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> Yes, that wiring doesn’t exist today and will have to be built out, but wiring conduits already exist in most cities for street lighting and residential distr

> Yes, that wiring doesn’t exist today and will have to be built out, but wiring conduits already exist in most cities for street lighting and residential distribution. That's easily said than done. You can't build it wide enough, because maintenance and upkeep (you need to pay for reserved power) for big system will eat you alive. And if you build it small so maintenance and upkeep is as smallest fraction of revenue as possible, it won't make a difference for a comfort of BEV drivers compared to today. And all of that is under assumption that your local substation has spare power. And that's usually not the case.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I think people hugely underestimate the cost of maintaining parking spaces on public streets in dense urban areas, and then wildly overestimate the costs of the EV charging infrastructure drivers will need. You have to set aside enough valuable and productive urban real-estate to store a 1+-ton vehicle at street level, grade and pave the space for it, pave and maintain every piece of street that leads up to it, and then police and clean the streets (to keep people from blocking it in or parking illegally or starting fires with unmaintained vehicles.) We tend to think of street parking as “free” or “cheap” but that’s just because we pretend that asphalt and pavement and public land falls from the sky, rather than being a massive expense that taxpayers have born and continue to pay for. There are some good articles (mostly US focused) that talk about the replacement cost per-household of rebuilding new parking in even land-rich cities and the cost is staggering, close to $100k per household even in Wyoming. (It is hard for me to believe that these costs are lower for historically-preserved dense European cities.) Compared to these sunk costs, running 240V wiring for the equivalent of several new households per block doesn’t seem like a massive investment. The ongoing maintenance costs will certainly not exceed the cost of street maintenance. As far as how much power we need: the average European driver travels 32.9km/day. At a (Tesla) usage of 166wH/km that’s 5.461kWh/day, or 273W continuous average power draw assuming most people drive for 4H/day and park the rest of the time. You’re absolutely correct that even this level of new consumption is going to require us to upgrade city grids and substations, but that’s already baked into the EV transition. We’ll have to upgrade substations even if everyone stores their cars in private garages off the street.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

I think people hugely underestimate the cost of maintaining parking spaces on public streets in dense urban areas, and then wildly overestimate the costs of the EV charging infrastructure drivers will need. You have to set aside enough valuable and productive urban real-estate to store a 1+-ton vehicle at street level, grade and pave the space for it, pave and maintain every piece of street that leads up to it, and then police and clean the streets (to keep people from blocking it in or parking illegally or starting fires with unmaintained vehicles.) We tend to think of street parking as “free” or “cheap” but that’s just because we pretend that asphalt and pavement and public land falls from the sky, rather than being a massive expense that taxpayers have born and continue to pay for. There are some good articles (mostly US focused) that talk about the replacement cost per-household of rebuilding new parking in even land-rich cities and the cost is staggering, close to $100k per household even in Wyoming. (It is hard for me to believe that these costs are lower for historically-preserved dense European cities.) Compared to these sunk costs, running 240V wiring for the equivalent of several new households per block doesn’t seem like a massive investment. The ongoing maintenance costs will certainly not exceed the cost of street maintenance. As far as how much power we need: the average European driver travels 32.9km/day. At a (Tesla) usage of 166wH/km that’s 5.461kWh/day, or 273W continuous average power draw assuming most people drive for 4H/day and park the rest of the time. You’re absolutely correct that even this level of new consumption is going to require us to upgrade city grids and substations, but that’s already baked into the EV transition. We’ll have to upgrade substations even if everyone stores their cars in private garages off the street.