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The edge case I’m worried about is travel time during the holidays. Between LA and Phoenix is a desolate stretch of freeway running through a small number of es
by jmpman 3y ago
The edge case I’m worried about is travel time during the holidays. Between LA and Phoenix is a desolate stretch of freeway running through a small number of essentially truck stop towns. The most isolated one, Quartzite, has an enormous Tesla supercharging station, which just doubled in the last year. It’s virtually essential to stop in Quartzite on the drive in a Tesla. I made that drive a week after Thanksgiving, and the new Tesla superchargers are behind a brand new gas station. While stopping, I asked the clerk how the wait was during Thanksgiving, and he indicated that it was through the roof. Now, Quartzite and its grid can currently handle the peak Tesla traffic between LA and Phoenix on the busiest holiday travel weekend, with significant wait time, but can it handle the 100x increase required for full electrification? I’m skeptical. And the we have square miles of essentially idle chargers outside of this peak travel period? Seems wasteful. How do we feed the peak power demand to these tiny towns? New huge transmission lines to these isolated towns? Diesel generators? Tesla power packs?
- arkh 3y ago> How do we feed the peak power demand to these tiny towns? Like petrol station: charge some reservoir batteries during off hours and then you're able to discharge this energy fast. The problem then is the energy density of batteries making it so you'd need a gigantic battery / capacitor to replace a lot smaller fuel tank.
- jmpman 3y agoNow you’ve got to have a 75KW of grid storage available for these peak use cases for every car. Quartzite currently has 120 charging spaces. 100x increase boosts that to 12,000 spaces. That’s all the parking at the Mall of America. Mind boggling. 150KW for each spot, and that’s 1.8GW of power. To put it in perspective, one of the three Palo Verde reactors produces just 1.4GW. Mind blowing.