7 ms·

Charging is an issue for almost everyone I know. If I could get my utility company PG&E to upgrade my power, I could consider it, but we're told we have to wait

by jms703 2y ago

Charging is an issue for almost everyone I know. If I could get my utility company PG&E to upgrade my power, I could consider it, but we're told we have to wait years. So we have no way to charge, and there are not enough chargers around here are.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
I know a bunch of people who charge on standard 120V/15A. That'll let you add 40 miles of range overnight. It's not as good as 240V/50A that'll fully charge your car in 4 hours, but it is enough that they only rarely have to visit local fast chargers.
- pdabbadabba 2y ago
  That's what I do. And I still don't even bother to charge most nights. If you live in a relatively urban area and don't do a lot of driving that is more than adequate.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    The problem is your emissions are minuscule and the difference between you owning an electric car or gas car is meaningless if your goal is to save the climate. The big, heavy carbon users need to switch. But they have needs that are difficult to serve by electric
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      Electric generation is the low hanging fruit but some nations are already at the stage that the power sector has lower emissions than the transport sector and it is probably the next dominoe to fall. The country saves money and gets cleaner air plus battery storage to aid in greening the rest of the grid.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Everyone needs to switch to carbon neutral eventually, not everyone has to do it at the same time.
      - blooalien 2y ago
        > Everyone needs to switch to carbon neutral eventually, not everyone has to do it at the same time. That was true decades ago, but now it's gone far too long without any real action, and things have gotten far enough out of control that everyone really does kinda have to do it at the same time if we want a shred of hope to turn this flaming bus ride over the cliff-edge around (or even slow it down at all). It could have all been a relatively painless transition, but now there will be suffering involved, and the longer it's delayed, the worse the suffering will be.
        ben_w 2y ago
        It was indeed already true decades ago. I would say that the transition we are currently witnessing is real action: while the pandemic made it difficult to be certain, the extremely rapid growth of renewables — even though electricity is far from the only concern — seems to have resulted in emissions either peaking or being very close to peaking. I'm not sure if we really could have gone much faster. 20 years ago I would have bet on nuclear energy and hydrogen cars, not because they were cheap, but because nuclear was already at the right scale and hydrogen can obviously be scaled up quickly whenever the energy is cheap. Instead, we got PV so cheap I'm planning on getting a balcony system with a pay-back period of less than a year because it makes sense to get that immediately while my partner and I plan how to do a full-power system, and batteries are so cheap they're not only used in cars but also for grid power time shifting. But to expand on what I said before, electricity is far from the only concern: we need to reduce emissions by 99.9% to be sustainable. If you look at this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector, the remaining 0.1% is the smallest line in the pie chart — "grassland". Switching all road transport to electric helps a lot (11.9%), it's not something to be dismissed simply because other things also need to be fixed.
    - sowbug 2y ago
      The direct impact of an individual vehicle is small. Collectively, they justify further investments in infrastructure and research, eventually addressing more needs.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      1 car has miniscule emissions, if you call 50 tons of CO2 emissions miniscule, I don't. 2 billion cars & trucks together comprise the largest source of carbon emissions.
      - monero-xmr 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - bluGill 2y ago
      My car is my biggest source of emissions in my life. (I use a heat pump except on the coldest days) Though I just got a PEHV, which has greatly reduced my profile. I also live where my electric comes from renewable sources (my local utility generates more wind in a year than all customers use), so I can just ignore the impact of electric generation. Yes making a car uses a lot of carbon, but the car lasts a long time and generally in a ICE car the carbon emissions from using it are greater the manufacturing.
    - johnea 2y ago
      I agree with the replies indicating emissions aren't trivial, but to answer to the more self-serving interests that are well represented on HN: have you experienced NEVER going to a gas station? Seriously, that is a great feature of EVs... Not to mention the massively reduced cost/mile. I expect my used Nissan Leaf to pay for itself in ~5years... Not to mention the AMAZING acceleration of even a non-performance oriented EV...
