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We really aren't that far from a plausible charging setup that can do 300 miles in 10 minutes. And that would be perfectly adequate. The infrastructure to sup

We really aren't that far from a plausible charging setup that can do 300 miles in 10 minutes. And that would be perfectly adequate. The infrastructure to support it would certainly be less difficult than trying to get hydrogen available everywhere.

iainmerrick 5y ago
That’s not adequate at all! The lines at gas stations would be massive. Charging via electric at home or in a parking spot seems a lot more convenient, even if it takes a few hours.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas. Especially people with trucks, which is a large part of the US. Over half the population probably has the infrastructure to home charge right now, so this does not need to replace gas station pumps 1 for 1. I was not suggesting that all of us charging at home need to start using public chargers.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > 10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas. I don't want to "uhm, acktually", but it's less than 5 minutes: https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-the-average-person-spend-filling-up-at-gas-station-during-the-ownership-or-lease-of-their-particular-car https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-the-average-person-... - and that's including time spent faffing around with the awful pay-at-pump machines' UX.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I admit my experience is non-typical, as the only gasoline vehicle I own is a truck with a big tank, but 10 minutes is well within normal. For cars with 15 gallon tanks, 5 minutes is probably reasonable. But in any case, 10 minutes is fine no matter what. If you are willing to spend 4x as much for fuel in order to save less than 10 minutes per week when you stop for fuel, then the problem isn't the charge time.
      - guerby 5y ago
        Filling your tank with fossil fuel is 5 minutes wall clock but also 5 minutes where you can't do anything else. If you need to pee or eat that's a few more minutes. Filling your battery might be longer 10-15 minutes, but (at least for Tesla superchargers) about 20 seconds of your time, for the remaining 10-15 minutes you're free to do whatever you want.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Worth noting that "filling a gas tank" is something that makes sense to do every time you fill up at a gas station since that's your obly option to get energy. It doesn't make sense to do the equivalent of charging an EV to 100% basically ever, so its a weird thing to compare against. Even very long distance trips will aim to bounce between 20-80% to minimize total charging time. The big difference being that you don't have a small gas pump at home, in your office or at the supermarket that will fill your tank cheaply for you, and so you only need enough fuel to ensure you get to the next time that is available to you.
- elihu 5y ago
  I think going forward, EV charging locations aren't going to be like gas stations: they'll be on bigger lots, maybe on the edge of town or between towns where land is cheaper. Or they'll co-locate in shopping center parking lots, which you see now. Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    > Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time. On the contrary - have you ever noticed how gas-stations don't have an _upstairs_? Without the massive fire-and-explosion risk from pumping gasoline, a typical urban filling-station could be converted to a multi-storey charging plaza at a a reasonable expense, imo. I remember there was a brief fad in the 1990s to quickly build additional storeys of parking spaces on bare concrete/asphalt lots using metal superstructure: it worked and it was relatively cheap, but the results weren't long-lasting (my university tore-down their metal-based parking lot after it had been up for about 10-15 years IIRC) - I assume something similar could be done in this case.
shiftpgdn 5y ago
I feel like what a lot of people miss is that with an EV if you have a garage or dedicated parking spot you’re leaving home with a “full tank” every single day. You only need to use a public charger if you’re on a road trip.
- bbv-if 5y ago
  That is the big 'if' for the majority of population in European cities. Pretty convenient for suburbs though.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Yep, having to charge them at public charging stations is pretty shitty, takes a long time, and a lot of time they're not available to use. I used to work in a large business building a few years ago, and they had 4 charging stations right next to the main entrance, and having an electric car then was great... the "plebs" would have to park behind the building or in the garage under, and you'd have priority parking infront. Then, the number of electic cars rose to above 4 there, and first 4 that came, parked there, connected the chargers and went to work. If you came 5th, there was nothing you could do, except maybe if you knew one of those 4, politely ask them to move their car during lunch, so you can charge yours too.. but most of the people left their car there until end of work at 3-5h in the afternoon.
    - shiftpgdn 5y ago
      Ive charged plenty of times on road trips on both the Tesla and Electrify America networks. Charge time is usually under 20-30 at places and times I’d already be stopping to use the bathroom and stretch my legs. In regards to the chargers in your work garage: most modern charge systems let you set idle fees. If you install anything worthwhile you could easily configure it so people have to move after their car has been sitting fully charged for an hour.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Plenty of apartment buildings don't have a dedicated powerpoint per parking spot. This can be fixed but in the meantime it is a significant cost for the building. And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints will be trumped by later installs of dedicated, secured charging stations. I am not jumping to an EV any time soon.
gambiting 5y ago
We're not though. For the ease of calculation, let's take a 100kWh battery. To fill it up in 10 minutes, you'd need to charge it at 600kW. There isn't even an electrical standard which would allow this, not to mention having to somehow supply over half a megawatt(!!!!!) Into a single charging point, and somehow cool it and the battery. The best of the best charging systems draw "only" 250kW and even that is either impossibly rare in CCS world, and in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW. I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase. Having said all of the above - the 250kW charging as-is is already stupidly fast as "good enough". And charging at home will always be king even at slower speeds.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- notJim 5y ago
  > The best of the best charging systems draw "only" 250kW Actually Electrify America can charge at 350 kW. They have to actively cool the cables to keep them from overheating. > in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW. I think with v3 Superchargers, this is no longer true. There is a megawatt allocated per 4 chargers. I'm not sure how much this applies to the really big stations, because it seems they could be using multiple megawatts of power.
- gpm 5y ago
  > I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase. Chargers substantailly bigger than that are definitely in or past the planning phase, for example: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-port-close-up-look/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-po...
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  What does all that fast charging do to batteries though? I'm surprisingly ignorant on this. ICE engine is fast-recharge as baseline; feels like batteries will forever have slow charge as baseline, fast charge as emergency occasional compromise that you know is killing your durability. This is where hydrogen seemed an exciting alternative. Am I wrong?
coderenegade 5y ago
The issue is that for a BEV, charging speed is directly coupled to energy demand from the grid. Using nice numbers, if you want to charge a BEV with a 100kWh battery in 6 minutes, you'd need a 1MW charger, which is a non-trivial amount of power that needs to be dispatched. Multiply this by the number of cars charging at any given time, and you have a recipe for huge demand volatility, which is a problem if our grid is going to be powered by non-dispatchable sources like wind and solar. The alternative is having chargers be so ubiquitous that everywhere you park you have some form of trickle charging, so that people living in apartments don't have to sit at a fast charger once a week. Hydrogen gets around this, because eventually it's going to be a clean source of consistent demand that takes advantage of the fact that renewables require overproduction. A country like Denmark meets 40% of its electricity demand from wind, but produces up to 140% during periods of oversupply. If Denmark wanted to produce 80% of its electricity demand with wind, and do so with 90% confidence, it will generate more than 100% of its needs on average. Even if you wanted to look at the EU instead of Denmark, the same will still apply, because in order for two locations A and B to able to cover for each other when one has excess and the other doesn't, it must also be true that there will be times where no-one has a shortage. Since we want to guarantee our ability to provide X units of power at any given time, we need the grid as a whole to almost never have a shortage in aggregate, which means we will generally overproduce. To give you an idea of the scale of this; California already curtails around 2.5TWh a year, which is enough to charge anywhere between 25 and 40 million BEVs. And that's one state, today, at relatively low-moderate renewable penetrations. It doesn't really matter if the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is lower than Li-ion, because we aren't going to have a shortage of electricity by any means. We're already throwing the stuff away.

