to be something that you want to work into your routine.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#17I would be real happy if employers would focus more on adding reserved parking with chargers instead of reserve parking for mid level management. It would send a much better message. It might take something akin to handicap parking to convince people to think different. I would use the carrot method, get better parking with your plug in (hybrid or otherwise) instead of taxing the other to death.
There are companies that reserve parking for mid-level managers?!? I agree: that sends a terrible message.
Yup. One of my wife's previous employers did this. The first row of spaces were reserved for long-time employees, which really just meant the VPs who had been there a while. The CEO's admin might have had one of those as well. The rank and file had very little change of ever obtaining a reserved spot.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#18IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an…
The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars, versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations as there are gas stations wouldn't be an issue there.
Also, once you have an operational charge point you can easily go parallel with stations, just like with gas pumps.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#19IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an…
Assuming 100% utilization of course, which around here is very far from the truth.
Re: Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations
#20IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an…
The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars, versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations as there are gas stations would…
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