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The grid will be just fine. An advanced economy can install bigger wires and burn more natural gas. Battery technology is already diversifying around mineral mi

The grid will be just fine. An advanced economy can install bigger wires and burn more natural gas. Battery technology is already diversifying around mineral mining constraints. The problem I see is with lifestyles. There's a ceiling on how many people work and travel in a predictable manner to a predictable place with a garage that they own and can install a charger in. Are landlords going to install enough chargers to fill entire apartment complex parking lots? Are they going to maintain and repair them? Will they charge for charging? Do we live in a society where people won't routinely vandalize and neglect the chargers? I fear a future where there will be a privileged set of suburbanites who get to drive their subsidized cars from their subsidized jobs to their subsidized homes and charge it with subsidized electricity, but a very large subset of people will be stuck driving combustion cars that are heavily carbon taxed and penalized. And it won't be because they don't care about climate change, but because their lives are different.

outworlder 4y ago
> I fear a future where there will be a privileged set of suburbanites who get to drive their subsidized cars from their subsidized jobs to their subsidized homes and charge it with subsidized electricity, but a very large subset of people will be stuck driving combustion cars that are heavily carbon taxed and penalized That is _already_ the case. I could charge at home today, but why bother, next time I'm at the office I can fully charge at 0 cost to me (and a low cost to the employer, who gets electricity at much cheaper rates). I was supposed to get some subsidies too (but for bureaucracy reasons, could not). People around me are getting hit by high gas prices, they have their periodic oil changes, they need to fork cash for smog checks. That said, if humanity had gone the opposite route and we were trying to transition from EV to ICE, that task would be deemed impossible - building the network of gas stations, all the refinery and fuel transportation logistics is an incredible task. While electricity is everywhere. As for "chargers" (EVSE, not chargers), they are not expensive at all. It's peanuts for new construction. The main issue is existing buildings with old wiring(or non-existent wiring on garages). As for revenue, they could easily charge for them if they wanted to, today. Add some, say, Chargepoint stations, set the price and off you go.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > Add some, say, Chargepoint stations, set the price and off you go. Ugh. Please don't. You pay more for the charger and the ongoing maintenance fees than you'd pay for electricity in an awful lot of cases with a "free, dumb charger." Chargepoint makes really nice stuff. Their hardware side is great, and the units are very well tested for long term operation. It's just their entire business model that I hate. Their model is, "We should be able to intermediate in, and get a cut of, all EV charging, everywhere except home. And ideally home if it's an apartment complex." And this is simply not needed in the bulk of cases. Apartments should either just wire a 240V EVSE circuit to apartments for charging ("Parking spot 101 goes to apartment 101, parking spot 102 goes to apartment 102, etc"), or just have some "EV charging" spots that are $20/mo or $40/mo or something. It's cheaper to do this than to try and monitor every kWh that goes into the EVs, and if the net is close enough, call it good. I say this having tried the cost recovery thing on a charger, and discovering that, with infrequent use, the $5/mo management fees to then recover costs were more expensive than literally just paying for the power. If a 240V/16A EVSE runs flat out for 30 days, at our local $0.10/kWh costs, that's $275/mo in power... but nobody will actually do that.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Heh, yeah, 240V/16A is 370 miles a day, 11,262 a month, or 135,050 a year. While that's quite a bit, it's a bit sobering to see that $0.025 per mile.
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      I'm confused... Why is $0.025/mi sobering? That's about right for an EV. Gas is far higher, by an order of magnitude or so.
      - sliken 4y ago
        I just meant sobering in how cheap it is. One thing that's a bit worse for the environment is I enjoy driving an EV more and tend to drive it more than I drove an ICE. Quiet, fast ... sporty even, no oil changes, no gas station trips, not even a transmission. Sure I'm not burning oil, or even (mostly) brake pads, but I'm still turning magic pixies into motion and chewing through tires.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
IMO, the best solution for apartment complexes is to run bog standard 120V/15A to every stall. That's a lot easier to manage than trying to share a limited number of 240V L2 chargers. And 120V is enough for everybody who averages less than 100 miles per day. Everybody does more than 100 miles on some days, but only when you have multiple consecutive multi-hundred mile days would you need more than 120V overnight. For the rare occasions that happens, you can use a commercial fast charger. 120V at every stall would be much nicer than a limited number of 240V L2 chargers. You just plug in when you park and forget about it. With a shared charger you have to wait until the charger is free, and you have to move off the charger after you're charged to be polite.
- sliken 4y ago
  Don't forget you often can't charge when away from home. So it's more like 50 miles a day of charging not 100. Most cars charge around 3-5 miles per hour on 120v, and if you have an 8 hour job, 30 minutes for lunch, and 30 minute commute (approximately average I believe) you are gone for 9.5 hours a day. That's assuming no dropping off kids, picking up kids, grocery shopping, etc.
falcolas 4y ago
