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Highway EV charging will soon need a ton of power

70 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

jleyank 4y ago
People on HN question from time to time about what to do. This article points out several key issues, and battery recycling must be added: Where do the amps come from? How do they get to the chargers? How much delay is introduced by charger operation/bottleneck? Plug/voltage compatibility? Current safety? Disaster handling (can’t carry a bucket of electrons)? This suggests material science, power generation, portable aux power sources and real time load balancing are going to be critical. Along with a whole lot of infrastructure that might have difficulty getting built. I’m not an EE - is it possible to create a solar cell that has any impact on an EV? Even enough to move it at trivial speeds? Might portable wind turbines have an effect? Will this force a return to smaller lighter cars? Would be nice to replace some/much of the medium long haul/intercity travel with trains but that’s a political problem. So is a paying for all the steps in changing from a gas to an electric environment. Man, that Nobel-to-be for high temperature superconducting will be very much appreciated.
- jackmott 4y ago
  solar cells can have a decent impact on very exotic efficient designs like the aptera. On a normal sedan it is better to put the solar panel elsewhere than the car
  - brianbreslin 4y ago
    what about power generation at the charging site? i.e. solar on the roof of the charging station. Small scale hydrogen cells? Local battery storage on site so its not all simultaneously drawing from the grid? (I'm not an engineer, just curious)
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Article says many sites will need 5 megawatts. 5 megawatts) / ((1000 watts) / (square meter))) / .18 = 27 777.7778 m2 And, of course, this is only when sun is shining with max intensity and certainly not delivered at night. Figure in the Northeast you get 4 hours times this power on a typical day, and it’s not aligned with peak charging demand.
- derekp7 4y ago
  Just some back-of-the-napkin math. An electric car uses approx .25 kWh per mile. Household solar gives you 15 watts/sq ft. Assuming a car 5 ft wide, the hood 5 ft long, roof 4 ft, and trunk 3 ft, that's 60 sqft of sky-facing surface. Accounting for rounded edges, let's make that 50 sqft. So 750 watts, or .75 kWh per hour. That comes out to 3 miles of driving for every 1 hour charge. So your car sitting at work for 8 hours will give you 24 miles of power to drive home. Adjust up or down based on location, summer vs winter, cloud cover, solar cell efficiency, etc. Now what you can do is have your garage roof covered in solar, charge a stationary battery, then transfer from there to your car every night. Or swap-able car batteries. Another possibility is have a design that keeps the solar on the car following the curves of the vehicle when driving, then have a parking mode that would extend / unfold solar to cover more of the car when it is parked. That would be good for people who live in apartments without charging ports, although if parking is provided for tenants then adding charging ports (for a fee) may be a thing.
  - danaris 4y ago
    And, importantly (which you imply, but I feel needs stating outright), this car-roof solar does not have to be the sole source of charging. It can be a convenient (and energy-efficient) supplement to whatever other charging options we can make work.
    - jleyank 4y ago
      I was thinking of emergency use but extenders work as well (or commuter parking).
- readams 4y ago
  Even converting the whole surface of the car to ideal 100% efficient solar cells world be nowhere close to enough, unfortunately.
  - asadotzler 4y ago
    Close enough enough for what? For the typical Californian or New Yorker, who drives about 30 miles a day, on-car solar would cut their charging needs in half. That's "close enough" to useful that dismissing it out of hand seems wrong.
    - readams 4y ago
      You're assuming something like 24 hours a day of having the car parked in full sunlight, which is not realistic (even ignoring that night exists). For it to make sense, you'd need the solar arrays on the car to provide a reasonable percentage of the energy needed during driving. If this isn't the case, you're way better off putting the solar panels somewhere other than the car (where they can work much better), and charging the car when it's not driving.
hoosieree 4y ago
Somewhat related, I think user-swappable batteries make a lot of sense. https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-018-07585-6/d41586-018-07585-6_16303638.jpg https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-018-07... Smaller vehicles would also help.
- glitchc 4y ago
  The ship has sailed on smaller EVs, now that the F-150 Lightning exists. People will opt for bigger if they can obtain it.
  - fredoliveira 4y ago
    A US-centric take if I've ever seen one. Culture in the US is not culture everywhere. Lots of people find the F-150 an absolute abomination.
    - danaris 4y ago
      Lots of people even in the US find the F-150 an abomination, I assure you.
- cduzz 4y ago
  I have a propane tank for my BBQ. All propane tanks around here have a "do not refill past this date" stamped into them. There are 2 ways of "refilling" a tank -- the first is to swap your tank for another tank that's filled; the other is to go to a place that can refill your tank. 99% of the time when I do the tank swap they try to give me one with an expiration date that's coming up in the next 6 months. I almost never am offered one with a very long expiration date. Do you really think that, in a situation where you own your car and battery, you'll reliably get a battery that's as good or better than the one that's in your car? Keep in mind the value of the vehicle is 40-80% tied up in _only_ the battery. Battery swaps aren't a realistic plan unless someone else owns the battery, and then you'll get all sorts of other nonsense in the ecosystem.
  - 4y ago
fundad 4y ago
