4 ms·

In America this would require some pretty high-level rework of how city infrastructure works.

WorldMaker 6y ago
Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs (even that's not a given, really; cars themselves can transmit their payment information these days, or costs could be rolled into existing city taxes/parking fees). This isn't rocket science, this is infrastructure America has been building since the early 1900s.
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs Your parent was not saying that it'd be difficult to have a few charging stations on streets, but rather that it would be difficult to add a lot of densely packed chargers on the street. Today, there just isn't that much use for electricity on the street: traffic lights and the occasional parking meter are pretty much it from what I can tell. What you're proposing is adding 100's if not 1000's of amps of electricity to the sidewalk. For many, many streets. The situation is even more dire in the north: while it's not too bad to charge in a garage, particularly if it's insulated, EVs on the street will have to expend a substantial amount of energy keeping their batteries warm during the winter months, meaning that the minimum charging rate for those areas will have to be solidly in the Level 2 range. All of this work isn't impossible or even conceptually difficult. But it is a lot of work, and it's not as simple as just setting up charging stations and hooking them into the already existing infrastructure.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Most American street lamps are already "Level 2 range" for historic reasons that many of them are high powered sodium lamps or extremely early fluorescents. In most major US cities the combined density of traffic lights, street lamps, and parking meters (especially parking meters!) is extremely high; much higher than average in Europe from what I've seen. Plus, most US cities don't have historic preservation laws that apply to "street furniture" like street lamps and parking meters, as opposed to European cities that have already done a lot of work into shaping EV plugs to look more like historic street furniture and fit within preservation law limits. Europe has a slight advantage that their default plug output is closer to "Level 2" than America's paltry "Level 1" wall outlets, but even that advantage isn't as huge as it seems to some of these discussions. (Especially, again, given America wired most streets and parking lots for "Level 2" in the first place because those styles of street lamps were more convenient for more decades.) It is just as simple as adding plugs to the streets. People keep acting like car chargers are some sort of futuristic new electricity component, but at the end of the day it is a slightly smarter US dryer plug and maybe a meter. Maybe we need to beef up those circuits to support future demands, but just starting with the demand we have today we don't need to worry so much, the capacity is already there, and we know how to scale the infrastructure for demand as we add it, because scaling electricity infrastructure is a well solved problem. So what if it is a "lot of work"? That's not a "huge high-level rework", as suggested above, that's an "expand what's already there, eventually as needed/demanded". We're not moving to some foreign concept of a new energy grid, we are taking the energy grid we have and expanding it as demand happens (again, nowhere conceptually any different than what cities have done since the very first electric street lamp rollouts in the 1910s).
    - fomine3 6y ago
      Amperes for charging EV is outrageous compared to other electric devices. It shouldn't be easy to deploy massively for power grid.
- AgloeDreams 6y ago
  Allow me to place this in the form of reality: We would have to drill/ replace/ rip up thousands of sidewalks to add chargers to every parking spot (or even most). But the issue isn't about tech. I'm saying the infrastructure problem is that it's a chicken and Egg problem. You need street charging to have affordable EVs happen, you need affordable EVs to have the political pressure to drive city governments to spend millions on chargers. Europe does not have the conservative issue in the way that America does, most political parties dont think that 'global warming' is a hoax too. Even to have a company show up and do it you need those cars to exist..but then America isn't Europe, it's vastly different. There are good reasons why City Cars are successful in Europe and nobody buys them in the US: We have large, long highways, people do not live 'in' metro cities, generally and for those who do, owning a car is a net negative. Much of America is tight suburban housing, so you need large batteries, higher watt charging, and more stations all over. America won't do it for a long time because our country is so vastly different.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    > We would have to drill/ replace/ rip up thousands of sidewalks to add chargers to every parking spot (or even most). We do all of that every day as a matter of "natural" maintenance cycles, most roads last only a few years between necessary resurfacing, normal activities like construction/reconstruction, utility maintenance, etc continually shift/replace/rip up sidewalks as just the organic life cycle of a city. Of course it sounds daunting to think about doing it all at once in a major upgrade. But we already have continual processes happening that would benefit from adding electric requirements, and in which adding electric requirements isn't much different from existing zoning laws and regulations (modest modifications to existing street lamp requirements and parking space requirements). > so you need large batteries, higher watt charging, and more stations all over No, so you/we think you/we need those things. I don't think America's issue is even that political at this point, it's (a sad) mixture of a failure of imagination, the resistive momentum of the status quo, and the love of outliers/passion for the tales of "Spiders McGee" equivalents. The old weird anecdote that the average person each 3 spiders a year turning out that that mean was hugely biased by a single "Spiders McGee" that supposedly ate 10,000 spiders a year. The median and mode were both zero. The average person, by two of the three average forms ate zero spiders. Whenever we define "average" we need to remember how exactly we count those averages and stop falling in love with excusing weirdos like "Spiders McGee" at the expense of the median/mode. Right now the EVs sold in America have the battery size to more