8 ms·

The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is alw

by ar9av 4y ago

The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time. Renewables and stored heat batteries will cover night/low wind loads. Geothermal in the north. Public transit options will continue to improve, electrified bikes make them an even more viable alternative. We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles.

midasuni 4y ago
In the U.K. the average car does less than 30 miles a day. Charging overnight would require a draw off less than 1kW. Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. My shower this morning was nearer 10kW.
- uc_banana 4y ago
  >Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. Indeed. When people's kettle usage was much more synchronised (ie, when TV advert breaks were a shared experience by most people), they had to build a power station just to cover this scenario (Dinorwic pumped storage). "Power station" is also quite generous, as it is only storage, and therefore is a net loss to the power grid. Even the most optimistic person has to admit that there's a limit to what can be done spread the additional load of 40 million EVs each needing to charge ~10kWh per day without grid upgrades and investment.
  - midasuni 4y ago
    Except the grid can cope with peak usage into peoples housing when the ovens are on etc. Sure you may need some more power stations, but the actual capacity for the wires, substations etc can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.
    - uc_banana 4y ago
      >can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles. Not necessarily. At the scale of the national grid, a kettle is a very short-term load. I can't imagine that it would go well if 30 million homes decided to leave their ovens on all night.
- 0_____0 4y ago
  As a USian who uses my kettle multiple times a day I'm a bit jealous of your fast boiling kettles. It can take minutes to boil a full kettle at our measly 1.5kW limit. Just checked. 7 minutes 30 seconds to boil 1.7L :(
- ajb 4y ago
  A lot of people in the UK use on street parking. You're not allowed to run a wire across the footpath even if you happen to get the spot outside your house. The current plan seems to be to make every lamppost into a slow charger, but that wouldn't be enough for everyone to replace their petrol vehicle.
  - midasuni 4y ago
    Most people don’t though. In England it’s 68% of homes that either have or have potential for off street parking https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standing-still https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi...
    - ajb 4y ago
      32% is still a big number to deal with. Government can't just write off that many car owners.
      - midasuni 4y ago
        They wrote off 48% just fine and seem to have been rewarded.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I’m also going to guess that people drive on average far less in the EU than in North America where I imagine a lot of critics are framing their mental model of the issue. A quick search suggests that the average annual distance in the US is about double.
mschuster91 4y ago
> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time. The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. They're not as rotten as the US grid, but still - barely any smart capability, no realtime insights anywhere but on the generation and distribution level, no small-scale dynamic load management... To support even 10% of an electric vehicle fleet getting plugged in after people arrive at home, not to mention large-scale small renewables, grid operators will have to do extensive upgrades. Street transformers need real-time load monitoring, PLC support must be present everywhere to make sure all the components of the grid can still talk to each other, and vehicle chargers and solar inverters need to talk with the grid as well. And there are barely any standards in that area.
- ivan_gammel 4y ago
  >The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. This is not a problem. Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. In the past they were upgraded at sufficient speed and economic model of that upgrade was reasonable. I do not see, why we won’t be able to continue the same way. We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. Barely. Grid regulation has exploded in cost in the last few years. > We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time. A lot of infrastructure has been barely, if at all, maintained for far longer timespans. The 2018 fire, for example, was caused by a worn-out hook that may have been at least 88 years old [1]. What makes you think that utility providers will do the necessary upgrades in that time?! [1] https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-a-pge-transmission-line-claimed-85-lives-in-the-2018-camp-fire/ https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-a-pge-...
    - 4y ago
javajosh 4y ago
installing chargers on light poles. That seems like a reasonable idea. Almost...too reasonable.
- uc_banana 4y ago
  I don't see what's reasonable about asking a streetlight installation designed to handle at most several hundred watts to suddenly provide several kilowatts.
  - the8472 4y ago
    Those installations are in the process of being converted from sodium vapor to LED, that should free up a few watts. And this doesn't have to be fast-charging. Combining a few hundred watts over night and at the workplace could be enough to cover the daily commute.