A fast charger can consume 300 watts. An 80% fast charge takes around 9 minutes for a Tesla. Let’s say each charger sees 20% utilization, and a location has 6 chargers, so around 300 kWh a month. FWIW, that’s about double the amount of energy a small store already consumes every month. Free won’t ever be easy.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Stores don't install 300kW L3 chargers, they install 10kW L2 chargers. They don't want customers charging in 10 minutes, they want customers plugged in for an hour or three. Tesla calls them "Destination Chargers" in contrast the superchargers that you use in the middle of your trip.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    But customers don’t want that. And as technology advances and more cars can take advantage of fast chargers, people will seek them out. 9 minutes of a customers time is better than none. Most gas stations that live on transient customers get less than 9 minutes, and they’re quite profitable.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Gas stations are a completely different use case. By "stores" I assume the OP meant retail stores like malls, restaurants and hotels that add free/cheap charging to encourage customer traffic rather than as a primary business. I've seen lots of those with L2 charging, but none with L3 charging.
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      As a customer, I want that. If I drive from here to the closest proper movie theater, I can plug in my car at a 22kW outlet. It gets around 7.5kW/h from it (single phase charger in the car, so it can only use 1/3). A 2 hour movie and some faffing about on both ends is around 2.5 hours. That's 15-20kW of power charged to my car, which can go 100km with 15kWh. The theater is about 40km away, so I actually come back home with a fuller battery than I left with. This is how the future should look like. 11/22kW destination chargers should be ubiquitous in all places you spend an hour or more usually (bigger grocery stores, hardware stores, IKEA, malls etc).
lamontcg 4y ago
Lamp-post chargers are one possible solution in urban centers: https://www.driving.co.uk/news/lamp-post-powered-electric-car-charging-points-arrive-london/ https://www.driving.co.uk/news/lamp-post-powered-electric-ca... The advantage that electrons have over hydrocarbons is that the delivery network for end use is very highly decentralized. We have to stick hydrocarbons into a gas station with a big tank underground because we can't just have gasoline being piped into everyone's homes because that's just way too dangerous. With electrons you can stick charging stations all over the place.
theshrike79 4y ago
> Are landlords going to install enough chargers to fill entire apartment complex parking lots? Yes, because they can bill for that. > Are they going to maintain and repair them? It's just an outlet. Do landlords fix outlets inside their houses? If yes, they can also maintain and repair the charging sockets. > Will they charge for charging? Depends on the laws. Over here it's illegal to resell power at too big a profit, you need to be an actual licensed power company to do that. A monthly cost with a slight premium per kWh is OK though. > Do we live in a society where people won't routinely vandalize and neglect the chargers? Depends. I've had an outlet at every parking spot I've had in the last 25 years. They have been vandalised zero times. Well, OK. The grandma on the opposite spot once backed up to the pole and the maintenance guy had to spend 20 minutes poking it back upright.
kkfx 4y ago
Two notes: if you try to summarize G8/"World Government" [1]/McKinsey [2] public reports it's not there but essentially implied that "smart cities" residents will be just slaves while some "wealthy" people profit from their work living outside. McKinsey goes further [3] probably imaging without telling a world with far less ground infrastructures, mostly dedicated only for commercial transports, with people living essentially where they born or get relocated Chine's style, while only those who can afford flying vehicles can travel. From the distopic scenario to a practical one the second note: dense urban areas are not sustainable just because they can't evolve. Let's say you construct a new skyscraper "A class" in energy saving terms (hard to achieve for a skyscraper but anyway), it's the best of the tech today. In 50 years is probably a hard to maintain dinosaur. You can't really rebuild it in practical terms since there are too many people inside, too many conflicting interests. On contrary with modern logistic you can made "rivieras alike suburbs" where people live and work from home or at a short distance range in small buildings, single family homes. Something CAN evolve practically for instance when the owner change, where there is physical space to evolve etc. A bit of density because we are social animals, but not too much. Long story short: in cities the only SHORT term evolution is nearly-only public transport systems with the city as a single complex building (not that different than the classic "the datacenter as a computer" in scale design principles), no matter if the future will be distopic or not. In the long terms cities can only be wiped and rebuilt as we have always done in history, with the important difference in space and time scale and tech terms (cities with buildings made of rocks and wood source much of the needed raw material from ruins of the old city itself, concrete and steel are another story), something we can say confidently it's not sustainable. Suburbs USA style never really work. Far spread people never lift themselves to a civilization so we need something in between. IMO that's a riviera where people live in single family homes with a bit of land around but not in residential-only areas, instead in mixed residential and commercials areas where they can live and work at a short range, few districts for things can't be done differently (like mining, various manufacturing industries, but also high schools/campus, military stuff etc) that being single-purpose can be rebuilt as tech change. Seen the actual state of things... Well... Probably we can't evolve like that due partially to the reactionary ideas of most and mere overpopulation. So it's easy to predict even outside of a distopic scenario that some people, most of humans actually, will suffer much the change while few will benefit from the start. [1] https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org [2] you can start with https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-we-help-clients/capital-excellence/cities https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-w... [3] https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-...

