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Oh, not this again. If you have a standard household outlet accessible where you park, you probably don’t need charging stations outside of road trips, because
by ericd 4y ago
Oh, not this again. If you have a standard household outlet accessible where you park, you probably don’t need charging stations outside of road trips, because you’ll be getting 60+ miles of charge overnight. The load at a given time is like a third that of a central air conditioner. I think we can handle it.
- pojzon 4y agoPlease talk to any energy technician working on national grid. We have troubles generating enough power to not force blackouts in EU and we talk about introducing hundreds of millions of EVs / to every household. Currently it all works only because they are a novelity.
- jupp0r 4y agoBuild wind, solar and grid batteries, then. Nothing magically hard about it. The grid itself will need updates too.
- sangnoir 4y ago> EVs are excellent grid batteries, with the incentives.
- jupp0r 4y agoExcellent point, although I haven't seen this actually be done in practice either at grid scale or household scale. Do current EV's charging electronics support this use case?
- ericd 4y agoTeslas aren’t currently bidirectional, some of the new Fords are, unsure about others.
- ciceryadam 4y agoKias/Hyundais are as well.
- ericd 4y agoI think you all can figure it out, it’s not a huge percentage increase vs people’s normal usage, and there’s plenty of time to incrementally improve - battery production is currently a pretty hard bottleneck on the production rate.
- _ea1k 4y ago> Currently it all works only because they are a novelity. EVs are certainly not only a novelty in the EU right now.
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoAnd for those of us in apartments / condos? My HOA were all born in the 40s and think EVs are simply a fad that doesn't need supporting.
- ericd 4y agoYep, it’s not going to work for everyone immediately. But it will for the majority, and over time, it will for everyone. As they become more common, the culture will shift and make this resistance seem more and more obviously ridiculous.
- mmaurizi 4y agoWhat about where you park at work? Or when grocery shopping? There are more options for 240v "slow" chargers than you'd think.
- krallja 4y agoHow long does grocery shopping take you? I can do it in under 30 minutes, definitely under an hour. And in that half hour, my car charges… about three miles (@ 3.6kW)? That’s about how far the trip to the grocery store is. 50A 240V (10.8kW) only gets me up to 7.5 miles of charge in a grocery shopping trip.
- ericd 4y agoModel Ys use something like 250-300 Wh per mile if you’re not at highway speeds, so I think your range estimates might be a bit pessimistic? But yeah, I wouldn’t count on short grocery store stops to charge my car.
- mmaurizi 4y agoThats... extremely pessimistic. I have a VW eGolf, with our 7.6kW home charger it can go from empty - full in 4 hours. It has a 36kWhr battery w/ a range of 150 miles, so in 30 minutes that's on average a little under 19 miles (probably more because you get faster charging at first and slower when closer to full). But more to the point, how many people have a regular commute, only have street parking at home, and ALSO couldn't be expected to have their employer provide charging at work? Are they doing on-street parking at work as well? I know a lot of folks in the city who own a car but use it for errands and trips but not commuting. They're the people best served by slower charging at grocery stores, movie theaters, etc. 20 miles isn't a lot but if you're topping up every-time you use the car anyways it adds up or at the least means you only need to use the fast charger once every few months at the most.
- greatpatton 4y agoMoving all private cars to electricity will increase total electricity consumption by 19% (https://phys.org/news/2015-07-cars-electric.html https://phys.org/news/2015-07-cars-electric.html). This number is not something worrying in any way, and well manageable by the current incremental improvement of the electricity grid.
- vegardx 4y agoAnd the charging is primarily done during the night, where the grid (typically) is less strained. The biggest issue is that it currently doesn't align very well with things like solar. In my buildings parking garage there are 150 cars, where probably a good 30-40% of cars are BEVs. We're pulling a maximum of 32kW, or 400V/80A. I have yet to find my car not fully charged in the morning. It's a load balanced system, so usually I get full effect of 11kW when charging.
- stuckinhell 4y agoMaybe in europe, but not in rural or surburban America where driving is a way of life. Lots of people would need to charge in the daytime.