    - uc_banana 4y ago
      Assuming you live on a motorway and your local streetlight used 500W, and was converted to an LED that draws practically nothing, that frees up....about enough juice to add 20 miles of range over 12 hours. No wonder no-one bothers with this scheme.
      - the8472 4y ago
        That's merely the capacity that was freed up, it doesn't account for additional spare capacity in the wires. And I said "overnight and at the workplace", which should cover more than 12 hours. Maybe it's a bit tight but it should be enough to alleviate charging stops on most days. If you're going to make longer trips then may be a stop by a fast charger may be needed.
        jjk166 4y ago
        There isn't additional spare capacity in the wires that were designed only to power the light. While they almost certainly are rated for a bit more juice to deal with intermittent power surges and an appropriate factor of safety for design use, you still need that buffer for any application that draws 500W, so you can't persistently run above that level. And if you're charging when you park at home and at work, unless you find someone who works at your home and sleeps where you work, that's going to be around 2 streetlights per car, and even that's assuming 100% street parking with optimally arranged streetlights. For context, there are currently about 6 cars per streetlight in Europe, and their current total power consumption of 35 TWh/yr would be able to provide 20 miles of range per day to just 16% of that number of cars. Of course streetlights aren't normally running 24/7, but even if you triple the power usage (which the streetposts might not even be able to handle) you're still at less than half of what you'd need at a minimum. There's really no way around building substantially more charging infrastructure.
bluescrn 4y ago
> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. As usual, everything's just fine for the wealthy, with a new top-end Tesla with its nice big range, and parking/charging space on your own land. The wealthy people will probably be able to demand at-work charging at their 6-figure-salary tech jobs too. Not likely for the more average worker. Many people will be stuck with old/basic models of cars with smaller/degraded batteries. Many people are unable to charge at home due to living in apartments etc. And right now, many people are entirely priced out of the EV market, as the used EV market is still small. Also consider that filling up a petrol car takes ~2mins. Charging an EV takes 10-20x that. It's a huge time cost to have to sit around near a public charger, let alone having to queue to charge. And then there's the near-certainty of public chargers price-gouging like crazy once the demand is sufficiently high. For a large chunk of the population, this transition is going to be painful (If we survive another decade of 'omnicrisis' to even reach 2035 without world war, total collapse, or mass uprising of some kind, that is)
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  Consider who climate change is going to impact most? The climate transition, mass migrations, ecosystem collapses etc are going to hit the most vulnerable people the hardest.
  - prottog 4y ago
    Everything always hits the vulnerable people the hardest, as that's basically the meaning of the word. We can't use that to justify policy, since then any and every policy would be justified.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Climate change is likely to hit vulnerable people in the tropics the hardest. Europe did pretty well during the Medieval Warm Period. We should absolutely take steps to reduce CO2 emissions, but a slightly warmer climate is unlikely to be a disaster for poor people in the EU.
- uc_banana 4y ago
numbers_guy 4y ago
You need a charging port literally every two meters on all residential streets in all cities in all of Europe, because most people park outside and have no driveway/garage available. Also you charge ever 300 miles if you have an expensive luxury EV with a huge battery, which is definitely way beyond what the vast majority can afford, especially on EU salaries.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles But where? https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6 https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6 This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km. 53% of our country works outside of their place of residence, ~20% of people even drive more than 40km to work (and 40 back), and ~10% more than 60km one way. So, this means that a rather large percentage of people will need to "only charge their car for a few hours" every two days. And again.. where? If you have a house with a garage and cheap electricity, sure, you can. If you don't (as many not-rich people don't), you're basically fucked. Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-evs-150000536.html?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev... And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Not to mention the electric grids are getting overloaded, meaning they cannot add charging stations anymore until the grids have been upgraded - which will cost billions and years. This goes on top of a huge surge for renewables and getting rid of the dependency on gas - solar panels, heat pumps, infrared panels, electric stovetops and, indeed, electric cars. The will is there for sure, but we're running into real capacity issues. We can only go so fast. And the pessimist in me is saying it's too little, too late and we've passed the point of no return decades ago; no amount of switching to EVs will stop the polar caps melting (removing the ice means less sunlight is reflected), the permafrost melting (exposing sequestered plant material, their now decomposition releasing co2 and methane), and with that the glaciers melting (raising the sea level and lowering the salt content, causing the gulf stream to slow down / stop which will make the north colder and the equator warmer)