- jhenkens 2y ago
  Or, if we are getting fancy, 240V/20A, which can be run with just a single 12/2 Romex, provides around 3x the "range" per hour, since there is some fixed overhead losses to heat the battery pack, turn electronics on, etc. In new-ish (but not new enough to have EV charger prewiring) construction, garages sometimes have a dedicated 20A receptacle circuit for a garage freezer. If its a dedicated circuit with one outlet, you can rewire the 120V/20A to 240V/20A to get 3.8kW vs 1.4kW on a 120V/15A. The cost to do this (to code) would be about $150, or $50 if you don't care about GFCI. Could also buy a used, cheap, hardwired EVSE rather than making it an outlet.
  - neogodless 2y ago
    While it's not cost effective, I've been debating getting a $300 smart switcher that plugs into my dryer's 240V / 30A, and includes an adapter to the 50A plug my home charger users, while preventing charging while the dryer is in use. Dryer is next to garage, still need to make a "fancy" hole in the wall, but definitely like the idea of the faster, more efficient charging option. In the meantime, slow-ass 120V/15A charging is plenty for my needs.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      I've thought about that, but technically those are not allowed by code in most places.
- brabel 2y ago
  I did that for years, just using an average power plug (now I moved to a house that already had a fast charger installed). The car, a PHEV, came with the recharger and charged fully overnight. The car only goes around 40km on EV alone, but that's more than enough for my daily needs. And it's almost "free", we did not notice any change in the electric bill after buying the car!
  - bluGill 2y ago
    I find that the 30 miles my PHEV gives me is not enough for daily needs several times a week. Though I seem to be saving hundreds of dollars every month in gas while I haven't noticed a power bill increase (I've only had it for a few weeks so I can't fully gauge the impact, but so far it seems to line up with your report). At the point I can safely tell most people that they should just refuse to look at any new vehicle that isn't PHEV or full EV. Used car buyers should be willing to pay a lot more of the above - it will pay off in the long term.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Note that the big battery in a BEV is a great averaging mechanism. As long as your average drive is less than the amount you get from an overnight charge, you're likely fine. If you're adding 40 miles of range a night to a 300 mile battery, you have to have 4 consecutive days of 100 mile usage before you have to hit an external charger. Mix a few days of 20 mile usage between those 100 mile days and external charger usage is exceedingly rare.
tonmoy 2y ago
I don’t know where you live, but I charge my EV using two phase 240V outlet (same as the ones used by washing machine) and it takes about 8 hours to charge from 30% to full, which is more than enough for 99% of my use cases
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of people here who live in apartments have to wait for any electricity to be added to the parking lot at all, even 120V is generally unavailable. It's definitely restricting adoption.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    Yes, but also - people who live in apartments and condos are the most likely not to even own a car in the first place, and if they do, drive it the least. The people who are doing the most driving are the suburban folks living in houses with big yards and driving 30 miles into work every day. And that's a larger chunk of the total population in the US than the apartment dwellers who own cars. Your metro may vary. Rome wasn't built in a day. Charging will come to newer apartments, and then older apartments.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      In my metro there are a lot of apartments in the suburbs that are just as car dependent as any single family house. Some have bus service, but it is the service for those who after 5 DWIs can't get someone else to drive them, not the fast frequent service that makes people willing to take the bus if they have any other option.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        Sure, same situation here. Lots of apartments in mostly car dependent areas. But there's still a lot of single-family homes, yes? Like, the majority of people living in those areas are in single-family homes? So probably the majority of car owners?
armarr 2y ago
Unlike what some people think you really don't need a 7kW charger at home. A dryer outlet will charge a car fully overnight.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Depends on range. My PEHV only has 30 miles of range, sometimes my morning errands use that and it would be nice for a 1 hour charge over lunch for the afternoon errands. (most days 30 miles is plenty). Or better yet just mandate 70 miles minimum range which will get most daily errands.
Jcampuzano2 2y ago
