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Solution to these problems will come. Its a chicken & egg problem. I live in a flat in London and thinking of similar issues with electric cars. Maybe 20min sup

Solution to these problems will come. Its a chicken & egg problem. I live in a flat in London and thinking of similar issues with electric cars. Maybe 20min supercharging every couple of weeks is enough for my weekend driving. I'm hoping soon every lamp post will have a charging plug.

lm28469 7y ago
> I'm hoping soon every lamp post will have a charging plug. I don't see any major city doing that anytime soon. The grid is not ready, power plants are not ready, it would cost billions to rewire everything, especially in old European towns. And even more for germany since they're shutting down coal and nuclear right now. It's not a big issue though, we should focus on getting rid of personal cars and that's something Berlin is getting slightly better at by the day.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  > grid is not ready, The UK National Grid says otherwise. See https://www.carbonbrief.org/rise-uk-electric-vehicles-national-grid-doubles-2040-forecast https://www.carbonbrief.org/rise-uk-electric-vehicles-nation... for instance.
- mooktakim 7y ago
  Firstly, when they add these types of charging stations, they will make the grid ready. Secondly, grid has a lot of capacity. Its like motorways, most of the time its under utilised. Only during peak time that it is full capacity. Think of the grid in a similar way. Its mostly under utilised except for peak time. All we need to do is make use of it outside peak time (with batteries) and suddenly we have double or triple the capacity.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    What about all the people getting from/to work roughly at the same time and plugging their cars. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup for example, and that's just tea pots > All we need to do is make use of it outside peak time Seems like a huge thing to overcome to me.
    - mooktakim 7y ago
      Just because they plug in at the same time doesn't mean they all need to draw power. In fact a lot of chargers now are set to charge late at night to take advantage of the lower off-peak prices.

lm28469 7y ago

> I'm hoping soon every lamp post will have a charging plug. I don't see any major city doing that anytime soon. The grid is not ready, power plants are not ready, it would cost billions to rewire everything, especially in old European towns. And even more for germany since they're shutting down coal and nuclear right now. It's not a big issue though, we should focus on getting rid of personal cars and that's something Berlin is getting slightly better at by the day.

kwhitefoot 7y ago
> grid is not ready, The UK National Grid says otherwise. See https://www.carbonbrief.org/rise-uk-electric-vehicles-national-grid-doubles-2040-forecast https://www.carbonbrief.org/rise-uk-electric-vehicles-nation... for instance.
mooktakim 7y ago
Firstly, when they add these types of charging stations, they will make the grid ready. Secondly, grid has a lot of capacity. Its like motorways, most of the time its under utilised. Only during peak time that it is full capacity. Think of the grid in a similar way. Its mostly under utilised except for peak time. All we need to do is make use of it outside peak time (with batteries) and suddenly we have double or triple the capacity.
- lm28469 7y ago
  What about all the people getting from/to work roughly at the same time and plugging their cars. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup for example, and that's just tea pots > All we need to do is make use of it outside peak time Seems like a huge thing to overcome to me.
  - mooktakim 7y ago
    Just because they plug in at the same time doesn't mean they all need to draw power. In fact a lot of chargers now are set to charge late at night to take advantage of the lower off-peak prices.