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
jtc331 4y ago
It's nice to be able to hand wave away the problem. "A few hours" is "10 hours", and the instantaneous energy for each of those is very high. When I charge my EV it doubles my normal peak electrical usage (in KW, instantaneous) and quadruples (or more) my average KW usage. In my new neighborhood a set of ~5 homes is connected to a 50 KVa transformer. Those five homes charging a single vehicle each at the same time is enough to overload that transformer even with zero other demand. That's a real problem. My understanding is that we're talking about a doubling of demand. Are we ready to double all of our electrical generation and transmission infrastructure?
- jtc331 4y ago
  I don’t understand the downvotes. These are specific datapoints we have to wrestle with to make this transition, not a position on desirability of any of these things.
aboringusername 4y ago
> Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time. The amount of turn-over of cars, daily, or even hourly at gas stations today is insane. As soon as you hit 50%+ of call cars being electric, there will be a % of those charging 24/7 (any hour/time of day, for possibly multiple hours). That's going to hit the grid. Hard. Now imagine in 2022/2023 where governments in the EU are giving citizens cost of living payments, money off their energy bills. And that's today. Apparently because one country invaded another. But people were scared they couldn't "heat their homes" let alone charge their cars. Whatever you are paying for electric today just times that by 3/4 because that's the realistic cost once EV's are the main vehicle on the road. As soon as EV's take off and become the "norm" the costs for electric will skyrocket. Wouldn't be surprised if it costs 1-2+ euros per kWh.
elif 4y ago
As someone that provides more energy to the grid than I draw from march to october, using solar panels I could afford in large part thanks to the economics of an electric car, it really bothers me when people use this argument. During peaker plant hours I'm pumping 3-4kW to my neighbors, actively reducing grid demand.. When my car charges itself at 4am, it is using base load nuclear that needs a destination. Also, using renters as the excuse in a wealth argument is disingenuous. That is an entirely separate poor financial decision. My house was purchased for 7 years of what my rent was costing when I bought it in 2012. In today's rent the figure would be much worse.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Well, in the peak you won't be able to charge your car due to all slots being taken with hours long queues, when you need to drive NOW. I don't think you realize how great throughput gas stations have with few pumps, compared to place where you need to park your car for X hours. 300 miles maybe for top models, but I don't think current generation of cheapest (=most popular) electric cars will be charged every 500km, nobody sane drives from full to empty. Electrified bikes require a bit more than just being available for purchase for often price of used basic ICE car. You need serious improvement in width and density in bike lanes, and they can't be shared with cars (or scooters/motorbikes). Many cities will struggle with that, unless removing car lanes completely. The oil infrastructure is everywhere because we had 150 years to develop and deploy it as needed. All this and much, much more to say - these are good moves, in right directions, but 2035 is utterly unrealistic even for rich countries, while eastern half of EU is far from rich and generally look at this Brussel activities as... clueless to be polite, very very polite. We can force it earlier than reasonable a bit, just a bit, but at costs which are insane while most of the world still burns coal and everything else like there is no tomorrow. Hard to explain to family with kids where parents earn equivalent of 800$ that they should buy this new electric car for 40k just to get to work because some bureaucrats thought that's the only way.
enigma20 4y ago
> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. You are joking, right? 300 miles is 482 km. On paper, yes. What about reality? See this CarWow video https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E?t=2240 https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E?t=2240 - Volkswagen ID Buzz - 203 miles - Mercedes EQA - 208 miles - Audi Q4 e-tron Sportback - 235 miles - Genesis GV60 - 253 miles - Nissan Ariya - 267 miles - Tesla Model Y - 285 miles And those are big, bulky SUVs with big batteries. What about small/medium hatchbacks? They will probably have 50-70% percent of that. Test done in UK. What about colder countries, or countries where winters are cold?