This is a problem that an administration could easily solve given enough motivation, so it is fundamentally a problem with US administrations. Provide high incentives to provide easy access to charging infrastructure from federal funding. This is simply not an issue in many other countries that actually place value on modern infrastructure, or an issue that is quickly rectifying itself, except in the US. But that doesn't put money into oil profits and hurts their bottom line.
- bluGill 2y ago
  IT need not be federal. Your state can do more than the federal government - some of the most effective changes are things the constitution doesn't give the federal government power over. Require 50 amp capability to every parking spot for example is something only the states can do (possibly you can limit this to residential). For that matter states could just build good transit systems, while there are federal subsidies most states are big enough to go alone and pay for it out of the savings from their road budget.
grapesodaaaaa 2y ago
I can foresee a lot of places using battery “reservoirs” as batteries become cheaper. Gas stations don’t have pipelines straight to the pump. It only makes more sense if you want to make the grid greener & have price arbitrage based on the time of day. I’m sure there are problems with this (feel free to point them out).
- pornel 2y ago
  On-site battery storage is the standard for DC fast charging installations. It's already cheaper.
ben_w 2y ago
This is why I keep saying it's good to put PV cells onto cars *despite* that being a suboptimal place for the cells and the car bodies not being big enough to generate 100% of what they need. Putting them there makes the necessary grid upgrades much smaller than they otherwise would be.
- bluGill 2y ago
  A car and get maybe 200 watts in the best conditions - not enough to be significant. Even if parked in the sun all day you won't get much range from that. Now a semi truck might actually get significant added range.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    US collectively does ~3.3e12 miles per year[0], over 283e6 registered vehicles[1], or 32 miles per vehicle per day. EV efficiency is around 24-30 kWh/100 miles[2], so that's around 8-10 kWh/day. 200 W is what I expect as a 24h average; that's 4.8 kWh/day, 48%-60% of average usage. I'd expect a semi to be a much smaller percentage because of getting driven further each day — drivers get in the news for spending longer than they're supposed to behind the wheel. [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drivers-log-328-trillion-miles-2024-setting-new-record-2025-03-05/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drivers-log-328-trillion... [1] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/number-of-registered-vehicles https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/number-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_EPA_fuel_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_EPA_fuel_economy
    - bluGill 2y ago
      200w is an instantaneous measure, not a daily measure. I would guess just over 1kw/h generated over the course of a day - between the panels not being at the correct angle, clouds, and just how long the sun is up that seems reasonable. You could get a large SUV up to maybe 3 with the most efficient panels in the desert. I pointed out a semi because for long distance shipping they don't use much power (they get as much as 10mpg - but I don't know how to turn that into watts) and because of that long trailer they could potentially be close to energy neutral around mid-day (though only for a couple hours during ideal conditions).
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I briefly owned a Smart EV, a decade ago or so, and handily recharged it from 110 overnight. But obviously with a larger vehicle, longer range, larger battery capacity, charging it from low to full must be quite the consumption of energy. It would be nice if somehow we could move to lighter cars where the same range would require half the battery capacity, therefore half the charging resources to go from low to full.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Compromise. I love driving tiny cars, but once in a while I need to haul a large load (you can't rent a truck for this in many cases - I've tried: normally it isn't allowed in the contract even when it is there are restrictions. All that assumes you can find something for rent when you need it. So I drive a large truck. (well once a week I drive a large truck, most of the time I bike)
- vel0city 2y ago
  > charging it from low to full must be quite the consumption of energy Charging it from low to high generally uses the same energy as five charges of 1/5th the capacity.
subpixel 2y ago
I charge every night on standard power. I only ever charge using fast chargers when I’m over 100 miles away from home and want to drive back same day - this barely ever happens.
johnea 2y ago
I live in a house in San Diego, built in 1920. It has 240v AC, which I use to charge. I seriously doubt you need to "upgrade" anything, just plug in the car. Unless you're trying to have the highest grade fast charging at home, your existing electrical connection is almost certainly adequate. But since a car at home can charge overnight, you almost certainly don't need any kind of fast charging...