iainmerrick 5y ago

That’s not adequate at all! The lines at gas stations would be massive. Charging via electric at home or in a parking spot seems a lot more convenient, even if it takes a few hours.

rootusrootus 5y ago
10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas. Especially people with trucks, which is a large part of the US. Over half the population probably has the infrastructure to home charge right now, so this does not need to replace gas station pumps 1 for 1. I was not suggesting that all of us charging at home need to start using public chargers.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > 10 minutes isn't that far off what people routinely spend today to fill a tank of gas. I don't want to "uhm, acktually", but it's less than 5 minutes: https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-the-average-person-spend-filling-up-at-gas-station-during-the-ownership-or-lease-of-their-particular-car https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-the-average-person-... - and that's including time spent faffing around with the awful pay-at-pump machines' UX.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I admit my experience is non-typical, as the only gasoline vehicle I own is a truck with a big tank, but 10 minutes is well within normal. For cars with 15 gallon tanks, 5 minutes is probably reasonable. But in any case, 10 minutes is fine no matter what. If you are willing to spend 4x as much for fuel in order to save less than 10 minutes per week when you stop for fuel, then the problem isn't the charge time.
    - guerby 5y ago
      Filling your tank with fossil fuel is 5 minutes wall clock but also 5 minutes where you can't do anything else. If you need to pee or eat that's a few more minutes. Filling your battery might be longer 10-15 minutes, but (at least for Tesla superchargers) about 20 seconds of your time, for the remaining 10-15 minutes you're free to do whatever you want.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Worth noting that "filling a gas tank" is something that makes sense to do every time you fill up at a gas station since that's your obly option to get energy. It doesn't make sense to do the equivalent of charging an EV to 100% basically ever, so its a weird thing to compare against. Even very long distance trips will aim to bounce between 20-80% to minimize total charging time. The big difference being that you don't have a small gas pump at home, in your office or at the supermarket that will fill your tank cheaply for you, and so you only need enough fuel to ensure you get to the next time that is available to you.
elihu 5y ago
I think going forward, EV charging locations aren't going to be like gas stations: they'll be on bigger lots, maybe on the edge of town or between towns where land is cheaper. Or they'll co-locate in shopping center parking lots, which you see now. Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Converting an existing gas station to EV charging just wouldn't work in most cases because they don't have the space to charge, say, a hundred cars at the same time. On the contrary - have you ever noticed how gas-stations don't have an _upstairs_? Without the massive fire-and-explosion risk from pumping gasoline, a typical urban filling-station could be converted to a multi-storey charging plaza at a a reasonable expense, imo. I remember there was a brief fad in the 1990s to quickly build additional storeys of parking spaces on bare concrete/asphalt lots using metal superstructure: it worked and it was relatively cheap, but the results weren't long-lasting (my university tore-down their metal-based parking lot after it had been up for about 10-15 years IIRC) - I assume something similar could be done in this case.