by ar9av 4y ago

midasuni 4y ago

In the U.K. the average car does less than 30 miles a day. Charging overnight would require a draw off less than 1kW. Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. My shower this morning was nearer 10kW.

uc_banana 4y ago
>Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. Indeed. When people's kettle usage was much more synchronised (ie, when TV advert breaks were a shared experience by most people), they had to build a power station just to cover this scenario (Dinorwic pumped storage). "Power station" is also quite generous, as it is only storage, and therefore is a net loss to the power grid. Even the most optimistic person has to admit that there's a limit to what can be done spread the additional load of 40 million EVs each needing to charge ~10kWh per day without grid upgrades and investment.
- midasuni 4y ago
  Except the grid can cope with peak usage into peoples housing when the ovens are on etc. Sure you may need some more power stations, but the actual capacity for the wires, substations etc can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.
  - uc_banana 4y ago
    >can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles. Not necessarily. At the scale of the national grid, a kettle is a very short-term load. I can't imagine that it would go well if 30 million homes decided to leave their ovens on all night.
0_____0 4y ago
As a USian who uses my kettle multiple times a day I'm a bit jealous of your fast boiling kettles. It can take minutes to boil a full kettle at our measly 1.5kW limit. Just checked. 7 minutes 30 seconds to boil 1.7L :(
ajb 4y ago
A lot of people in the UK use on street parking. You're not allowed to run a wire across the footpath even if you happen to get the spot outside your house. The current plan seems to be to make every lamppost into a slow charger, but that wouldn't be enough for everyone to replace their petrol vehicle.
- midasuni 4y ago
  Most people don’t though. In England it’s 68% of homes that either have or have potential for off street parking https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standing-still https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi...
  - ajb 4y ago
    32% is still a big number to deal with. Government can't just write off that many car owners.
    - midasuni 4y ago
      They wrote off 48% just fine and seem to have been rewarded.

Waterluvian 4y ago

I’m also going to guess that people drive on average far less in the EU than in North America where I imagine a lot of critics are framing their mental model of the issue. A quick search suggests that the average annual distance in the US is about double.

mschuster91 4y ago

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time. The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. They're not as rotten as the US grid, but still - barely any smart capability, no realtime insights anywhere but on the generation and distribution level, no small-scale dynamic load management... To support even 10% of an electric vehicle fleet getting plugged in after people arrive at home, not to mention large-scale small renewables, grid operators will have to do extensive upgrades. Street transformers need real-time load monitoring, PLC support must be present everywhere to make sure all the components of the grid can still talk to each other, and vehicle chargers and solar inverters need to talk with the grid as well. And there are barely any standards in that area.

ivan_gammel 4y ago
>The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. This is not a problem. Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. In the past they were upgraded at sufficient speed and economic model of that upgrade was reasonable. I do not see, why we won’t be able to continue the same way. We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. Barely. Grid regulation has exploded in cost in the last few years. > We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time. A lot of infrastructure has been barely, if at all, maintained for far longer timespans. The 2018 fire, for example, was caused by a worn-out hook that may have been at least 88 years old [1]. What makes you think that utility providers will do the necessary upgrades in that time?! [1] https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-a-pge-transmission-line-claimed-85-lives-in-the-2018-camp-fire/ https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-a-pge-...
  - 4y ago

javajosh 4y ago

installing chargers on light poles. That seems like a reasonable idea. Almost...too reasonable.