by jms703 2y ago

bryanlarsen 2y ago

I know a bunch of people who charge on standard 120V/15A. That'll let you add 40 miles of range overnight. It's not as good as 240V/50A that'll fully charge your car in 4 hours, but it is enough that they only rarely have to visit local fast chargers.

pdabbadabba 2y ago
That's what I do. And I still don't even bother to charge most nights. If you live in a relatively urban area and don't do a lot of driving that is more than adequate.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  The problem is your emissions are minuscule and the difference between you owning an electric car or gas car is meaningless if your goal is to save the climate. The big, heavy carbon users need to switch. But they have needs that are difficult to serve by electric
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    Electric generation is the low hanging fruit but some nations are already at the stage that the power sector has lower emissions than the transport sector and it is probably the next dominoe to fall. The country saves money and gets cleaner air plus battery storage to aid in greening the rest of the grid.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Everyone needs to switch to carbon neutral eventually, not everyone has to do it at the same time.
    - blooalien 2y ago
      > Everyone needs to switch to carbon neutral eventually, not everyone has to do it at the same time. That was true decades ago, but now it's gone far too long without any real action, and things have gotten far enough out of control that everyone really does kinda have to do it at the same time if we want a shred of hope to turn this flaming bus ride over the cliff-edge around (or even slow it down at all). It could have all been a relatively painless transition, but now there will be suffering involved, and the longer it's delayed, the worse the suffering will be.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        It was indeed already true decades ago. I would say that the transition we are currently witnessing is real action: while the pandemic made it difficult to be certain, the extremely rapid growth of renewables — even though electricity is far from the only concern — seems to have resulted in emissions either peaking or being very close to peaking. I'm not sure if we really could have gone much faster. 20 years ago I would have bet on nuclear energy and hydrogen cars, not because they were cheap, but because nuclear was already at the right scale and hydrogen can obviously be scaled up quickly whenever the energy is cheap. Instead, we got PV so cheap I'm planning on getting a balcony system with a pay-back period of less than a year because it makes sense to get that immediately while my partner and I plan how to do a full-power system, and batteries are so cheap they're not only used in cars but also for grid power time shifting. But to expand on what I said before, electricity is far from the only concern: we need to reduce emissions by 99.9% to be sustainable. If you look at this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector, the remaining 0.1% is the smallest line in the pie chart — "grassland". Switching all road transport to electric helps a lot (11.9%), it's not something to be dismissed simply because other things also need to be fixed.
  - sowbug 2y ago
    The direct impact of an individual vehicle is small. Collectively, they justify further investments in infrastructure and research, eventually addressing more needs.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    1 car has miniscule emissions, if you call 50 tons of CO2 emissions miniscule, I don't. 2 billion cars & trucks together comprise the largest source of carbon emissions.
    - monero-xmr 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - bluGill 2y ago
    My car is my biggest source of emissions in my life. (I use a heat pump except on the coldest days) Though I just got a PEHV, which has greatly reduced my profile. I also live where my electric comes from renewable sources (my local utility generates more wind in a year than all customers use), so I can just ignore the impact of electric generation. Yes making a car uses a lot of carbon, but the car lasts a long time and generally in a ICE car the carbon emissions from using it are greater the manufacturing.
  - johnea 2y ago
    I agree with the replies indicating emissions aren't trivial, but to answer to the more self-serving interests that are well represented on HN: have you experienced NEVER going to a gas station? Seriously, that is a great feature of EVs... Not to mention the massively reduced cost/mile. I expect my used Nissan Leaf to pay for itself in ~5years... Not to mention the AMAZING acceleration of even a non-performance oriented EV...
jhenkens 2y ago
Or, if we are getting fancy, 240V/20A, which can be run with just a single 12/2 Romex, provides around 3x the "range" per hour, since there is some fixed overhead losses to heat the battery pack, turn electronics on, etc. In new-ish (but not new enough to have EV charger prewiring) construction, garages sometimes have a dedicated 20A receptacle circuit for a garage freezer. If its a dedicated circuit with one outlet, you can rewire the 120V/20A to 240V/20A to get 3.8kW vs 1.4kW on a 120V/15A. The cost to do this (to code) would be about $150, or $50 if you don't care about GFCI. Could also buy a used, cheap, hardwired EVSE rather than making it an outlet.
- neogodless 2y ago
  While it's not cost effective, I've been debating getting a $300 smart switcher that plugs into my dryer's 240V / 30A, and includes an adapter to the 50A plug my home charger users, while preventing charging while the dryer is in use. Dryer is next to garage, still need to make a "fancy" hole in the wall, but definitely like the idea of the faster, more efficient charging option. In the meantime, slow-ass 120V/15A charging is plenty for my needs.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    I've thought about that, but technically those are not allowed by code in most places.
brabel 2y ago
I did that for years, just using an average power plug (now I moved to a house that already had a fast charger installed). The car, a PHEV, came with the recharger and charged fully overnight. The car only goes around 40km on EV alone, but that's more than enough for my daily needs. And it's almost "free", we did not notice any change in the electric bill after buying the car!
- bluGill 2y ago
  I find that the 30 miles my PHEV gives me is not enough for daily needs several times a week. Though I seem to be saving hundreds of dollars every month in gas while I haven't noticed a power bill increase (I've only had it for a few weeks so I can't fully gauge the impact, but so far it seems to line up with your report). At the point I can safely tell most people that they should just refuse to look at any new vehicle that isn't PHEV or full EV. Used car buyers should be willing to pay a lot more of the above - it will pay off in the long term.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Note that the big battery in a BEV is a great averaging mechanism. As long as your average drive is less than the amount you get from an overnight charge, you're likely fine. If you're adding 40 miles of range a night to a 300 mile battery, you have to have 4 consecutive days of 100 mile usage before you have to hit an external charger. Mix a few days of 20 mile usage between those 100 mile days and external charger usage is exceedingly rare.