shiftpgdn 5y ago

I feel like what a lot of people miss is that with an EV if you have a garage or dedicated parking spot you’re leaving home with a “full tank” every single day. You only need to use a public charger if you’re on a road trip.

bbv-if 5y ago
That is the big 'if' for the majority of population in European cities. Pretty convenient for suburbs though.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yep, having to charge them at public charging stations is pretty shitty, takes a long time, and a lot of time they're not available to use. I used to work in a large business building a few years ago, and they had 4 charging stations right next to the main entrance, and having an electric car then was great... the "plebs" would have to park behind the building or in the garage under, and you'd have priority parking infront. Then, the number of electic cars rose to above 4 there, and first 4 that came, parked there, connected the chargers and went to work. If you came 5th, there was nothing you could do, except maybe if you knew one of those 4, politely ask them to move their car during lunch, so you can charge yours too.. but most of the people left their car there until end of work at 3-5h in the afternoon.
  - shiftpgdn 5y ago
    Ive charged plenty of times on road trips on both the Tesla and Electrify America networks. Charge time is usually under 20-30 at places and times I’d already be stopping to use the bathroom and stretch my legs. In regards to the chargers in your work garage: most modern charge systems let you set idle fees. If you install anything worthwhile you could easily configure it so people have to move after their car has been sitting fully charged for an hour.
_carbyau_ 5y ago
Plenty of apartment buildings don't have a dedicated powerpoint per parking spot. This can be fixed but in the meantime it is a significant cost for the building. And you bet that early adopters putting in regular powerpoints will be trumped by later installs of dedicated, secured charging stations. I am not jumping to an EV any time soon.

gambiting 5y ago

We're not though. For the ease of calculation, let's take a 100kWh battery. To fill it up in 10 minutes, you'd need to charge it at 600kW. There isn't even an electrical standard which would allow this, not to mention having to somehow supply over half a megawatt(!!!!!) Into a single charging point, and somehow cool it and the battery. The best of the best charging systems draw "only" 250kW and even that is either impossibly rare in CCS world, and in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW. I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase. Having said all of the above - the 250kW charging as-is is already stupidly fast as "good enough". And charging at home will always be king even at slower speeds.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
notJim 5y ago
> The best of the best charging systems draw "only" 250kW Actually Electrify America can charge at 350 kW. They have to actively cool the cables to keep them from overheating. > in Tesla world it's shared between chargers so if you have few Teslas charging at once no one is getting 250kW. I think with v3 Superchargers, this is no longer true. There is a megawatt allocated per 4 chargers. I'm not sure how much this applies to the really big stations, because it seems they could be using multiple megawatts of power.
gpm 5y ago
> I admit 600 doesn't sound like a lot more than 250 but we're nowhere near those charging speeds, not even in a planning phase. Chargers substantailly bigger than that are definitely in or past the planning phase, for example: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-port-close-up-look/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi-megacharger-charging-po...
NikolaNovak 5y ago
What does all that fast charging do to batteries though? I'm surprisingly ignorant on this. ICE engine is fast-recharge as baseline; feels like batteries will forever have slow charge as baseline, fast charge as emergency occasional compromise that you know is killing your durability. This is where hydrogen seemed an exciting alternative. Am I wrong?

coderenegade 5y ago

The issue is that for a BEV, charging speed is directly coupled to energy demand from the grid. Using nice numbers, if you want to charge a BEV with a 100kWh battery in 6 minutes, you'd need a 1MW charger, which is a non-trivial amount of power that needs to be dispatched. Multiply this by the number of cars charging at any given time, and you have a recipe for huge demand volatility, which is a problem if our grid is going to be powered by non-dispatchable sources like wind and solar. The alternative is having chargers be so ubiquitous that everywhere you park you have some form of trickle charging, so that people living in apartments don't have to sit at a fast charger once a week. Hydrogen gets around this, because eventually it's going to be a clean source of consistent demand that takes advantage of the fact that renewables require overproduction. A country like Denmark meets 40% of its electricity demand from wind, but produces up to 140% during periods of oversupply. If Denmark wanted to produce 80% of its electricity demand with wind, and do so with 90% confidence, it will generate more than 100% of its needs on average. Even if you wanted to look at the EU instead of Denmark, the same will still apply, because in order for two locations A and B to able to cover for each other when one has excess and the other doesn't, it must also be true that there will be times where no-one has a shortage. Since we want to guarantee our ability to provide X units of power at any given time, we need the grid as a whole to almost never have a shortage in aggregate, which means we will generally overproduce. To give you an idea of the scale of this; California already curtails around 2.5TWh a year, which is enough to charge anywhere between 25 and 40 million BEVs. And that's one state, today, at relatively low-moderate renewable penetrations. It doesn't really matter if the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is lower than Li-ion, because we aren't going to have a shortage of electricity by any means. We're already throwing the stuff away.