Car culture exists to create a market for fuel. Nationalize the fossil fuel companies to staff municipal utilities.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  That is preposterous. Cars exist so that people can go where they want.
  - oblak 4y ago
    They also pollute the air, make too much noise, and take incredible amount of space. The vast majority of cars are clearly not needed, they are desired.
rco8786 4y ago
This article seems to be mostly fear-mongering? I am surprised to see it this far up on HN. Highway charging stations will need a lot of power to charge all the cars and we’ll have to build the infrastructure to make it happen. Literally no surprise here.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  It being true does not make it insignificant.
- locallost 4y ago
  It's not fear mongering, but call to action. > If state agencies and utilities don’t coordinate on how to supply high-voltage grid interconnections to the mega-charging hubs coming down the pike, the result could be delays and higher costs that hinder expansion of a technology that’s key to decarbonizing transportation. >“If we wait 10 years or 15 years to make these investments, I can guarantee you they’ll be double or triple” what they would be if they were planned well in advance, said Brian Wilkie, National Grid’s director of transportation electrification in New York.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  When it comes to green/progressive tech/infrastructure like wind/solar, electric cars, and so on: fear-mongering, conservatism, and misunderstanding is pretty much how HN rolls. HN commenters love to shout about wind and solar being stupid ("WhAT haPPens at nIGhT!? wINd DoESN't ALwaYs bLOW!!! GOTCHA!") yet grid-scale energy storage systems are quite common and one of the fastest areas of capex investment by utilities...and then there's the constant stream of "nuclear is the future!" nonsense. The power generation debate is over; utilities and grids aren't buying nuclear, they're buying wind, solar, and some natural gas backup capacity...and not because "liberal brainwashing" or some other nonsense, but because wind and solar are the cheapest source of power right now, and wind especially keeps dropping in price. Neither presents anywhere near the level of headaches of nuclear, and it takes months to build out and a few years to break even on carbon footprint, not decades. There's a fair bit of dunning-krueger effect as well; scroll down to see comments from "not an electrical engineer" who is talking about "buckets of electrons" and thinks that EV charging is something where there's so many "amps" we need to think of the chil...er, have safety protocols. Like DCFC stations and L1/L2 charge adapters don't already do a whole suite of electrical safety checks every time they start charging a vehicle....
andai 4y ago
Here's a silly idea... so when you run a coil past an array of alternating magnetic fields, power is generated. What if we just installed an array of (non electro-) magnets into the road? Or would it increase the fuel consumption more than it would save? (My "perpetuum mobile" detector is tingling...)
- dboreham 4y ago
  Definitely perpetual motion.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  Yes, it would be a braking force on the car. You've basically made one of those "magnet in a copper pipe" toys (the pipe is the car). If you make them electromagnets and drive turn just so as the car passes, now it's a linear motor and would work to accelerate the car (this is how some rollercoasters work), but still doesn't magick energy out of the ether: something has to generate that power. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's certainly no such thing as a lunch you get paid to eat.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  More feasible: Turn the large, grassy, frequently mowed medians into solar fields.
  - andai 4y ago
    This is the earth The soil, its dirt Through work and toil The harvest of light
- castratikron 4y ago
  I'm gonna lean into newtons third law here. When you pass a magnet through a coil the coil also pushes back on the magnet. So magnets in the ground would essentially be brakes and not a source of "free energy" for the car. That's basically what regen braking is anyways.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  No, static magnets wouldn't work. A series of electromagnets driven by A/C could possibly work, either as a linear motor (fixed magnet in the car, and the road pushes or along) or at a much higher frequency as a wireless charging thing (if you can get the power high enough without being dangerous). But at that point there are probably cheaper options.
pmontra 4y ago
A plan in case we're really desperate. Gas stations already have large tanks full of gasoline. They burn that gas in generators to charge batteries to charge EVs from. No need for extra infrastructure except the generator: the energy is delivered to the gas station in the usual way, a truck. Then gradually build the infrastructure and deliver electricity directly to the gas station, that won't be _gas_ anymore.
- slavboj 4y ago
  Gas stations do not universally want cars taking up space in their parking lots for the requisite amount of charge time at a much lower expected revenue per minute than equivalent gas fillup capacity.
  - nekoashide 4y ago
    Gas Stations make money off the merchandise, the margins for gas at the station level are not that great.
    - idlehand 4y ago
      Indeed, gas stations would probably love if all cars were electric. When you stop to charge, you know that you will be stopping for at least 15 minutes, so why not get a cup of coffee and a snack while waiting? If we're lucky, gas stations might turn into alcohol-free third places where people watch sports, have a meal and hang out while waiting for their car to charge. Driving ranges are generally high enough that driving from 100 to 0% charge means you should take a legally mandated break. So why not embrace that?
    - slavboj 4y ago
      They make money off of X% of N travelers per day stopping to buy a coffee, cigarettes etc. If you require a substantial amount of space to be taken by travelers who sit there charging for 30 minutes, you're reducing peak travelers (eg during the morning and evening commutes) and significantly reducing total traffic. Claiming that they're all going to come in for a slurpee and this will happen to work out neutral or positive for the gas station is pure handwaving.
