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Improving the grid is not the same as building gas stations. Petrol can be moved in advance and stored. A gas station is essentially a big hole underground fill
by bonzini 6y ago
Improving the grid is not the same as building gas stations. Petrol can be moved in advance and stored. A gas station is essentially a big hole underground filled with inflammable liquid, plus filling a tank is fast enough (compared to even 15min for a partial supercharger "refill") that you can build them away from densely populated regions.
A parking lot downtown, with 500 car capacity, might need several hundred kW of power at peak every day (50 km * 0.15 kWh/km * 500 / 8 hours = 475 kW). Anything above 100 kW requires MV distribution and a local transformer. At least they could allow people to book their charging slot and stagger the charging of all those cars, though. There are worse cases.
Ski resorts will have people visiting for a day on the slopes, possibly after a 100 miles drive or so, and needing their cars charged by the time they leave, maybe 6-7 hours later. But at least these are in sparsely populated regions, and often close to hydroelectric dams too, so it's not impossible to bring more electric power. By the time those people go back home they will have to charge as well to get ready for next day's commute the though.
In fact, every night people will come home and charge their cars. In this case (unlike the parking lot) there is no centralized distributor that could try to stagger the charging of all these cars.
And perhaps it will only be a couple days a year on long weekends or bank holidays, but there will be cases when a condo with 100 flats will also need a sustained power of hundreds of kW for several hours... and all other boxes of flats will have the same need on exactly the same day.
This means building lots of HV and MV transformation stations (which are not exactly cheap) in densely populated regions. Where are the plans to estimate this need and to build this infrastructure?