tonmoy 2y ago

I don’t know where you live, but I charge my EV using two phase 240V outlet (same as the ones used by washing machine) and it takes about 8 hours to charge from 30% to full, which is more than enough for 99% of my use cases

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of people here who live in apartments have to wait for any electricity to be added to the parking lot at all, even 120V is generally unavailable. It's definitely restricting adoption.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  Yes, but also - people who live in apartments and condos are the most likely not to even own a car in the first place, and if they do, drive it the least. The people who are doing the most driving are the suburban folks living in houses with big yards and driving 30 miles into work every day. And that's a larger chunk of the total population in the US than the apartment dwellers who own cars. Your metro may vary. Rome wasn't built in a day. Charging will come to newer apartments, and then older apartments.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    In my metro there are a lot of apartments in the suburbs that are just as car dependent as any single family house. Some have bus service, but it is the service for those who after 5 DWIs can't get someone else to drive them, not the fast frequent service that makes people willing to take the bus if they have any other option.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Sure, same situation here. Lots of apartments in mostly car dependent areas. But there's still a lot of single-family homes, yes? Like, the majority of people living in those areas are in single-family homes? So probably the majority of car owners?

armarr 2y ago

Unlike what some people think you really don't need a 7kW charger at home. A dryer outlet will charge a car fully overnight.

bluGill 2y ago
Depends on range. My PEHV only has 30 miles of range, sometimes my morning errands use that and it would be nice for a 1 hour charge over lunch for the afternoon errands. (most days 30 miles is plenty). Or better yet just mandate 70 miles minimum range which will get most daily errands.