codazoda 4y ago
One of the nice things about this tech is that we can adapt over time. Today we might burn some coal or natural gas to generate the additional power we need, which doesn’t help the environment, but tomorrow we can expand the amount of solar, wind, and water energy we produce.
- ezfe 4y ago
  It's still more efficient to power an EV off natural gas/goal than a combustion vehicle, due to the improved efficiency at the larger power plant vs the small vehicle.
  - natch 4y ago
    Agree. And improved efficiency in the car itself as well.
- natch 4y ago
  It actually is better for the environment to run an EV off of even something as dirty as coal power, than to run a gasoline car because the EV drivetrain is so much more efficient. That being said, I agree of course that transitioning the mix toward a lower proportion of dirty sources will be good.
  - tzs 4y ago
    Another plus for the dirty powered EV is that when you burn fossil fuels in a car then (1) any add-on equipment you want to use to capture or reduce pollution has severe size and weight and cost restrictions due to being part of the car, and (2) you are releasing your pollution in population centers. With the EV powered by electricity from a dirty power plant (1) you can afford bigger, heavier, more expensive pollution control, and (2) you can build power plants away from population centers so whatever pollution does escape ends up being a small increase for people over a wide area instead of major increase for just one city.
- ehnto 4y ago
  There are a number of cities around the world that do get the majority of their power from renewable sources as well, so it depends on where you live as to what the impact is. Where I live an EV would be solar or wind powered if you charged it during the day. At night, a blend of wind and gas.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Helmut10001 4y ago
In Europe it is the same situation. I think they want to prohibit combustion engines for new trucks by 2030, meaning that all new trucks will need to be EV. To charge a single EV truck in 1.5 hours on the Autobahn (this is the common break time for truck drivers), you'll need 80kW EV loading (that's 80000 Watts for a single truck). Imagine there're 20 trucks charging at 80kW on a single autobahn rest area. I don't know who came up with this time schedule, the grid cannot support this and I think it is quite challenging to scale it enough till 2030.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  It costs nothing to make a rule that your successor has to deal with.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  Apparently Siemens is already onto 175 kW chargers, "Great for fast charging locations and applications along highway corridors.": https://new.siemens.com/us/en/products/energy/topics/transportation-electrification/versicharge-ultra-dc-fast-chargers.html https://new.siemens.com/us/en/products/energy/topics/transpo... Probably they want to halve the times in your example to 3/4th hour. They may be able to have 10 charging stations instead of 20, but the overall grid consumption will remain the same 1600-2000 kW is a lot of power and the need for dedicated power lines won't change.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    ~250-350kW 800v chargers are the current top-dog DCFC charger systems in the EU, US, and elsewhere and they're increasingly common. Pairing stations with "local" battery buffer is a thing, as it reduces the need for local infrastructure upgrades and the systems can also help pay for themselves by acting as part of a 'virtual power plant'. The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...
    - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
      The issue is, presently, the overwhelming majority of our energy use I'd supplied by coal, oil, and natural gas. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix The problem is those who think building more wind and solar in the next few years is going to reverse this.
ldbooth 4y ago
Certainly part of the problem is the protocol of the highway system itself, and our expectation as consumers. Passengers can get by on 30kg ebikes we need a lane system for those on all roads, not just a 'take your own risks bike lane'. 1500kg passenger vehicle curb weight should not be the starting point for passenger vehicles. But no one takes this on because it's regulatory and a quagmire. Trucking is an unavoidable issue, but (at least in the US) there is plenty of space for combined solar/wind/battery sites on trucking corridors.
- amirhirsch 4y ago
  Whenever I see comments like this I gotta ask: do you have kids? Like I can’t fathom the car-rejectionist position coming from someone with multiple offspring.
  - ericpauley 4y ago
    This random source on the Internet [1] suggests most car miles are single passenger. Just looking out my window (main street in average American town) this number looks about right. So for the vast majority of passenger transport the car is not the best choice. [1] https://thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters/ https://thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters/
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      Most, not all. If you ban cars, that also bans their uses for families with multiple kids or family members.
      - ericpauley 4y ago
        Yours is the first comment in this thread about a car ban. Nobody is arguing that cars don't have uses, but that also doesn't mean we should ignore their negative effects and skip investing in more efficient options.
spenrose 4y ago
We're building a charging network for the largest highway vehicles, complete with dedicated power: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/31/daimler-nextera-and-blackrock-to-deploy-nationwide-us-electric-trucking-network/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/31/daimler-nextera-and-b... Our team is building the associated software. If you'd like to help solve this problem, reach out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33823403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33823403
