10 ms·

Oregon expands electric vehicle charging statewide

111 points by clouddrover 4y ago

kbob 4y ago
I've had real "range anxiety" even in ICE cars in Oregon. It's not hard to be 100 miles from a gas station on some of the backwoods logging roads. Combine that with occasional road blockages (trees, rocks), and it can get dicey.
Fatnino 4y ago
Are you allowed to plug in your own car in Oregon? Or do you have to let the attendant do it?
webwielder2 4y ago
Are we going to end up overbuilding our EV infrastructure because people don’t intuitively grasp that most of their charging can be done at home?
- dymk 4y ago
  Better over than under. And if we overbuild, then just wait for the market to catch up to available capacity before building more.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  Sets of 4 chargers interspersed along major interstates and highways, which are exactly the settings (long hauls/roadtrips) where you really do need chargers away from home.
  - wumpus 4y ago
    4 chargers per location?! That's not a good way to have reliability.
    - InefficientRed 4y ago
      4 chargers per install. I'd assume multiple installs per location in some cases but not others.
      - wumpus 4y ago
        That's pretty confusing. Chargers don't naturally come in multiples of 4. Sometime hardware is multiples of 1 or 2.
        InefficientRed 4y ago
        but they will bid out the entire install and possibly even design. Gas pumps come in multiples of 1 or 2 but gas station design & construction happens in larger units of pumps & aren't bid in a "pick any multiple of 1 or 2 pumps" way. Does that make sense?
        wumpus 4y ago
        It makes sense that there's an economy of scale, and standardized designs are good, but the number 4 doesn't seem to be special in any way.
        InefficientRed 4y ago
        Right, I don't think it's special, other than perhaps as "this is the absolute minimum of chargers we'd ever want to put in a single place, and we're good with multiples of 4".
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Most isn’t all and a lot of places will be inaccessible if you don’t build out.
  - abirch 4y ago
    You're right. Especially in rural areas when you need the extra range.
- qgin 4y ago
  I'd love to see some modeling of charging demand based on travel patterns. Something that takes into account trips that take into consideration trips that would be served by overnight home charging vs need for freestanding charging out in the wild.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, we have to have places for all the apartment dwellers to charge, as well as for all the people who are driving on long trips. Even with the limited number of Teslas on the road right now, I ended up having to wait for over an hour for a spot to charge while driving from Northern California to Southern California on a holiday weekend. The station had 40 superchargers and still had over and hour wait to get to them. If every single driver on I-5 had to stop to charge, you will need a LOT of charging stations.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, finally every parking for apartment must have slow charger, isn't it? I think this is easier, cheaper, efficient, and useful way than having supercharger everywhere. Supercharger at highway must be encouraged for long trip.
- version_five 4y ago
  Overbuilding? I regularly stop at highway rest stops to get gas and have to wait on line at an 8 pump gas station they takes minutes per fill. If people were using electric cars with similarly distributed infrastructure that took 1/2 hour or more to charge, it would be impossible to go anywhere. I don't understand how it moves from niche to mass adoption, but under the current system, I guess it involves an insane amount of chargers Edit: my point above is that I'm talking about highway rest stops which are presumably exclusively frequented by people on long road trips. Maybe some started without a full tank, but the majority are gassing up to extend their range, and my point is that current infrastructure already gets bogged down with that despite the comparatively high speed of filling a gas tank.
  - peter422 4y ago
    Most EV owners will only need to charge at these types of chargers when on long road trips, which are likely to be infrequent (for most drivers). Overnight charging is all you need for any daily driving <300 miles. Everybody needs to go to the gas station whether they are road tripping or a local. It’s not the same for EVs.
    - vanilla_nut 4y ago
      Everyone who owns a charger, most likely in a garage, attached to a single-family home is != everyone. It’s a good point, that theoretically you’ll have fewer users at electric charging stations because individuals can self-charge. But when most homes don’t have an electric charger, and many will never have an electric charger, that might not be as big a difference as you think. My last apartment was a very nice condo and there were two electric chargers in the basement. Not sure if I could rely on that for every day commuting needs.
      - matthewdgreen 4y ago