uc_banana 4y ago
I don't see what's reasonable about asking a streetlight installation designed to handle at most several hundred watts to suddenly provide several kilowatts.
- the8472 4y ago
  Those installations are in the process of being converted from sodium vapor to LED, that should free up a few watts. And this doesn't have to be fast-charging. Combining a few hundred watts over night and at the workplace could be enough to cover the daily commute.
  - uc_banana 4y ago
    Assuming you live on a motorway and your local streetlight used 500W, and was converted to an LED that draws practically nothing, that frees up....about enough juice to add 20 miles of range over 12 hours. No wonder no-one bothers with this scheme.
    - the8472 4y ago
      That's merely the capacity that was freed up, it doesn't account for additional spare capacity in the wires. And I said "overnight and at the workplace", which should cover more than 12 hours. Maybe it's a bit tight but it should be enough to alleviate charging stops on most days. If you're going to make longer trips then may be a stop by a fast charger may be needed.
      - jjk166 4y ago
        There isn't additional spare capacity in the wires that were designed only to power the light. While they almost certainly are rated for a bit more juice to deal with intermittent power surges and an appropriate factor of safety for design use, you still need that buffer for any application that draws 500W, so you can't persistently run above that level. And if you're charging when you park at home and at work, unless you find someone who works at your home and sleeps where you work, that's going to be around 2 streetlights per car, and even that's assuming 100% street parking with optimally arranged streetlights. For context, there are currently about 6 cars per streetlight in Europe, and their current total power consumption of 35 TWh/yr would be able to provide 20 miles of range per day to just 16% of that number of cars. Of course streetlights aren't normally running 24/7, but even if you triple the power usage (which the streetposts might not even be able to handle) you're still at less than half of what you'd need at a minimum. There's really no way around building substantially more charging infrastructure.

bluescrn 4y ago

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. As usual, everything's just fine for the wealthy, with a new top-end Tesla with its nice big range, and parking/charging space on your own land. The wealthy people will probably be able to demand at-work charging at their 6-figure-salary tech jobs too. Not likely for the more average worker. Many people will be stuck with old/basic models of cars with smaller/degraded batteries. Many people are unable to charge at home due to living in apartments etc. And right now, many people are entirely priced out of the EV market, as the used EV market is still small. Also consider that filling up a petrol car takes ~2mins. Charging an EV takes 10-20x that. It's a huge time cost to have to sit around near a public charger, let alone having to queue to charge. And then there's the near-certainty of public chargers price-gouging like crazy once the demand is sufficiently high. For a large chunk of the population, this transition is going to be painful (If we survive another decade of 'omnicrisis' to even reach 2035 without world war, total collapse, or mass uprising of some kind, that is)

jnsaff2 4y ago
Consider who climate change is going to impact most? The climate transition, mass migrations, ecosystem collapses etc are going to hit the most vulnerable people the hardest.
- prottog 4y ago
  Everything always hits the vulnerable people the hardest, as that's basically the meaning of the word. We can't use that to justify policy, since then any and every policy would be justified.
- nradov 4y ago
  Climate change is likely to hit vulnerable people in the tropics the hardest. Europe did pretty well during the Medieval Warm Period. We should absolutely take steps to reduce CO2 emissions, but a slightly warmer climate is unlikely to be a disaster for poor people in the EU.
uc_banana 4y ago

numbers_guy 4y ago

You need a charging port literally every two meters on all residential streets in all cities in all of Europe, because most people park outside and have no driveway/garage available. Also you charge ever 300 miles if you have an expensive luxury EV with a huge battery, which is definitely way beyond what the vast majority can afford, especially on EU salaries.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

> You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles But where? https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6 https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6 This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km. 53% of our country works outside of their place of residence, ~20% of people even drive more than 40km to work (and 40 back), and ~10% more than 60km one way. So, this means that a rather large percentage of people will need to "only charge their car for a few hours" every two days. And again.. where? If you have a house with a garage and cheap electricity, sure, you can. If you don't (as many not-rich people don't), you're basically fucked. Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-evs-150000536.html?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev... And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Not to mention the electric grids are getting overloaded, meaning they cannot add charging stations anymore until the grids have been upgraded - which will cost billions and years. This goes on top of a huge surge for renewables and getting rid of the dependency on gas - solar panels, heat pumps, infrared panels, electric stovetops and, indeed, electric cars. The will is there for sure, but we're running into real capacity issues. We can only go so fast. And the pessimist in me is saying it's too little, too late and we've passed the point of no return decades ago; no amount of switching to EVs will stop the polar caps melting (removing the ice means less sunlight is reflected), the permafrost melting (exposing sequestered plant material, their now decomposition releasing co2 and methane), and with that the glaciers melting (raising the sea level and lowering the salt content, causing the gulf stream to slow down / stop which will make the north colder and the equator warmer)
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago

jtc331 4y ago

It's nice to be able to hand wave away the problem. "A few hours" is "10 hours", and the instantaneous energy for each of those is very high. When I charge my EV it doubles my normal peak electrical usage (in KW, instantaneous) and quadruples (or more) my average KW usage. In my new neighborhood a set of ~5 homes is connected to a 50 KVa transformer. Those five homes charging a single vehicle each at the same time is enough to overload that transformer even with zero other demand. That's a real problem. My understanding is that we're talking about a doubling of demand. Are we ready to double all of our electrical generation and transmission infrastructure?

jtc331 4y ago
I don’t understand the downvotes. These are specific datapoints we have to wrestle with to make this transition, not a position on desirability of any of these things.

aboringusername 4y ago

> Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time. The amount of turn-over of cars, daily, or even hourly at gas stations today is insane. As soon as you hit 50%+ of call cars being electric, there will be a % of those charging 24/7 (any hour/time of day, for possibly multiple hours). That's going to hit the grid. Hard. Now imagine in 2022/2023 where governments in the EU are giving citizens cost of living payments, money off their energy bills. And that's today. Apparently because one country invaded another. But people were scared they couldn't "heat their homes" let alone charge their cars. Whatever you are paying for electric today just times that by 3/4 because that's the realistic cost once EV's are the main vehicle on the road. As soon as EV's take off and become the "norm" the costs for electric will skyrocket. Wouldn't be surprised if it costs 1-2+ euros per kWh.

elif 4y ago

As someone that provides more energy to the grid than I draw from march to october, using solar panels I could afford in large part thanks to the economics of an electric car, it really bothers me when people use this argument. During peaker plant hours I'm pumping 3-4kW to my neighbors, actively reducing grid demand.. When my car charges itself at 4am, it is using base load nuclear that needs a destination. Also, using renters as the excuse in a wealth argument is disingenuous. That is an entirely separate poor financial decision. My house was purchased for 7 years of what my rent was costing when I bought it in 2012. In today's rent the figure would be much worse.

saiya-jin 4y ago

Well, in the peak you won't be able to charge your car due to all slots being taken with hours long queues, when you need to drive NOW. I don't think you realize how great throughput gas stations have with few pumps, compared to place where you need to park your car for X hours. 300 miles maybe for top models, but I don't think current generation of cheapest (=most popular) electric cars will be charged every 500km, nobody sane drives from full to empty. Electrified bikes require a bit more than just being available for purchase for often price of used basic ICE car. You need serious improvement in width and density in bike lanes, and they can't be shared with cars (or scooters/motorbikes). Many cities will struggle with that, unless removing car lanes completely. The oil infrastructure is everywhere because we had 150 years to develop and deploy it as needed. All this and much, much more to say - these are good moves, in right directions, but 2035 is utterly unrealistic even for rich countries, while eastern half of EU is far from rich and generally look at this Brussel activities as... clueless to be polite, very very polite. We can force it earlier than reasonable a bit, just a bit, but at costs which are insane while most of the world still burns coal and everything else like there is no tomorrow. Hard to explain to family with kids where parents earn equivalent of 800$ that they should buy this new electric car for 40k just to get to work because some bureaucrats thought that's the only way.

enigma20 4y ago

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. You are joking, right? 300 miles is 482 km. On paper, yes. What about reality? See this CarWow video https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E?t=2240 https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E?t=2240 - Volkswagen ID Buzz - 203 miles - Mercedes EQA - 208 miles - Audi Q4 e-tron Sportback - 235 miles - Genesis GV60 - 253 miles - Nissan Ariya - 267 miles - Tesla Model Y - 285 miles And those are big, bulky SUVs with big batteries. What about small/medium hatchbacks? They will probably have 50-70% percent of that. Test done in UK. What about colder countries, or countries where winters are cold?