jliptzin 4y ago
Since when do sports stadiums consume that much power? Is it the lights? Cell phone plugs under every seat?
xiphias2 4y ago
Providing electricity for EVs can be a much higher business than selling EVs (where batteries make them more expensive than ICE cars), as electricity/km is cheaper than gas. The hard part is compatibility of all EVs with the charging stations, where segmentation might be in iterest in some car makers for the short term, so that's the only part where government intervention can help, but it has improved since the early days as far as I know.
- Gare 4y ago
  In the EU Type 2/Combo 2 is standardized. Even Tesla has adopted it.
n8cpdx 4y ago
I wish we spent more time as a society thinking about how to reduce dependence on long-distance highway trips, rather than just making cars electric. They’re the vaping of the sustainability movement, which is not worthless, but nowhere near an unalloyed good. Teslas still kill kids. Electrification doesn’t solve the health problems of sedentary commute time. There is huge demand to live in cities, close to jobs; we should be putting more resources towards that goal, reducing the demand on highway electric charging stations along the way.
amirhirsch 4y ago
It seems like a swappable battery model would help with grid balancing especially if we are in remote areas where we need to average out the total power draw requirements over time. Swapping batteries also makes cheaper/lighter EVs more practical as well as street parking EVs in cities. constraints that have led to the battery integration we see today may not be as applicable further down the adoption cycle.
more_corn 4y ago
This is a Good thing. The demand curve is high during the day and low at night. Drastic increase in night demand brings the night dip up towards the day peak. This is a really good thing for the power companies because they can deploy more steady, baseline capacity (which low carbon sources are good for) and have less need for rapid start on-demand capacity. (Which is fulfilled with gas turbines)
kkfx 4y ago
Few notes: quick charge on highways is NEEDED simply because we need to travel from A to B even if the trip is longer than the vehicle range in a reasonable amount of time. Renault in the past have testes swappable batteries and failed so quick charging is the sole current option. For a car this means 100kW, a truck I suspect must get at least 400kW. IF EVs get spread at the current peace we need at list 10+ concurrent charging ability every 50km or so. The other option is electrifying roads, witch means cars can suck power with something like a long trolley, the phase in a grid-like roof, the neutral on ground, mandatory AC for a minimum safety. VERY costly and problematic for big transports. That's is already today. Having cars with bigger range might help A BIT, in the sense that most do not do such a long trips one after another but stay ad the first long destination for a long enough time for a 22-50kW charge, but that means cars with around 1000km range with a price people can buy, of course. Even if we can achieve that trucks remain out of options anyways.
mgerdts 4y ago
If charging commuter cars how much does this change the equation? Where I live, law dictates that power companies don't have to pay for excess power that not-the-power-company puts onto the grid. Thus, everyone that puts solar panels on their roofs shoots for putting up capacity to that is slightly under what they expect to consume. Businesses that have large roofs but comparatively little electricity demand are disincentivized from rooftop solar. We need to change this. Building codes should require that every roof that faces a suitable direction and is not obscured by landscape, buildings, etc., must include rooftop solar. Every new garage stall should be equipped with a charger. Cars that spend the day at home can be topped off (or to 90%, whatever works best for the battery tech) during the day and be drained to run the house/neighborhood and charge daytime commuters during the night. I have a pretty good idea when I will need to have more than 50 - 100 miles of range in my car. I don't feel like my gas tank needs to be full every day. Likewise, if my EV with a range of 200 - 300 miles has 100 miles of range most days, I have no worries at all. If I'm expecting a longer trip, I should be able to say "be sure I have 300 miles of range by 8:00" or pop in for a one-off charge at a charging station. Surely this doesn't address dominated by multi-story apartments. Arguably, those are also the areas that have less dependence on cars and make up a minority of the housing in the US. According to the US census, 29 million people live in urban clusters and the remaining 220 million live in less densely populated areas. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
grapescheesee 4y ago
New York recently shut down one of its main power plants. Indian Point Nuclear power station. From Wikipedia. "As a result of the permanent shutdown of the plant, three new natural-gas fired power plants: Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center, and Cricket Valley Energy Center were built, with a total capacity of 1.8 GW, replacing 90% of the 2.0 GW of carbon-free electricity previously generated by the plant.[6] As a consequence, New York is expected to struggle to meet its climate goals.[9][3]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
amne 4y ago
The solution should be fairly straight forward: batteries. If you think about it .. petrol is not pumped in your car straight from the refinery, right? It's brought in from time to time and stored in underground tanks. Energy can be sipped non-stop into large capacity batteries (stored underground?) . Said batteries will have very high-discharge capabilities. When you come in to charge your car it's just a matter of grabbing a "pump" connected to the "underground tanks". No stress on the network.
entropicgravity 4y ago
Given how fast solar/wind will continue to be built out over the next three, seven, ten years, the "ton of power" will be there before the EV's.