        I mean this sounds bad but also eminently fixable. Compared to, say, replacing a condo roof the problem of installing a few new chargers is about the most straightforward capital improvement you could imagine.
- Grim-444 4y ago
  There's more use cases for vehicles than driving around a major city, I use my vehicle as more than a grocery fetcher. I routinely drive hundreds of miles, I'm routinely in remote areas, I really value freedom of movement. At the moment an EV is completely out of the question for me because the infrastructure isn't remotely close to what would support my use case. I guess if you want to convert more people to EVs you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using.
  - InefficientRed 4y ago
    > I'm routinely in remote areas Are those remote areas clogged with your next door neighbors? Or are they mostly empty? > you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using. Nah. You're an (extreme) edge case.
    - shukantpal 4y ago
      > Nah. You're an (extreme) edge case. False.
      - InefficientRed 4y ago
        The average gas-powered car has a 300 mile range. I drive to remote areas fairly often. I cannot get to these areas in my daily driver because I don't have enough range! It's an extreme outlier scenario.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Once we have the vehicles and infrastructure to support the other 95% of the population, maybe things will be good enough that you might find an EV or similar for your needs.
- glowingly 4y ago
  I would love to charge at home. My landlord doesn't quite agree. I would love to own my own home. In the meantime, I will accept other EV charging initiatives.
- stetrain 4y ago
  We are currently far from overbuilding. Home charging is great and means we don't need EV chargers everywhere we currently have gas stations. But highway chargers need to handle peak demand for highway travel, including holidays. And we do need lots of slow chargers for those who can't install their own home charger. City street parking, offices, parking garages, apartment buildings, etc.
- amluto 4y ago
  Even if we overbuild EV chargers, it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as overbuilding gas stations. Abandoned gas stations turn into nasty environmental messes — tanks leak, things spilled on the ground soak in, etc. Abandobed EV chargers are parking spaces with smallish, harmless machines that may even have some scrap value.
  - darknavi 4y ago
    > that may even have some scrap value. Charging cables are already being scalped for copper unfortunately.
ZacharyPitts 4y ago
I live in Oregon, and I went for long drive last weekend. I tried to charge twice at Electrify America charging stations... and both had lines of people waiting! I will appreciate this.
- pkulak 4y ago
  I did pledge years ago that my next car was going to be electric only, but now there are a bunch of 30+ mile plugin hybrids, and some of these stories about chargers make it sound like it hasn't gotten any better than when I had my Leaf about 8 years ago. Maybe I want to use gas for road trips and electric for everything else...
  - chrisjc 4y ago
    > Maybe I want to use gas for road trips and electric for everything else... This is effectively my setup. Got an SUV for all those bigger, longer hauls, and a little 60-90 mile range VW eGolf for "around the town" trips. This weekend we used the SUV and filled up for the first time in about 1-1.5 months and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw $75 after the pump stopped. Unfortunately, I just don't feel comfortable without having a fuel based option in the garage. Although the new F-150 lightning with range-extender (only a patent atm) and a price drop (yeah right) might convince me otherwise.
  - formvoltron 4y ago
    If you don't go on longer road trips very often then maybe just rent a car when you need one for a road trip.
  - ZacharyPitts 4y ago
    I used to feel that way, then I got an electric car with a 250 mile range last year. I really have not felt the desire to ever have a gasoline car since. Hybrids have so many more parts needed, that I feel like they will simply have more problems long term. In an EV, there's not much that will ever need to get replaced due to "wear" other than tires and brakes. As for charging, this last weekend was the first time I've ever had a problem finding a charger on 300 mile days. Most people I know don't even go on as many long drives as I do, as I enjoy driving for driving sake. I have zero plans on gasoline ever again.
jakear 4y ago
A good number of rural Oregon gas stations still follow the “park, walk in, give the cashier a $20 bill, go out and pump until the mechanical dial says “20”, then drive off” honor system. Interested to see if those ancient pumps will now be accompanied by some new fangled electric thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Ugh, I've experienced systems that require pre-pay, so you go in and give $20 and the pump runs at a snail's pace from $19.50 onward just to make sure you don't get $20.01
  - akomtu 4y ago