than meet the median/mode of American travel even taking into account America's love affairs with suburbs and long, high speed highways. The existing distribution of stations can already handle the median/mode of American long distance travel. (In terms of raw highway coverage at least, if not yet some weird idea of theoretical "full capacity", and yes that will only get scaled out as people start to use them.) Even the the current "low watt charging" ("trickle") in most homes can easily meet the median/mode of day-to-day/week-to-week driving of the "average" American. We're letting visions of some "perfect" EV that can travel 500 miles on a charge, recharge in 3 minutes, in any random American neighborhood gas station cloud the reality that statistically no one needs 500 miles on a charge, recharging a full 500 miles in anything less than 30 minutes, or recharging "everywhere" that traditional gas is sold. The vast majority of American trips are 40 miles or less. Trips of 300 miles or more in a single run are already suggested to take half-hour breaks every so often to stretch/eat/relieve bladders and avoid driving problems such as driving when too tired, driving without enough human fuel, driving while damaging bladders and important muscle groups. Even just trickle charging at boring American wall outlet power at home or at work or at anywhere else our car is parked for long stretches of time (and by far most cars spend a lot more time parked than driving) greatly changes the economic game versus traditional much more "centralized" models of gas stations. Sure, nearly every American we all have our tales of those 12 hour straight drives with nothing but the wind to our backs, the snacks in packs, the bottles we eventually grossly pee in, but those trips as oddly romanticly as we recall them are outliers. We shouldn't be using such visions as such big forces in our cost analysis of what constitutes a viable EV today, shouldn't just keep relying on "well I might want to do that once or twice a year" as some sort of resolute line in a sand driving us to large batteries with capacity rarely used, higher watt charging for charge times rarely needed, and more stations "all over" for trips rarely taken. If America "won't do it for a long time", it isn't because the country is vastly "different", it's because the country is so vastly and weirdly disillusioned, drastically underestimating the economic distinction/difference of trickle/at home charging, and in love with its own weird stories of being "different" over practical reality where it isn't as different as it thinks it is statistically or that cannot be improved. (America once had the greatest passenger rail network in the world. That was a story that Americans told ourselves made us great. It was told just as romanticly as we culturally give to our tellings of those 12 hour highway trips in cars. A lot of the suburbs that "require owning a car" were still planned and started being built when it was expected they'd be served by rail/light rail/trolley. We've forgotten, but the bones are still there.)

Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs (even that's not a given, really; cars themselves can transmit their payment information these days, or costs could be rolled into existing city taxes/parking fees). This isn't rocket science, this is infrastructure America has been building since the early 1900s.

nordsieck 6y ago
> Not really? We have electricity at the streets. We want additional plugs on the streets, and maybe a credit card reader on those plugs Your parent was not saying that it'd be difficult to have a few charging stations on streets, but rather that it would be difficult to add a lot of densely packed chargers on the street. Today, there just isn't that much use for electricity on the street: traffic lights and the occasional parking meter are pretty much it from what I can tell. What you're proposing is adding 100's if not 1000's of amps of electricity to the sidewalk. For many, many streets. The situation is even more dire in the north: while it's not too bad to charge in a garage, particularly if it's insulated, EVs on the street will have to expend a substantial amount of energy keeping their batteries warm during the winter months, meaning that the minimum charging rate for those areas will have to be solidly in the Level 2 range. All of this work isn't impossible or even conceptually difficult. But it is a lot of work, and it's not as simple as just setting up charging stations and hooking them into the already existing infrastructure.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Most American street lamps are already "Level 2 range" for historic reasons that many of them are high powered sodium lamps or extremely early fluorescents. In most major US cities the combined density of traffic lights, street lamps, and parking meters (especially parking meters!) is extremely high; much higher than average in Europe from what I've seen. Plus, most US cities don't have historic preservation laws that apply to "street furniture" like street lamps and parking meters, as opposed to European cities that have already done a lot of work into shaping EV plugs to look more like historic street furniture and fit within preservation law limits. Europe has a slight advantage that their default plug output is closer to "Level 2" than America's paltry "Level 1" wall outlets, but even that advantage isn't as huge as it seems to some of these discussions. (Especially, again, given America wired most streets and parking lots for "Level 2" in the first place because those styles of street lamps were more convenient for more decades.) It is just as simple as adding plugs to the streets. People keep acting like car chargers are some sort of futuristic new electricity component, but at the end of the day it is a slightly smarter US dryer plug and maybe a meter. Maybe we need to beef up those circuits to support future demands, but just starting with the demand we have today we don't need to worry so much, the capacity is already there, and we know how to scale the infrastructure for demand as we add it, because scaling electricity infrastructure is a well solved problem. So what if it is a "lot of work"? That's not a "huge high-level rework", as suggested above, that's an "expand what's already there, eventually as needed/demanded". We're not moving to some foreign concept of a new energy grid, we are taking the energy grid we have and expanding it as demand happens (again, nowhere conceptually any different than what cities have done since the very first electric street lamp rollouts in the 1910s).