70 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

People on HN question from time to time about what to do. This article points out several key issues, and battery recycling must be added: Where do the amps come from? How do they get to the chargers? How much delay is introduced by charger operation/bottleneck? Plug/voltage compatibility? Current safety? Disaster handling (can’t carry a bucket of electrons)? This suggests material science, power generation, portable aux power sources and real time load balancing are going to be critical. Along with a whole lot of infrastructure that might have difficulty getting built. I’m not an EE - is it possible to create a solar cell that has any impact on an EV? Even enough to move it at trivial speeds? Might portable wind turbines have an effect? Will this force a return to smaller lighter cars? Would be nice to replace some/much of the medium long haul/intercity travel with trains but that’s a political problem. So is a paying for all the steps in changing from a gas to an electric environment. Man, that Nobel-to-be for high temperature superconducting will be very much appreciated.

jackmott 4y ago
solar cells can have a decent impact on very exotic efficient designs like the aptera. On a normal sedan it is better to put the solar panel elsewhere than the car
- brianbreslin 4y ago
  what about power generation at the charging site? i.e. solar on the roof of the charging station. Small scale hydrogen cells? Local battery storage on site so its not all simultaneously drawing from the grid? (I'm not an engineer, just curious)
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Article says many sites will need 5 megawatts. 5 megawatts) / ((1000 watts) / (square meter))) / .18 = 27 777.7778 m2 And, of course, this is only when sun is shining with max intensity and certainly not delivered at night. Figure in the Northeast you get 4 hours times this power on a typical day, and it’s not aligned with peak charging demand.
derekp7 4y ago
Just some back-of-the-napkin math. An electric car uses approx .25 kWh per mile. Household solar gives you 15 watts/sq ft. Assuming a car 5 ft wide, the hood 5 ft long, roof 4 ft, and trunk 3 ft, that's 60 sqft of sky-facing surface. Accounting for rounded edges, let's make that 50 sqft. So 750 watts, or .75 kWh per hour. That comes out to 3 miles of driving for every 1 hour charge. So your car sitting at work for 8 hours will give you 24 miles of power to drive home. Adjust up or down based on location, summer vs winter, cloud cover, solar cell efficiency, etc. Now what you can do is have your garage roof covered in solar, charge a stationary battery, then transfer from there to your car every night. Or swap-able car batteries. Another possibility is have a design that keeps the solar on the car following the curves of the vehicle when driving, then have a parking mode that would extend / unfold solar to cover more of the car when it is parked. That would be good for people who live in apartments without charging ports, although if parking is provided for tenants then adding charging ports (for a fee) may be a thing.
- danaris 4y ago
  And, importantly (which you imply, but I feel needs stating outright), this car-roof solar does not have to be the sole source of charging. It can be a convenient (and energy-efficient) supplement to whatever other charging options we can make work.
  - jleyank 4y ago
    I was thinking of emergency use but extenders work as well (or commuter parking).
readams 4y ago
Even converting the whole surface of the car to ideal 100% efficient solar cells world be nowhere close to enough, unfortunately.
- asadotzler 4y ago
  Close enough enough for what? For the typical Californian or New Yorker, who drives about 30 miles a day, on-car solar would cut their charging needs in half. That's "close enough" to useful that dismissing it out of hand seems wrong.
  - readams 4y ago
    You're assuming something like 24 hours a day of having the car parked in full sunlight, which is not realistic (even ignoring that night exists). For it to make sense, you'd need the solar arrays on the car to provide a reasonable percentage of the energy needed during driving. If this isn't the case, you're way better off putting the solar panels somewhere other than the car (where they can work much better), and charging the car when it's not driving.

hoosieree 4y ago

Somewhat related, I think user-swappable batteries make a lot of sense. https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-018-07585-6/d41586-018-07585-6_16303638.jpg https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-018-07... Smaller vehicles would also help.

glitchc 4y ago
The ship has sailed on smaller EVs, now that the F-150 Lightning exists. People will opt for bigger if they can obtain it.
- fredoliveira 4y ago
  A US-centric take if I've ever seen one. Culture in the US is not culture everywhere. Lots of people find the F-150 an absolute abomination.
  - danaris 4y ago
    Lots of people even in the US find the F-150 an abomination, I assure you.
cduzz 4y ago
I have a propane tank for my BBQ. All propane tanks around here have a "do not refill past this date" stamped into them. There are 2 ways of "refilling" a tank -- the first is to swap your tank for another tank that's filled; the other is to go to a place that can refill your tank. 99% of the time when I do the tank swap they try to give me one with an expiration date that's coming up in the next 6 months. I almost never am offered one with a very long expiration date. Do you really think that, in a situation where you own your car and battery, you'll reliably get a battery that's as good or better than the one that's in your car? Keep in mind the value of the vehicle is 40-80% tied up in _only_ the battery. Battery swaps aren't a realistic plan unless someone else owns the battery, and then you'll get all sorts of other nonsense in the ecosystem.
- 4y ago

fundad 4y ago

Car culture exists to create a market for fuel. Nationalize the fossil fuel companies to staff municipal utilities.