    That 0.01 matters to them. A few years ago most gas stations had replaced those electronic price displays to show 3 digits after comma: the subtle scam of 3.99 prices cost them a cent, which adds up, and now it costs them only 0.1 cent.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      A colleague told me of a gas station that found after many years, that they had sold more gas than they had bought. Eventually they realized that it was because their tanks were filled up at night, when gas was cooler/less voluminous than when it was pumped out in the heat of the day (it was in the central valley of CA, which gets very hot).
      - caf 4y ago
        I've long thought that fuel should be sold by mass rather than volume.
notduncansmith 4y ago
Are you allowed to charge your own electric vehicle in Oregon, or are attendants required as they are at gas stations?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pkulak 4y ago
  Oh you. In all seriousness, charging a car is far safer than filling it with gas; no attendants needed! * so long as you believe the premise of the law
  - azinman2 4y ago
    It’s a valid question — I was wondering the same.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    The premise of the law is a jobs program, is it not? No one could reasonably look at the other 48.5 states and conclude that self-service fueling is dangerous. They could reasonably say “we want to structure fueling to protect bullshit jobs.”
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      I think if you look at insurance costs, you could find the answer to whether or not self-service fueling is more dangerous or not.
      - version_five 4y ago
        Or you could answer whether insurance is rent seeking that's parasitic on society. I don't know the details so could be wrong, but if insurance is mandated by government and supplied by an oligopoly, it's fees don't necessarily reflect the actual risk involved. It's easy to see comparisons of different health/car insurance costs across jurisdictions to see that.
olivermarks 4y ago
I have a low level of confidence in the state of Oregon being capable of pulling this off. 'Oregon has yet to spend nearly $300 million in tax revenue set aside for substance abuse treatment and recovery services under a voter-approved law intended to transform the state’s response to addiction. So far not a single new treatment bed has been funded since Measure 110′s passage to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of heroin and other street drugs and set up a system to refer and treat those suffering from addiction. By law, a citizen-led council is in charge of overseeing the distribution of the money to drug treatment and treatment-related services. Originally, funding was supposed to start flowing to local organizations by the end of last year'. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/total-chaos-delays-dog-oregon-s-drug-decriminalization-law/ar-AAW9qYm https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/total-chaos-delays-dog-ore... Much as everyone hates big oil they have an excellent supply chain track record and fully functional gas stations. Having a state like Oregon with its complicated energy supply house of cards organize this is asking for trouble, before you even get to the brave new world of squeezing 100Kwh into BEVS. https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Utilities.aspx https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Uti...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
j2kun 4y ago
The more electrified infrastructure the better! Glad for Oregon.
Scoundreller 4y ago
I'm looking forward to the day that electric vehicle charging infrastructure starts charging time of day rates. Or market rates, ie: take what you get rates. Oregon has a lot of hydroelectricity, but a lot of nat gas too, and I'm assuming the hydro is the cheapest rate but only 100% at night time.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  For home EV charging, Georgia Power already does this. 11pm-7am is $0.01/kwh. At the other extreme, on weekdays in the summer between 2pm and 7pm, the cost is $0.20/kwh. All other times EV charging is $0.07/kwh. If your driving habits are such that you can top off your battery within the eight hour window each night, it's nearly free energy.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  This will have a lot of unintended dystopian consequences too. Rich people won't care or notice how much power they use when but poor people will be strongly impacted and have to spend disproportionately more of their time managing electricity usage. I'm ok paying a few extra cents so that the old lady down the road doesn't have to wonder whether or not she can afford to make tea now or she should wait until 1am.
  - wumpus 4y ago
    Lots of parts of the US already have time-of-day electricity rates.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Electric cars are for rich people anyway. Time-of-use billing is the least of the barriers to letting normal people use them viably in a way that lets them get the same benefit as all my neighbors who have Teslas and also a Suburban to take ontoad trips. Charging people based on supply and demand generally has a better outcome for everyone than trying to mandate economics.