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Amperes for charging EV is outrageous compared to other electric devices. It shouldn't be easy to deploy massively for power grid.
AgloeDreams 6y ago
Allow me to place this in the form of reality: We would have to drill/ replace/ rip up thousands of sidewalks to add chargers to every parking spot (or even most). But the issue isn't about tech. I'm saying the infrastructure problem is that it's a chicken and Egg problem. You need street charging to have affordable EVs happen, you need affordable EVs to have the political pressure to drive city governments to spend millions on chargers. Europe does not have the conservative issue in the way that America does, most political parties dont think that 'global warming' is a hoax too. Even to have a company show up and do it you need those cars to exist..but then America isn't Europe, it's vastly different. There are good reasons why City Cars are successful in Europe and nobody buys them in the US: We have large, long highways, people do not live 'in' metro cities, generally and for those who do, owning a car is a net negative. Much of America is tight suburban housing, so you need large batteries, higher watt charging, and more stations all over. America won't do it for a long time because our country is so vastly different.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  > We would have to drill/ replace/ rip up thousands of sidewalks to add chargers to every parking spot (or even most). We do all of that every day as a matter of "natural" maintenance cycles, most roads last only a few years between necessary resurfacing, normal activities like construction/reconstruction, utility maintenance, etc continually shift/replace/rip up sidewalks as just the organic life cycle of a city. Of course it sounds daunting to think about doing it all at once in a major upgrade. But we already have continual processes happening that would benefit from adding electric requirements, and in which adding electric requirements isn't much different from existing zoning laws and regulations (modest modifications to existing street lamp requirements and parking space requirements). > so you need large batteries, higher watt charging, and more stations all over No, so you/we think you/we need those things. I don't think America's issue is even that political at this point, it's (a sad) mixture of a failure of imagination, the resistive momentum of the status quo, and the love of outliers/passion for the tales of "Spiders McGee" equivalents. The old weird anecdote that the average person each 3 spiders a year turning out that that mean was hugely biased by a single "Spiders McGee" that supposedly ate 10,000 spiders a year. The median and mode were both zero. The average person, by two of the three average forms ate zero spiders. Whenever we define "average" we need to remember how exactly we count those averages and stop falling in love with excusing weirdos like "Spiders McGee" at the expense of the median/mode. Right now the EVs sold in America have the battery size to more than meet the median/mode of American travel even taking into account America's love affairs with suburbs and long, high speed highways. The existing distribution of stations can already handle the median/mode of American long distance travel. (In terms of raw highway coverage at least, if not yet some weird idea of theoretical "full capacity", and yes that will only get scaled out as people start to use them.) Even the the current "low watt charging" ("trickle") in most homes can easily meet the median/mode of day-to-day/week-to-week driving of the "average" American. We're letting visions of some "perfect" EV that can travel 500 miles on a charge, recharge in 3 minutes, in any random American neighborhood gas station cloud the reality that statistically no one needs 500 miles on a charge, recharging a full 500 miles in anything less than 30 minutes, or recharging "everywhere" that traditional gas is sold. The vast majority of American trips are 40 miles or less. Trips of 300 miles or more in a single run are already suggested to take half-hour breaks every so often to stretch/eat/relieve bladders and avoid driving problems such as driving when too tired, driving without enough human fuel, driving while damaging bladders and important muscle groups. Even just trickle charging at boring American wall outlet power at home or at work or at anywhere else our car is parked for long stretches of time (and by far most cars spend a lot more time parked than driving) greatly changes the economic game versus traditional much more "centralized" models of gas stations. Sure, nearly every American we all have our tales of those 12 hour straight drives with nothing but the wind to our backs, the snacks in packs, the bottles we eventually grossly pee in, but those trips as oddly romanticly as we recall them are outliers. We shouldn't be using such visions as such big forces in our cost analysis of what constitutes a viable EV today, shouldn't just keep relying on "well I might want to do that once or twice a year" as some sort of resolute line in a sand driving us to large batteries with capacity rarely used, higher watt charging for charge times rarely needed, and more stations "all over" for trips rarely taken. If America "won't do it for a long time", it isn't because the country is vastly "different", it's because the country is so vastly and weirdly disillusioned, drastically underestimating the economic distinction/difference of trickle/at home charging, and in love with its own weird stories of being "different" over practical reality where it isn't as different as it thinks it is statistically or that cannot be improved. (America once had the greatest passenger rail network in the world. That was a story that Americans told ourselves made us great. It was told just as romanticly as we culturally give to our tellings of those 12 hour highway trips in cars. A lot of the suburbs that "require owning a car" were still planned and started being built when it was expected they'd be served by rail/light rail/trolley. We've forgotten, but the bones are still there.)