nonethewiser 4y ago
That is preposterous. Cars exist so that people can go where they want.
- oblak 4y ago
  They also pollute the air, make too much noise, and take incredible amount of space. The vast majority of cars are clearly not needed, they are desired.

rco8786 4y ago

This article seems to be mostly fear-mongering? I am surprised to see it this far up on HN. Highway charging stations will need a lot of power to charge all the cars and we’ll have to build the infrastructure to make it happen. Literally no surprise here.

nonethewiser 4y ago
It being true does not make it insignificant.
locallost 4y ago
It's not fear mongering, but call to action. > If state agencies and utilities don’t coordinate on how to supply high-voltage grid interconnections to the mega-charging hubs coming down the pike, the result could be delays and higher costs that hinder expansion of a technology that’s key to decarbonizing transportation. >“If we wait 10 years or 15 years to make these investments, I can guarantee you they’ll be double or triple” what they would be if they were planned well in advance, said Brian Wilkie, National Grid’s director of transportation electrification in New York.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
When it comes to green/progressive tech/infrastructure like wind/solar, electric cars, and so on: fear-mongering, conservatism, and misunderstanding is pretty much how HN rolls. HN commenters love to shout about wind and solar being stupid ("WhAT haPPens at nIGhT!? wINd DoESN't ALwaYs bLOW!!! GOTCHA!") yet grid-scale energy storage systems are quite common and one of the fastest areas of capex investment by utilities...and then there's the constant stream of "nuclear is the future!" nonsense. The power generation debate is over; utilities and grids aren't buying nuclear, they're buying wind, solar, and some natural gas backup capacity...and not because "liberal brainwashing" or some other nonsense, but because wind and solar are the cheapest source of power right now, and wind especially keeps dropping in price. Neither presents anywhere near the level of headaches of nuclear, and it takes months to build out and a few years to break even on carbon footprint, not decades. There's a fair bit of dunning-krueger effect as well; scroll down to see comments from "not an electrical engineer" who is talking about "buckets of electrons" and thinks that EV charging is something where there's so many "amps" we need to think of the chil...er, have safety protocols. Like DCFC stations and L1/L2 charge adapters don't already do a whole suite of electrical safety checks every time they start charging a vehicle....

andai 4y ago

Here's a silly idea... so when you run a coil past an array of alternating magnetic fields, power is generated. What if we just installed an array of (non electro-) magnets into the road? Or would it increase the fuel consumption more than it would save? (My "perpetuum mobile" detector is tingling...)

dboreham 4y ago
Definitely perpetual motion.
Oxidation 4y ago
Yes, it would be a braking force on the car. You've basically made one of those "magnet in a copper pipe" toys (the pipe is the car). If you make them electromagnets and drive turn just so as the car passes, now it's a linear motor and would work to accelerate the car (this is how some rollercoasters work), but still doesn't magick energy out of the ether: something has to generate that power. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's certainly no such thing as a lunch you get paid to eat.
ceejayoz 4y ago
More feasible: Turn the large, grassy, frequently mowed medians into solar fields.
- andai 4y ago
  This is the earth The soil, its dirt Through work and toil The harvest of light
castratikron 4y ago
I'm gonna lean into newtons third law here. When you pass a magnet through a coil the coil also pushes back on the magnet. So magnets in the ground would essentially be brakes and not a source of "free energy" for the car. That's basically what regen braking is anyways.
tbrownaw 4y ago
No, static magnets wouldn't work. A series of electromagnets driven by A/C could possibly work, either as a linear motor (fixed magnet in the car, and the road pushes or along) or at a much higher frequency as a wireless charging thing (if you can get the power high enough without being dangerous). But at that point there are probably cheaper options.

pmontra 4y ago

A plan in case we're really desperate. Gas stations already have large tanks full of gasoline. They burn that gas in generators to charge batteries to charge EVs from. No need for extra infrastructure except the generator: the energy is delivered to the gas station in the usual way, a truck. Then gradually build the infrastructure and deliver electricity directly to the gas station, that won't be _gas_ anymore.

slavboj 4y ago
Gas stations do not universally want cars taking up space in their parking lots for the requisite amount of charge time at a much lower expected revenue per minute than equivalent gas fillup capacity.
- nekoashide 4y ago
  Gas Stations make money off the merchandise, the margins for gas at the station level are not that great.
  - idlehand 4y ago
    Indeed, gas stations would probably love if all cars were electric. When you stop to charge, you know that you will be stopping for at least 15 minutes, so why not get a cup of coffee and a snack while waiting? If we're lucky, gas stations might turn into alcohol-free third places where people watch sports, have a meal and hang out while waiting for their car to charge. Driving ranges are generally high enough that driving from 100 to 0% charge means you should take a legally mandated break. So why not embrace that?
  - slavboj 4y ago
    They make money off of X% of N travelers per day stopping to buy a coffee, cigarettes etc. If you require a substantial amount of space to be taken by travelers who sit there charging for 30 minutes, you're reducing peak travelers (eg during the morning and evening commutes) and significantly reducing total traffic. Claiming that they're all going to come in for a slurpee and this will happen to work out neutral or positive for the gas station is pure handwaving.