    - Tagbert 4y ago
option 4y ago
Did the government also fund the construction of gas stations when cars were getting started?
- olivermarks 4y ago
  https://www.convenience.org/Topics/Fuels/The-History-of-Fuels-Retailing https://www.convenience.org/Topics/Fuels/The-History-of-Fuel... quite interesting, the way the petroleum supply chain grew. Monopolies broken up but no government grants etc to speak of
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 1270018080 4y ago
  If we're talking government funded car infrastructure... yeah I think a lot of that happened, and continues to, unfortunately.
- clouddrover 4y ago
  Governments the world over subsidize petroleum and other fossil fuel industries: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united-states-spend-ten-times-more-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-than-education/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united... https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/aug/07/fossil-fuel-subsidies-are-a-staggering-5-tn-per-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... Governments fund the roads to drive the cars on in the first place (roads, bridges, road signs, traffic lights, street cleaning, etc.). A bit of extra funding for building EV charging infrastructure is not disproportionate.
  - option 4y ago
    I'm asking about gas stations specifically. Of course, governments do and should continue building electric grid infrastructure
1270018080 4y ago
I know this forum is chock full of Tesla drivers, but cars are the ultimate blight on the planet. Electric cars aren't good for the environment, especially when supporting them with highways, charging stations, maintenance etc. I can't help but think what would happen if every public dollar spent on EV infrastructure was spent on reducing car dependence instead. Every dollar put towards cars is like technical debt but for infrastructure. It's immature. $100M in buses and dense housing would be so much better. You'd think a state like Oregon would be able to figure this one out too. I've always seen this as an opportunity to fix the problem that is cars.
- chrisjc 4y ago
  I get what you're saying and agree in theory, but there are a couple of issues that I take with a couple of those assertions... EVs aren't good for the environment, but they're better and will get better for the environment at scale. Recycling/chemistry will improve, petroleum bi-products dependencies reduced, so on. We would still need most of the same infrastructure for buses, trucks, delivery vehicles, although all that extra torque and battery weight is going to make this a lot more expensive to maintain. But we're talking about increasing that torque and weight moving buses, trucks, etc to electric anyways. I'm sure charging stations will be orders of magnitude better for the environment than gas stations (run-off, refueling trucks, idle-waiting, etc). We'll need this for all the buses, trucks, etc anyways. Maybe most importantly in my eyes will be time-sharing vehicles, although not restricted to EVs. There is a chance that in the future that we'll get by with fewer cars on the road by sharing them. Most cars sit around doing nothing for most of the year. Imagine how much concrete, plastic, metal, money... might be saved by just doubling a vehicle's utilization. Imagine 3X, 4X,... Unfortunately/fortunately, the car has become an integral part of our ecomony and way of life. I think we're decades, if not a century away from being able to replace them.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  People don't all live in one place, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.
- quadrangle 4y ago
  I agree almost entirely. I am open-minded to the idea that there's some amount of transition-to-electric that is positive, but it's entirely in terms of the counterfactual question. Are we switching gas to electric (which itself isn't entirely helpful in every respect but definitely net helpful) or keeping private cars when we'd otherwise be moving away from private cars? Surely it's a mix. But given that we have limited resources, we should be pushing almost entirely on the move away from car-dependency, so to the extent that electric car funding is taking away from that, it's a bad thing. Electric cars are not a solution to enough of our problems, and they are indeed enabling the continuation of most of everything terrible about car-dependent planning. FWIW, the best resources for these topics I urge everyone to check out are r/fuckcars and YouTube channel NotJustBikes and the non-profit Strong Towns (all of which are actually not just knee-jerk anti-car incidentally)
repiret 4y ago
Fun story: I live in very rural Oregon and a few years ago a friend bought an all electric for use around town. He had to bring it to town with a truck and trailer because it didn’t have near enough range to get here on its own. Works out great for him though. The additional charging coverage contemplated by the article would have let him drive it home.