outworlder 4y ago

> I fear a future where there will be a privileged set of suburbanites who get to drive their subsidized cars from their subsidized jobs to their subsidized homes and charge it with subsidized electricity, but a very large subset of people will be stuck driving combustion cars that are heavily carbon taxed and penalized That is _already_ the case. I could charge at home today, but why bother, next time I'm at the office I can fully charge at 0 cost to me (and a low cost to the employer, who gets electricity at much cheaper rates). I was supposed to get some subsidies too (but for bureaucracy reasons, could not). People around me are getting hit by high gas prices, they have their periodic oil changes, they need to fork cash for smog checks. That said, if humanity had gone the opposite route and we were trying to transition from EV to ICE, that task would be deemed impossible - building the network of gas stations, all the refinery and fuel transportation logistics is an incredible task. While electricity is everywhere. As for "chargers" (EVSE, not chargers), they are not expensive at all. It's peanuts for new construction. The main issue is existing buildings with old wiring(or non-existent wiring on garages). As for revenue, they could easily charge for them if they wanted to, today. Add some, say, Chargepoint stations, set the price and off you go.

Syonyk 4y ago
> Add some, say, Chargepoint stations, set the price and off you go. Ugh. Please don't. You pay more for the charger and the ongoing maintenance fees than you'd pay for electricity in an awful lot of cases with a "free, dumb charger." Chargepoint makes really nice stuff. Their hardware side is great, and the units are very well tested for long term operation. It's just their entire business model that I hate. Their model is, "We should be able to intermediate in, and get a cut of, all EV charging, everywhere except home. And ideally home if it's an apartment complex." And this is simply not needed in the bulk of cases. Apartments should either just wire a 240V EVSE circuit to apartments for charging ("Parking spot 101 goes to apartment 101, parking spot 102 goes to apartment 102, etc"), or just have some "EV charging" spots that are $20/mo or $40/mo or something. It's cheaper to do this than to try and monitor every kWh that goes into the EVs, and if the net is close enough, call it good. I say this having tried the cost recovery thing on a charger, and discovering that, with infrequent use, the $5/mo management fees to then recover costs were more expensive than literally just paying for the power. If a 240V/16A EVSE runs flat out for 30 days, at our local $0.10/kWh costs, that's $275/mo in power... but nobody will actually do that.
- sliken 4y ago
  Heh, yeah, 240V/16A is 370 miles a day, 11,262 a month, or 135,050 a year. While that's quite a bit, it's a bit sobering to see that $0.025 per mile.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    I'm confused... Why is $0.025/mi sobering? That's about right for an EV. Gas is far higher, by an order of magnitude or so.
    - sliken 4y ago
      I just meant sobering in how cheap it is. One thing that's a bit worse for the environment is I enjoy driving an EV more and tend to drive it more than I drove an ICE. Quiet, fast ... sporty even, no oil changes, no gas station trips, not even a transmission. Sure I'm not burning oil, or even (mostly) brake pads, but I'm still turning magic pixies into motion and chewing through tires.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

IMO, the best solution for apartment complexes is to run bog standard 120V/15A to every stall. That's a lot easier to manage than trying to share a limited number of 240V L2 chargers. And 120V is enough for everybody who averages less than 100 miles per day. Everybody does more than 100 miles on some days, but only when you have multiple consecutive multi-hundred mile days would you need more than 120V overnight. For the rare occasions that happens, you can use a commercial fast charger. 120V at every stall would be much nicer than a limited number of 240V L2 chargers. You just plug in when you park and forget about it. With a shared charger you have to wait until the charger is free, and you have to move off the charger after you're charged to be polite.

sliken 4y ago
Don't forget you often can't charge when away from home. So it's more like 50 miles a day of charging not 100. Most cars charge around 3-5 miles per hour on 120v, and if you have an 8 hour job, 30 minutes for lunch, and 30 minute commute (approximately average I believe) you are gone for 9.5 hours a day. That's assuming no dropping off kids, picking up kids, grocery shopping, etc.

