5 ms·

Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?

by s0rce 6y ago

Robotbeat 6y ago
A literal 120V exterior outlet? 83% of these vehicles drive in the city. They drive on average 18 miles a day (typical routes being about 45 miles). You don't need a 150kW Supercharger station, you just need a 1.2kW regular old 120V exterior outlet used for trimming the bushes. Even a cheap RV hookup would be overkill. If a federal government agency in the most powerful national on the planet can't take the most obvious step toward electrification in a case which is the best possible situation for an electric vehicle (very stop and go traffic, slow speeds, short routes, long total miles on odometer over life of vehicle), what hope does the rest of the world have in taking action on climate? Greta Thunberg is right. People don't care about climate. Literally everything else is a priority.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Yes, there are probably very few outlets where mail trucks currently park. These things are parked in the middle of parking lots, not in garages. And you need more than one outlet, you need one for every truck that parks there. And I am sure no current USPS office has power service hooked up for several hundred amps of draw that was never anticipated to be used. There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Does the electric code permit overallocation in that case? That's not my area of expertise but I doubt it does. And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.
        kube-system 6y ago
        I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be building out the equipment and processes required to roll them out.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        Except these vehicles are not going to be immediately dumped onto all USPS parking lots. They are going to be built over a period of years. Adding an outlet for each vehicle would cost on the order of 1% of the vehicle cost and would be paid for in fuel savings within a couple months. Look, I don't know where this idea came from that electricity is this hard problem. It's not. As it is now, many of these LLVs have to be fueled sometimes multiple times per week. Simply plugging into an external outlet not only is cheap but will actually save time. People who do not have electric cars keep looking for an inventing some kind of "gotcha," but they really are this easy. You literally can just use a normal external outlet to charge them, and even if you want faster charging (totally unnecessary and probably undesirable for this application), it costs maybe $1200 to get an RV hookup (equivalent to L2). I charge from an old dryer outlet, although sometimes use an exterior 120V. It really is that easy. In fact, I don't know if big USPS locations have refueling depots like bus depots do, but if they went electric, they'd be unnecessary and could be removed.
        6y ago
    - alacombe 6y ago
      A 100 vehicle fleet would require not 100-200 Amps service, but 1500 Amp service, and that's a whole different problem.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Outlier locations will have outlier problems. That's not necessarily something to be worried about. The average post office has six delivery vehicles if I did the math right.
        mlyle 6y ago
        I am in a small town, with one post office for 40k residents. We have approximately 20 mail trucks.
      - akira2501 6y ago
        Well, you've probably got 14 to 16 hours of time to phase that charge across your fleet. You're still going to need a lot of outlets, but you only need to feed power to 20-25% of them at a time.
        evgen 6y ago
        In many locations the charging window is going to be a lot smaller than you think with longer routes and later deliveries pushing parts of the fleet into sub-10 hour charging windows. Now you have a need to shuffle power and charging across this local fleet in the middle of the night. Who exactly is going to be doing this? If you are automating it then you are making some very large bets on the charging infrastructure being 100% reliable. It is a problem that sounds simple at first but becomes more complex when you actually dig into the details. A fleet that is ICE-ready on day one but which can be retrofitted to EV means that you are able to deploy something that works now and pick locations to test EV and all of the details that are involved in the process by doing partial upgrades as various locations. Overall, sounds like current plan is the smart one.
- pionar 6y ago
  A) The USPS is not technically a government agency. B) They're pretty strapped for funding right now.
  - BalinKing 6y ago
    I think the USPS actually is a government agency—from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Governance_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#G...: > The USPS is often mistaken for a state-owned enterprise or government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak) because it operates much like a business. It is, however, an "establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States", (39 U.S.C. § 201) as it is controlled by presidential appointees and the postmaster general.
- alacombe 6y ago
  One outlet is certainly fine, 100 outsets, not so much.
ratsforhorses 6y ago
Just putting this out there.."Adapting a lamp post into a charging point for electric vehicles can cost as little as £2,000" Seems like a good infrastructure project ...
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  2000 pounds? Try $200 maybe. And these vehicles cost on the order of $40k. Penny wise and pound foolish to spend thousands of dollars on a combustion engine and drivetrain just because you're afraid of a $200 exterior outlet.
  - lesdeuxmagots 6y ago
    $200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run. Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region. And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero? They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world? Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.

Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?

by s0rce 6y ago

Maybe the charging infrastructure isn't available?

A literal 120V exterior outlet? 83% of these vehicles drive in the city. They drive on average 18 miles a day (typical routes being about 45 miles). You don't need a 150kW Supercharger station, you just need a 1.2kW regular old 120V exterior outlet used for trimming the bushes. Even a cheap RV hookup would be overkill. If a federal government agency in the most powerful national on the planet can't take the most obvious step toward electrification in a case which is the best possible situation for an electric vehicle (very stop and go traffic, slow speeds, short routes, long total miles on odometer over life of vehicle), what hope does the rest of the world have in taking action on climate? Greta Thunberg is right. People don't care about climate. Literally everything else is a priority.

kube-system 6y ago
Yes, there are probably very few outlets where mail trucks currently park. These things are parked in the middle of parking lots, not in garages. And you need more than one outlet, you need one for every truck that parks there. And I am sure no current USPS office has power service hooked up for several hundred amps of draw that was never anticipated to be used. There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Does the electric code permit overallocation in that case? That's not my area of expertise but I doubt it does. And yes, installing service is "cheap" but it takes time.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be building out the equipment and processes required to roll them out.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        Except these vehicles are not going to be immediately dumped onto all USPS parking lots. They are going to be built over a period of years. Adding an outlet for each vehicle would cost on the order of 1% of the vehicle cost and would be paid for in fuel savings within a couple months. Look, I don't know where this idea came from that electricity is this hard problem. It's not. As it is now, many of these LLVs have to be fueled sometimes multiple times per week. Simply plugging into an external outlet not only is cheap but will actually save time. People who do not have electric cars keep looking for an inventing some kind of "gotcha," but they really are this easy. You literally can just use a normal external outlet to charge them, and even if you want faster charging (totally unnecessary and probably undesirable for this application), it costs maybe $1200 to get an RV hookup (equivalent to L2). I charge from an old dryer outlet, although sometimes use an exterior 120V. It really is that easy. In fact, I don't know if big USPS locations have refueling depots like bus depots do, but if they went electric, they'd be unnecessary and could be removed.
        6y ago
  - alacombe 6y ago
    A 100 vehicle fleet would require not 100-200 Amps service, but 1500 Amp service, and that's a whole different problem.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Outlier locations will have outlier problems. That's not necessarily something to be worried about. The average post office has six delivery vehicles if I did the math right.
      - mlyle 6y ago
        I am in a small town, with one post office for 40k residents. We have approximately 20 mail trucks.
    - akira2501 6y ago
      Well, you've probably got 14 to 16 hours of time to phase that charge across your fleet. You're still going to need a lot of outlets, but you only need to feed power to 20-25% of them at a time.
      - evgen 6y ago
        In many locations the charging window is going to be a lot smaller than you think with longer routes and later deliveries pushing parts of the fleet into sub-10 hour charging windows. Now you have a need to shuffle power and charging across this local fleet in the middle of the night. Who exactly is going to be doing this? If you are automating it then you are making some very large bets on the charging infrastructure being 100% reliable. It is a problem that sounds simple at first but becomes more complex when you actually dig into the details. A fleet that is ICE-ready on day one but which can be retrofitted to EV means that you are able to deploy something that works now and pick locations to test EV and all of the details that are involved in the process by doing partial upgrades as various locations. Overall, sounds like current plan is the smart one.
pionar 6y ago
A) The USPS is not technically a government agency. B) They're pretty strapped for funding right now.
- BalinKing 6y ago
  I think the USPS actually is a government agency—from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Governance_and_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#G...: > The USPS is often mistaken for a state-owned enterprise or government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak) because it operates much like a business. It is, however, an "establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States", (39 U.S.C. § 201) as it is controlled by presidential appointees and the postmaster general.
alacombe 6y ago
One outlet is certainly fine, 100 outsets, not so much.

ratsforhorses 6y ago

Just putting this out there.."Adapting a lamp post into a charging point for electric vehicles can cost as little as £2,000" Seems like a good infrastructure project ...

Robotbeat 6y ago
2000 pounds? Try $200 maybe. And these vehicles cost on the order of $40k. Penny wise and pound foolish to spend thousands of dollars on a combustion engine and drivetrain just because you're afraid of a $200 exterior outlet.
- lesdeuxmagots 6y ago
  $200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run. Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region. And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero? They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world? Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.