111 points by clouddrover 4y ago

kbob 4y ago

I've had real "range anxiety" even in ICE cars in Oregon. It's not hard to be 100 miles from a gas station on some of the backwoods logging roads. Combine that with occasional road blockages (trees, rocks), and it can get dicey.

Fatnino 4y ago

Are you allowed to plug in your own car in Oregon? Or do you have to let the attendant do it?

webwielder2 4y ago

Are we going to end up overbuilding our EV infrastructure because people don’t intuitively grasp that most of their charging can be done at home?

dymk 4y ago
Better over than under. And if we overbuild, then just wait for the market to catch up to available capacity before building more.
InefficientRed 4y ago
Sets of 4 chargers interspersed along major interstates and highways, which are exactly the settings (long hauls/roadtrips) where you really do need chargers away from home.
- wumpus 4y ago
  4 chargers per location?! That's not a good way to have reliability.
  - InefficientRed 4y ago
    4 chargers per install. I'd assume multiple installs per location in some cases but not others.
    - wumpus 4y ago
      That's pretty confusing. Chargers don't naturally come in multiples of 4. Sometime hardware is multiples of 1 or 2.
      - InefficientRed 4y ago
        but they will bid out the entire install and possibly even design. Gas pumps come in multiples of 1 or 2 but gas station design & construction happens in larger units of pumps & aren't bid in a "pick any multiple of 1 or 2 pumps" way. Does that make sense?
        wumpus 4y ago
        It makes sense that there's an economy of scale, and standardized designs are good, but the number 4 doesn't seem to be special in any way.
        InefficientRed 4y ago
        Right, I don't think it's special, other than perhaps as "this is the absolute minimum of chargers we'd ever want to put in a single place, and we're good with multiples of 4".
colechristensen 4y ago
Most isn’t all and a lot of places will be inaccessible if you don’t build out.
- abirch 4y ago
  You're right. Especially in rural areas when you need the extra range.
qgin 4y ago
I'd love to see some modeling of charging demand based on travel patterns. Something that takes into account trips that take into consideration trips that would be served by overnight home charging vs need for freestanding charging out in the wild.
cortesoft 4y ago
If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, we have to have places for all the apartment dwellers to charge, as well as for all the people who are driving on long trips. Even with the limited number of Teslas on the road right now, I ended up having to wait for over an hour for a spot to charge while driving from Northern California to Southern California on a holiday weekend. The station had 40 superchargers and still had over and hour wait to get to them. If every single driver on I-5 had to stop to charge, you will need a LOT of charging stations.
- fomine3 4y ago
  If we expect electric cars to replace all gas powered cars, finally every parking for apartment must have slow charger, isn't it? I think this is easier, cheaper, efficient, and useful way than having supercharger everywhere. Supercharger at highway must be encouraged for long trip.
version_five 4y ago
Overbuilding? I regularly stop at highway rest stops to get gas and have to wait on line at an 8 pump gas station they takes minutes per fill. If people were using electric cars with similarly distributed infrastructure that took 1/2 hour or more to charge, it would be impossible to go anywhere. I don't understand how it moves from niche to mass adoption, but under the current system, I guess it involves an insane amount of chargers Edit: my point above is that I'm talking about highway rest stops which are presumably exclusively frequented by people on long road trips. Maybe some started without a full tank, but the majority are gassing up to extend their range, and my point is that current infrastructure already gets bogged down with that despite the comparatively high speed of filling a gas tank.
- peter422 4y ago
  Most EV owners will only need to charge at these types of chargers when on long road trips, which are likely to be infrequent (for most drivers). Overnight charging is all you need for any daily driving <300 miles. Everybody needs to go to the gas station whether they are road tripping or a local. It’s not the same for EVs.
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    Everyone who owns a charger, most likely in a garage, attached to a single-family home is != everyone. It’s a good point, that theoretically you’ll have fewer users at electric charging stations because individuals can self-charge. But when most homes don’t have an electric charger, and many will never have an electric charger, that might not be as big a difference as you think. My last apartment was a very nice condo and there were two electric chargers in the basement. Not sure if I could rely on that for every day commuting needs.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      I mean this sounds bad but also eminently fixable. Compared to, say, replacing a condo roof the problem of installing a few new chargers is about the most straightforward capital improvement you could imagine.
Grim-444 4y ago
There's more use cases for vehicles than driving around a major city, I use my vehicle as more than a grocery fetcher. I routinely drive hundreds of miles, I'm routinely in remote areas, I really value freedom of movement. At the moment an EV is completely out of the question for me because the infrastructure isn't remotely close to what would support my use case. I guess if you want to convert more people to EVs you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > I'm routinely in remote areas Are those remote areas clogged with your next door neighbors? Or are they mostly empty? > you need to actually build out a system I'd be interested in using. Nah. You're an (extreme) edge case.
  - shukantpal 4y ago
    > Nah. You're an (extreme) edge case. False.
    - InefficientRed 4y ago
      The average gas-powered car has a 300 mile range. I drive to remote areas fairly often. I cannot get to these areas in my daily driver because I don't have enough range! It's an extreme outlier scenario.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Once we have the vehicles and infrastructure to support the other 95% of the population, maybe things will be good enough that you might find an EV or similar for your needs.
glowingly 4y ago
I would love to charge at home. My landlord doesn't quite agree. I would love to own my own home. In the meantime, I will accept other EV charging initiatives.
stetrain 4y ago
We are currently far from overbuilding. Home charging is great and means we don't need EV chargers everywhere we currently have gas stations. But highway chargers need to handle peak demand for highway travel, including holidays. And we do need lots of slow chargers for those who can't install their own home charger. City street parking, offices, parking garages, apartment buildings, etc.
amluto 4y ago
Even if we overbuild EV chargers, it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as overbuilding gas stations. Abandoned gas stations turn into nasty environmental messes — tanks leak, things spilled on the ground soak in, etc. Abandobed EV chargers are parking spaces with smallish, harmless machines that may even have some scrap value.
- darknavi 4y ago
  > that may even have some scrap value. Charging cables are already being scalped for copper unfortunately.