falcolas 4y ago

A fast charger can consume 300 watts. An 80% fast charge takes around 9 minutes for a Tesla. Let’s say each charger sees 20% utilization, and a location has 6 chargers, so around 300 kWh a month. FWIW, that’s about double the amount of energy a small store already consumes every month. Free won’t ever be easy.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Stores don't install 300kW L3 chargers, they install 10kW L2 chargers. They don't want customers charging in 10 minutes, they want customers plugged in for an hour or three. Tesla calls them "Destination Chargers" in contrast the superchargers that you use in the middle of your trip.
- falcolas 4y ago
  But customers don’t want that. And as technology advances and more cars can take advantage of fast chargers, people will seek them out. 9 minutes of a customers time is better than none. Most gas stations that live on transient customers get less than 9 minutes, and they’re quite profitable.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Gas stations are a completely different use case. By "stores" I assume the OP meant retail stores like malls, restaurants and hotels that add free/cheap charging to encourage customer traffic rather than as a primary business. I've seen lots of those with L2 charging, but none with L3 charging.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    As a customer, I want that. If I drive from here to the closest proper movie theater, I can plug in my car at a 22kW outlet. It gets around 7.5kW/h from it (single phase charger in the car, so it can only use 1/3). A 2 hour movie and some faffing about on both ends is around 2.5 hours. That's 15-20kW of power charged to my car, which can go 100km with 15kWh. The theater is about 40km away, so I actually come back home with a fuller battery than I left with. This is how the future should look like. 11/22kW destination chargers should be ubiquitous in all places you spend an hour or more usually (bigger grocery stores, hardware stores, IKEA, malls etc).

lamontcg 4y ago

Lamp-post chargers are one possible solution in urban centers: https://www.driving.co.uk/news/lamp-post-powered-electric-car-charging-points-arrive-london/ https://www.driving.co.uk/news/lamp-post-powered-electric-ca... The advantage that electrons have over hydrocarbons is that the delivery network for end use is very highly decentralized. We have to stick hydrocarbons into a gas station with a big tank underground because we can't just have gasoline being piped into everyone's homes because that's just way too dangerous. With electrons you can stick charging stations all over the place.

theshrike79 4y ago

> Are landlords going to install enough chargers to fill entire apartment complex parking lots? Yes, because they can bill for that. > Are they going to maintain and repair them? It's just an outlet. Do landlords fix outlets inside their houses? If yes, they can also maintain and repair the charging sockets. > Will they charge for charging? Depends on the laws. Over here it's illegal to resell power at too big a profit, you need to be an actual licensed power company to do that. A monthly cost with a slight premium per kWh is OK though. > Do we live in a society where people won't routinely vandalize and neglect the chargers? Depends. I've had an outlet at every parking spot I've had in the last 25 years. They have been vandalised zero times. Well, OK. The grandma on the opposite spot once backed up to the pole and the maintenance guy had to spend 20 minutes poking it back upright.

kkfx 4y ago

Two notes: if you try to summarize G8/"World Government" [1]/McKinsey [2] public reports it's not there but essentially implied that "smart cities" residents will be just slaves while some "wealthy" people profit from their work living outside. McKinsey goes further [3] probably imaging without telling a world with far less ground infrastructures, mostly dedicated only for commercial transports, with people living essentially where they born or get relocated Chine's style, while only those who can afford flying vehicles can travel. From the distopic scenario to a practical one the second note: dense urban areas are not sustainable just because they can't evolve. Let's say you construct a new skyscraper "A class" in energy saving terms (hard to achieve for a skyscraper but anyway), it's the best of the tech today. In 50 years is probably a hard to maintain dinosaur. You can't really rebuild it in practical terms since there are too many people inside, too many conflicting interests. On contrary with modern logistic you can made "rivieras alike suburbs" where people live and work from home or at a short distance range in small buildings, single family homes. Something CAN evolve practically for instance when the owner change, where there is physical space to evolve etc. A bit of density because we are social animals, but not too much. Long story short: in cities the only SHORT term evolution is nearly-only public transport systems with the city as a single complex building (not that different than the classic "the datacenter as a computer" in scale design principles), no matter if the future will be distopic or not. In the long terms cities can only be wiped and rebuilt as we have always done in history, with the important difference in space and time scale and tech terms (cities with buildings made of rocks and wood source much of the needed raw material from ruins of the old city itself, concrete and steel are another story), something we can say confidently it's not sustainable. Suburbs USA style never really work. Far spread people never lift themselves to a civilization so we need something in between. IMO that's a riviera where people live in single family homes with a bit of land around but not in residential-only areas, instead in mixed residential and commercials areas where they can live and work at a short range, few districts for things can't be done differently (like mining, various manufacturing industries, but also high schools/campus, military stuff etc) that being single-purpose can be rebuilt as tech change. Seen the actual state of things... Well... Probably we can't evolve like that due partially to the reactionary ideas of most and mere overpopulation. So it's easy to predict even outside of a distopic scenario that some people, most of humans actually, will suffer much the change while few will benefit from the start. [1] https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org [2] you can start with https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-we-help-clients/capital-excellence/cities https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-w... [3] https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-report.pdf https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-...