codazoda 4y ago

One of the nice things about this tech is that we can adapt over time. Today we might burn some coal or natural gas to generate the additional power we need, which doesn’t help the environment, but tomorrow we can expand the amount of solar, wind, and water energy we produce.

ezfe 4y ago
It's still more efficient to power an EV off natural gas/goal than a combustion vehicle, due to the improved efficiency at the larger power plant vs the small vehicle.
- natch 4y ago
  Agree. And improved efficiency in the car itself as well.
natch 4y ago
It actually is better for the environment to run an EV off of even something as dirty as coal power, than to run a gasoline car because the EV drivetrain is so much more efficient. That being said, I agree of course that transitioning the mix toward a lower proportion of dirty sources will be good.
- tzs 4y ago
  Another plus for the dirty powered EV is that when you burn fossil fuels in a car then (1) any add-on equipment you want to use to capture or reduce pollution has severe size and weight and cost restrictions due to being part of the car, and (2) you are releasing your pollution in population centers. With the EV powered by electricity from a dirty power plant (1) you can afford bigger, heavier, more expensive pollution control, and (2) you can build power plants away from population centers so whatever pollution does escape ends up being a small increase for people over a wide area instead of major increase for just one city.
ehnto 4y ago
There are a number of cities around the world that do get the majority of their power from renewable sources as well, so it depends on where you live as to what the impact is. Where I live an EV would be solar or wind powered if you charged it during the day. At night, a blend of wind and gas.

deleted 4y ago

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Helmut10001 4y ago

In Europe it is the same situation. I think they want to prohibit combustion engines for new trucks by 2030, meaning that all new trucks will need to be EV. To charge a single EV truck in 1.5 hours on the Autobahn (this is the common break time for truck drivers), you'll need 80kW EV loading (that's 80000 Watts for a single truck). Imagine there're 20 trucks charging at 80kW on a single autobahn rest area. I don't know who came up with this time schedule, the grid cannot support this and I think it is quite challenging to scale it enough till 2030.

bilsbie 4y ago
It costs nothing to make a rule that your successor has to deal with.
jaclaz 4y ago
Apparently Siemens is already onto 175 kW chargers, "Great for fast charging locations and applications along highway corridors.": https://new.siemens.com/us/en/products/energy/topics/transportation-electrification/versicharge-ultra-dc-fast-chargers.html https://new.siemens.com/us/en/products/energy/topics/transpo... Probably they want to halve the times in your example to 3/4th hour. They may be able to have 10 charging stations instead of 20, but the overall grid consumption will remain the same 1600-2000 kW is a lot of power and the need for dedicated power lines won't change.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  ~250-350kW 800v chargers are the current top-dog DCFC charger systems in the EU, US, and elsewhere and they're increasingly common. Pairing stations with "local" battery buffer is a thing, as it reduces the need for local infrastructure upgrades and the systems can also help pay for themselves by acting as part of a 'virtual power plant'. The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    The issue is, presently, the overwhelming majority of our energy use I'd supplied by coal, oil, and natural gas. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix The problem is those who think building more wind and solar in the next few years is going to reverse this.

ldbooth 4y ago

Certainly part of the problem is the protocol of the highway system itself, and our expectation as consumers. Passengers can get by on 30kg ebikes we need a lane system for those on all roads, not just a 'take your own risks bike lane'. 1500kg passenger vehicle curb weight should not be the starting point for passenger vehicles. But no one takes this on because it's regulatory and a quagmire. Trucking is an unavoidable issue, but (at least in the US) there is plenty of space for combined solar/wind/battery sites on trucking corridors.

amirhirsch 4y ago
Whenever I see comments like this I gotta ask: do you have kids? Like I can’t fathom the car-rejectionist position coming from someone with multiple offspring.
- ericpauley 4y ago
  This random source on the Internet [1] suggests most car miles are single passenger. Just looking out my window (main street in average American town) this number looks about right. So for the vast majority of passenger transport the car is not the best choice. [1] https://thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters/ https://thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters/
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    Most, not all. If you ban cars, that also bans their uses for families with multiple kids or family members.
    - ericpauley 4y ago
      Yours is the first comment in this thread about a car ban. Nobody is arguing that cars don't have uses, but that also doesn't mean we should ignore their negative effects and skip investing in more efficient options.

spenrose 4y ago

We're building a charging network for the largest highway vehicles, complete with dedicated power: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/31/daimler-nextera-and-blackrock-to-deploy-nationwide-us-electric-trucking-network/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/31/daimler-nextera-and-b... Our team is building the associated software. If you'd like to help solve this problem, reach out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33823403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33823403

jliptzin 4y ago

Since when do sports stadiums consume that much power? Is it the lights? Cell phone plugs under every seat?

xiphias2 4y ago

Providing electricity for EVs can be a much higher business than selling EVs (where batteries make them more expensive than ICE cars), as electricity/km is cheaper than gas. The hard part is compatibility of all EVs with the charging stations, where segmentation might be in iterest in some car makers for the short term, so that's the only part where government intervention can help, but it has improved since the early days as far as I know.