ZacharyPitts 4y ago

I live in Oregon, and I went for long drive last weekend. I tried to charge twice at Electrify America charging stations... and both had lines of people waiting! I will appreciate this.

pkulak 4y ago
I did pledge years ago that my next car was going to be electric only, but now there are a bunch of 30+ mile plugin hybrids, and some of these stories about chargers make it sound like it hasn't gotten any better than when I had my Leaf about 8 years ago. Maybe I want to use gas for road trips and electric for everything else...
- chrisjc 4y ago
  > Maybe I want to use gas for road trips and electric for everything else... This is effectively my setup. Got an SUV for all those bigger, longer hauls, and a little 60-90 mile range VW eGolf for "around the town" trips. This weekend we used the SUV and filled up for the first time in about 1-1.5 months and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw $75 after the pump stopped. Unfortunately, I just don't feel comfortable without having a fuel based option in the garage. Although the new F-150 lightning with range-extender (only a patent atm) and a price drop (yeah right) might convince me otherwise.
- formvoltron 4y ago
  If you don't go on longer road trips very often then maybe just rent a car when you need one for a road trip.
- ZacharyPitts 4y ago
  I used to feel that way, then I got an electric car with a 250 mile range last year. I really have not felt the desire to ever have a gasoline car since. Hybrids have so many more parts needed, that I feel like they will simply have more problems long term. In an EV, there's not much that will ever need to get replaced due to "wear" other than tires and brakes. As for charging, this last weekend was the first time I've ever had a problem finding a charger on 300 mile days. Most people I know don't even go on as many long drives as I do, as I enjoy driving for driving sake. I have zero plans on gasoline ever again.