Jcampuzano2 2y ago

This is a problem that an administration could easily solve given enough motivation, so it is fundamentally a problem with US administrations. Provide high incentives to provide easy access to charging infrastructure from federal funding. This is simply not an issue in many other countries that actually place value on modern infrastructure, or an issue that is quickly rectifying itself, except in the US. But that doesn't put money into oil profits and hurts their bottom line.

bluGill 2y ago
IT need not be federal. Your state can do more than the federal government - some of the most effective changes are things the constitution doesn't give the federal government power over. Require 50 amp capability to every parking spot for example is something only the states can do (possibly you can limit this to residential). For that matter states could just build good transit systems, while there are federal subsidies most states are big enough to go alone and pay for it out of the savings from their road budget.

grapesodaaaaa 2y ago

I can foresee a lot of places using battery “reservoirs” as batteries become cheaper. Gas stations don’t have pipelines straight to the pump. It only makes more sense if you want to make the grid greener & have price arbitrage based on the time of day. I’m sure there are problems with this (feel free to point them out).

pornel 2y ago
On-site battery storage is the standard for DC fast charging installations. It's already cheaper.

ben_w 2y ago

This is why I keep saying it's good to put PV cells onto cars *despite* that being a suboptimal place for the cells and the car bodies not being big enough to generate 100% of what they need. Putting them there makes the necessary grid upgrades much smaller than they otherwise would be.

bluGill 2y ago
A car and get maybe 200 watts in the best conditions - not enough to be significant. Even if parked in the sun all day you won't get much range from that. Now a semi truck might actually get significant added range.
- ben_w 2y ago
  US collectively does ~3.3e12 miles per year[0], over 283e6 registered vehicles[1], or 32 miles per vehicle per day. EV efficiency is around 24-30 kWh/100 miles[2], so that's around 8-10 kWh/day. 200 W is what I expect as a 24h average; that's 4.8 kWh/day, 48%-60% of average usage. I'd expect a semi to be a much smaller percentage because of getting driven further each day — drivers get in the news for spending longer than they're supposed to behind the wheel. [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drivers-log-328-trillion-miles-2024-setting-new-record-2025-03-05/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drivers-log-328-trillion... [1] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/number-of-registered-vehicles https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/number-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_EPA_fuel_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_EPA_fuel_economy
  - bluGill 2y ago
    200w is an instantaneous measure, not a daily measure. I would guess just over 1kw/h generated over the course of a day - between the panels not being at the correct angle, clouds, and just how long the sun is up that seems reasonable. You could get a large SUV up to maybe 3 with the most efficient panels in the desert. I pointed out a semi because for long distance shipping they don't use much power (they get as much as 10mpg - but I don't know how to turn that into watts) and because of that long trailer they could potentially be close to energy neutral around mid-day (though only for a couple hours during ideal conditions).

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I briefly owned a Smart EV, a decade ago or so, and handily recharged it from 110 overnight. But obviously with a larger vehicle, longer range, larger battery capacity, charging it from low to full must be quite the consumption of energy. It would be nice if somehow we could move to lighter cars where the same range would require half the battery capacity, therefore half the charging resources to go from low to full.

bluGill 2y ago
Compromise. I love driving tiny cars, but once in a while I need to haul a large load (you can't rent a truck for this in many cases - I've tried: normally it isn't allowed in the contract even when it is there are restrictions. All that assumes you can find something for rent when you need it. So I drive a large truck. (well once a week I drive a large truck, most of the time I bike)
vel0city 2y ago
> charging it from low to full must be quite the consumption of energy Charging it from low to high generally uses the same energy as five charges of 1/5th the capacity.

subpixel 2y ago

I charge every night on standard power. I only ever charge using fast chargers when I’m over 100 miles away from home and want to drive back same day - this barely ever happens.

johnea 2y ago

I live in a house in San Diego, built in 1920. It has 240v AC, which I use to charge. I seriously doubt you need to "upgrade" anything, just plug in the car. Unless you're trying to have the highest grade fast charging at home, your existing electrical connection is almost certainly adequate. But since a car at home can charge overnight, you almost certainly don't need any kind of fast charging...