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> 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 sa

> 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.

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.