jakear 4y ago

A good number of rural Oregon gas stations still follow the “park, walk in, give the cashier a $20 bill, go out and pump until the mechanical dial says “20”, then drive off” honor system. Interested to see if those ancient pumps will now be accompanied by some new fangled electric thing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Scoundreller 4y ago
Ugh, I've experienced systems that require pre-pay, so you go in and give $20 and the pump runs at a snail's pace from $19.50 onward just to make sure you don't get $20.01
- akomtu 4y ago
  That 0.01 matters to them. A few years ago most gas stations had replaced those electronic price displays to show 3 digits after comma: the subtle scam of 3.99 prices cost them a cent, which adds up, and now it costs them only 0.1 cent.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    A colleague told me of a gas station that found after many years, that they had sold more gas than they had bought. Eventually they realized that it was because their tanks were filled up at night, when gas was cooler/less voluminous than when it was pumped out in the heat of the day (it was in the central valley of CA, which gets very hot).
    - caf 4y ago
      I've long thought that fuel should be sold by mass rather than volume.

notduncansmith 4y ago

Are you allowed to charge your own electric vehicle in Oregon, or are attendants required as they are at gas stations?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pkulak 4y ago
Oh you. In all seriousness, charging a car is far safer than filling it with gas; no attendants needed! * so long as you believe the premise of the law
- azinman2 4y ago
  It’s a valid question — I was wondering the same.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  The premise of the law is a jobs program, is it not? No one could reasonably look at the other 48.5 states and conclude that self-service fueling is dangerous. They could reasonably say “we want to structure fueling to protect bullshit jobs.”
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I think if you look at insurance costs, you could find the answer to whether or not self-service fueling is more dangerous or not.
    - version_five 4y ago
      Or you could answer whether insurance is rent seeking that's parasitic on society. I don't know the details so could be wrong, but if insurance is mandated by government and supplied by an oligopoly, it's fees don't necessarily reflect the actual risk involved. It's easy to see comparisons of different health/car insurance costs across jurisdictions to see that.

olivermarks 4y ago

I have a low level of confidence in the state of Oregon being capable of pulling this off. 'Oregon has yet to spend nearly $300 million in tax revenue set aside for substance abuse treatment and recovery services under a voter-approved law intended to transform the state’s response to addiction. So far not a single new treatment bed has been funded since Measure 110′s passage to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of heroin and other street drugs and set up a system to refer and treat those suffering from addiction. By law, a citizen-led council is in charge of overseeing the distribution of the money to drug treatment and treatment-related services. Originally, funding was supposed to start flowing to local organizations by the end of last year'. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/total-chaos-delays-dog-oregon-s-drug-decriminalization-law/ar-AAW9qYm https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/total-chaos-delays-dog-ore... Much as everyone hates big oil they have an excellent supply chain track record and fully functional gas stations. Having a state like Oregon with its complicated energy supply house of cards organize this is asking for trouble, before you even get to the brave new world of squeezing 100Kwh into BEVS. https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Utilities.aspx https://www.oregon.gov/energy/energy-oregon/Pages/Oregon-Uti...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

j2kun 4y ago

The more electrified infrastructure the better! Glad for Oregon.

Scoundreller 4y ago

I'm looking forward to the day that electric vehicle charging infrastructure starts charging time of day rates. Or market rates, ie: take what you get rates. Oregon has a lot of hydroelectricity, but a lot of nat gas too, and I'm assuming the hydro is the cheapest rate but only 100% at night time.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
For home EV charging, Georgia Power already does this. 11pm-7am is $0.01/kwh. At the other extreme, on weekdays in the summer between 2pm and 7pm, the cost is $0.20/kwh. All other times EV charging is $0.07/kwh. If your driving habits are such that you can top off your battery within the eight hour window each night, it's nearly free energy.
idiotsecant 4y ago
This will have a lot of unintended dystopian consequences too. Rich people won't care or notice how much power they use when but poor people will be strongly impacted and have to spend disproportionately more of their time managing electricity usage. I'm ok paying a few extra cents so that the old lady down the road doesn't have to wonder whether or not she can afford to make tea now or she should wait until 1am.
- wumpus 4y ago
  Lots of parts of the US already have time-of-day electricity rates.
- version_five 4y ago
  Electric cars are for rich people anyway. Time-of-use billing is the least of the barriers to letting normal people use them viably in a way that lets them get the same benefit as all my neighbors who have Teslas and also a Suburban to take ontoad trips. Charging people based on supply and demand generally has a better outcome for everyone than trying to mandate economics.
  - Tagbert 4y ago

option 4y ago

Did the government also fund the construction of gas stations when cars were getting started?