Gare 4y ago
In the EU Type 2/Combo 2 is standardized. Even Tesla has adopted it.

n8cpdx 4y ago

I wish we spent more time as a society thinking about how to reduce dependence on long-distance highway trips, rather than just making cars electric. They’re the vaping of the sustainability movement, which is not worthless, but nowhere near an unalloyed good. Teslas still kill kids. Electrification doesn’t solve the health problems of sedentary commute time. There is huge demand to live in cities, close to jobs; we should be putting more resources towards that goal, reducing the demand on highway electric charging stations along the way.

amirhirsch 4y ago

It seems like a swappable battery model would help with grid balancing especially if we are in remote areas where we need to average out the total power draw requirements over time. Swapping batteries also makes cheaper/lighter EVs more practical as well as street parking EVs in cities. constraints that have led to the battery integration we see today may not be as applicable further down the adoption cycle.

more_corn 4y ago

This is a Good thing. The demand curve is high during the day and low at night. Drastic increase in night demand brings the night dip up towards the day peak. This is a really good thing for the power companies because they can deploy more steady, baseline capacity (which low carbon sources are good for) and have less need for rapid start on-demand capacity. (Which is fulfilled with gas turbines)

kkfx 4y ago

Few notes: quick charge on highways is NEEDED simply because we need to travel from A to B even if the trip is longer than the vehicle range in a reasonable amount of time. Renault in the past have testes swappable batteries and failed so quick charging is the sole current option. For a car this means 100kW, a truck I suspect must get at least 400kW. IF EVs get spread at the current peace we need at list 10+ concurrent charging ability every 50km or so. The other option is electrifying roads, witch means cars can suck power with something like a long trolley, the phase in a grid-like roof, the neutral on ground, mandatory AC for a minimum safety. VERY costly and problematic for big transports. That's is already today. Having cars with bigger range might help A BIT, in the sense that most do not do such a long trips one after another but stay ad the first long destination for a long enough time for a 22-50kW charge, but that means cars with around 1000km range with a price people can buy, of course. Even if we can achieve that trucks remain out of options anyways.

mgerdts 4y ago

If charging commuter cars how much does this change the equation? Where I live, law dictates that power companies don't have to pay for excess power that not-the-power-company puts onto the grid. Thus, everyone that puts solar panels on their roofs shoots for putting up capacity to that is slightly under what they expect to consume. Businesses that have large roofs but comparatively little electricity demand are disincentivized from rooftop solar. We need to change this. Building codes should require that every roof that faces a suitable direction and is not obscured by landscape, buildings, etc., must include rooftop solar. Every new garage stall should be equipped with a charger. Cars that spend the day at home can be topped off (or to 90%, whatever works best for the battery tech) during the day and be drained to run the house/neighborhood and charge daytime commuters during the night. I have a pretty good idea when I will need to have more than 50 - 100 miles of range in my car. I don't feel like my gas tank needs to be full every day. Likewise, if my EV with a range of 200 - 300 miles has 100 miles of range most days, I have no worries at all. If I'm expecting a longer trip, I should be able to say "be sure I have 300 miles of range by 8:00" or pop in for a one-off charge at a charging station. Surely this doesn't address dominated by multi-story apartments. Arguably, those are also the areas that have less dependence on cars and make up a minority of the housing in the US. According to the US census, 29 million people live in urban clusters and the remaining 220 million live in less densely populated areas. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural/ua-facts.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

grapescheesee 4y ago

New York recently shut down one of its main power plants. Indian Point Nuclear power station. From Wikipedia. "As a result of the permanent shutdown of the plant, three new natural-gas fired power plants: Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center, and Cricket Valley Energy Center were built, with a total capacity of 1.8 GW, replacing 90% of the 2.0 GW of carbon-free electricity previously generated by the plant.[6] As a consequence, New York is expected to struggle to meet its climate goals.[9][3]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center

amne 4y ago

The solution should be fairly straight forward: batteries. If you think about it .. petrol is not pumped in your car straight from the refinery, right? It's brought in from time to time and stored in underground tanks. Energy can be sipped non-stop into large capacity batteries (stored underground?) . Said batteries will have very high-discharge capabilities. When you come in to charge your car it's just a matter of grabbing a "pump" connected to the "underground tanks". No stress on the network.

entropicgravity 4y ago

Given how fast solar/wind will continue to be built out over the next three, seven, ten years, the "ton of power" will be there before the EV's.