olivermarks 4y ago
https://www.convenience.org/Topics/Fuels/The-History-of-Fuels-Retailing https://www.convenience.org/Topics/Fuels/The-History-of-Fuel... quite interesting, the way the petroleum supply chain grew. Monopolies broken up but no government grants etc to speak of
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
1270018080 4y ago
If we're talking government funded car infrastructure... yeah I think a lot of that happened, and continues to, unfortunately.
clouddrover 4y ago
Governments the world over subsidize petroleum and other fossil fuel industries: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united-states-spend-ten-times-more-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-than-education/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united... https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/aug/07/fossil-fuel-subsidies-are-a-staggering-5-tn-per-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... Governments fund the roads to drive the cars on in the first place (roads, bridges, road signs, traffic lights, street cleaning, etc.). A bit of extra funding for building EV charging infrastructure is not disproportionate.
- option 4y ago
  I'm asking about gas stations specifically. Of course, governments do and should continue building electric grid infrastructure

1270018080 4y ago

I know this forum is chock full of Tesla drivers, but cars are the ultimate blight on the planet. Electric cars aren't good for the environment, especially when supporting them with highways, charging stations, maintenance etc. I can't help but think what would happen if every public dollar spent on EV infrastructure was spent on reducing car dependence instead. Every dollar put towards cars is like technical debt but for infrastructure. It's immature. $100M in buses and dense housing would be so much better. You'd think a state like Oregon would be able to figure this one out too. I've always seen this as an opportunity to fix the problem that is cars.

chrisjc 4y ago
I get what you're saying and agree in theory, but there are a couple of issues that I take with a couple of those assertions... EVs aren't good for the environment, but they're better and will get better for the environment at scale. Recycling/chemistry will improve, petroleum bi-products dependencies reduced, so on. We would still need most of the same infrastructure for buses, trucks, delivery vehicles, although all that extra torque and battery weight is going to make this a lot more expensive to maintain. But we're talking about increasing that torque and weight moving buses, trucks, etc to electric anyways. I'm sure charging stations will be orders of magnitude better for the environment than gas stations (run-off, refueling trucks, idle-waiting, etc). We'll need this for all the buses, trucks, etc anyways. Maybe most importantly in my eyes will be time-sharing vehicles, although not restricted to EVs. There is a chance that in the future that we'll get by with fewer cars on the road by sharing them. Most cars sit around doing nothing for most of the year. Imagine how much concrete, plastic, metal, money... might be saved by just doubling a vehicle's utilization. Imagine 3X, 4X,... Unfortunately/fortunately, the car has become an integral part of our ecomony and way of life. I think we're decades, if not a century away from being able to replace them.
karaterobot 4y ago
People don't all live in one place, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.
quadrangle 4y ago
I agree almost entirely. I am open-minded to the idea that there's some amount of transition-to-electric that is positive, but it's entirely in terms of the counterfactual question. Are we switching gas to electric (which itself isn't entirely helpful in every respect but definitely net helpful) or keeping private cars when we'd otherwise be moving away from private cars? Surely it's a mix. But given that we have limited resources, we should be pushing almost entirely on the move away from car-dependency, so to the extent that electric car funding is taking away from that, it's a bad thing. Electric cars are not a solution to enough of our problems, and they are indeed enabling the continuation of most of everything terrible about car-dependent planning. FWIW, the best resources for these topics I urge everyone to check out are r/fuckcars and YouTube channel NotJustBikes and the non-profit Strong Towns (all of which are actually not just knee-jerk anti-car incidentally)

repiret 4y ago

Fun story: I live in very rural Oregon and a few years ago a friend bought an all electric for use around town. He had to bring it to town with a truck and trailer because it didn’t have near enough range to get here on its own. Works out great for him though. The additional charging coverage contemplated by the article would have let him drive it home.