Where will all the electric cars be charged?
Where will all the electric cars be charged?
Lampposts and mobile charging machines are being touted as the answer to charging electric cars.
At a charger, probably. I'm no expert though.
Someone doesn't know what British (European) streets are like.
Which is the truth, pretty much everywhere. There simply won't be enough chargers, likely ever.
It's a repeat of what happened to biofuels. It was hyped as the magic solution for fossil fuels, until people began to realize that we weren't in any position to scale up production of biofuels to the levels needed. After a brief period when we fantasized about ideas like cellulosic ethanol or algae oil, which never really happened BTW, we ultimately just gave up on biofuels.
Battery powered cars are likely to do the same thing. We are at the point were we are realizing that this won't scale up. There's going to be a brief period of fantasy solutions to the problem too, but those probably won't happen either. After that, we will move on from BEVs.
This is the same problem ICE cars faced when they were rolled out. It isn't like there was a gas station on every corner when the Model T rolled out. As more and more EVs hit the road, charging availability will increase until we reach a point where chargers are ubiquitous. It may reach the point where every parking space has a charger.
This is a transitional issue that will resolve itself.
Except it's not the same, yet. Currently in the space you can have a fuel station cars can refuel in 5 minutes to full and be on their way making that pump available.
EVs need at least 30 minutes with the fastest charger to get from say 20 to 60 right? In either case they take up the bay. So you need to be able to handle many more at once.
If all bays are fast charge, that's a lot of power infrastructure required.
Now, all isn't lost. There's more ways to charge an EV. For example people can mostly charge at home, there could be ways to charge on the move (I don't wonder what kind of drag would be applied charging with induction) and then, yes charging points which we'd hope are used less often.
But the issue is the promises of X things done by Y year. Since there's just not been enough work done until now.
The footprints of chargers and gas stations aren't the same though. A lot of places I go have a row of 8-10 spots with chargers. No added footprint really, just installed at the front of the spot. Compare that to an 8-10 pump gas station, even without a convenience store. If you removed a gas station and replaced it with rows of spaces with chargers I think you'd get more cars through over a given period of time.
EVs need at least 30 minutes with the fastest charger to get from say 20 to 60 right? In either case they take up the bay. So you need to be able to handle many more at once.
No. The Hyundai IONIQ 5 and 6 (and likely 7) only need 18 minutes to go from 10% to 80%.
But I can charge my EV at home so I only use public chargers like once every couple months instead of refilling exclusively at the gas stations. I also see a lot of people paying small amounts at the gas station (like 10-20 euros) so I'm guessing they visit them once per week. I have no idea how this impacts the overall occupancy rate but my guess is that a lot of city cars will not use public chargers at all so it's not like we're moving all cars for gas stations to charging stations.
those fast chargers require huge infrastructure to scale out. 480v service.
Ffs, can we please please stop the car centric city? Can we please invest in public transportation, bicycle lanes everywhere, and walkable neighborhoods?
Climate change hats this one little trick where we don't design cities to be car dependent hellscapes, and it's good for your (mental) health too!
FFS can we please acknowledge reality that cars are not going anywhere anytime soon and that cars are going to be a part of the solution along with the expansion of public transportation and bike lanes that doesn't get people killed and city planning around less urban sprawl and stop treating this stuff like it's a zero sum game.
This is an article posted by the BBC, in the UK.
Our cities are perfectly walkable, and we have public transport links.
Having lived in the US with publicly run transit and in the UK with privately run transit I'd say there's a lot of 'it depends' you're glossing over here. Very city dependent
I'm actually really interested in this as a project I would like to understand what it would take to get this done. The scope creep in planning seems simply astronomical and I would like to know who the authorities are on city design at the moment.
I also think there is a cynical side to me that thinks that all the people who do city design take the money they make and dump it into a mc mansion out in the burbs anyway so the motivation of individuals with these skills seems skewed.
It boggles my mind, that solutions so obvious and simple are somehow framed as untenable. If 3/4 streets in Manhattan were made walkable/bike-able only (except for wee hours for trash and whatnot) - we could still get everywhere - less death - less pollution - more little shops - more trees - healthier.
Not looking forward to sidewalks and curbs covered in a tangle of car charger cables.
A tangle of cables? I’ll feel right at home! …and right at work! 🤣
It would be nice if more manufacturers would put multiple charge ports on cars. Most only have one. And I don’t think anyone is doing more than 2.
Having one on each corner would be dope and would reduce the length of cord that often needs to be run.
That's because all cars can park facing in any direction. Now drivers, that's another story...
I instantly saw a car parked sideways and charging on both ends..
I have a dirty mind.
If shopping carts are any indication Europeans will simply plug cables back into the chargers while Americans will be dropping them on the sidewalk and hiring people to organize them.
Tesla is developing a wireless charger. So these could be embedded in the street negating the need for cords.
@[email protected] home owners would certainly charge their EVs at home, so the issue really is for those in apartment blocks. By us most apartment blocks have reserved/paid bays, so I'd imagine it must be possible to fit pop-up type chargers? I'd expect apartment blocks would have to make a plan of sorts to meet car owners halfway. After all, if you buy/rent any apartment today, it normally has electricity wired (and water piped, and often Internet connected) to the unit. Why not the same for a parking bay?
If your apartment even HAS parking... Lots of blocks here get built with no plan for the associated traffic:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2012/07/new_portland_apartment_buildin.html
https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/09/portland_apartments_with_no_pa.html
I live in a suburb of Portland and in an apartment. Our management is nice enough to provide a covered space (a luxury!) for a single car. I got to thinking about EV's and if all of a sudden everyone here was driving them, there would be no place to charge them, but then why not place a charger in front of each parking space? Problem solved. Then, the managers would probably assess an additional fee on top of the already high rents for monthly charging privileges.
Living in this area does have it's advantages, you can drive just a short distance to the local library and hit up the chargers, there, or go to the stores and always find an open charger or two
I get and will readily admit that most cities don't have this so I appreciate the concern over EV charging stations. I don't know much about them as I drive a dinosaur powered Honda so it's not yet in my radar. :)
In lots of cities most people live in apartments with only street parking. Hopefully public transit will grow to fill the needs of people living in dense cities, though.
@[email protected] yes by us, most have parking allocation at a cost per parking bay. But yes, if no parking bays then the City should be providing better public transport. The first prize is to actually have less private cars on the road, through efficient and safe public transport.
Not an exotheric notion.
Besides special purpose built charging spots, available in the streets, my country is incentivizing the instalation of charging spots in supermarkets, shopping malls and regular gas stations.
Residential buildings have incentives to install charging spots and I've read that new construction has to have it by default.
It is doable. In extremis, regular street light posts can be retrofitted with the necessary hardware.
I would love to see chargers more incentivized at workplaces. As solar becomes more common charging during the day is going to make more sense than night. There are already ways to track charging costs and bill them out or just consider it a job perk. Most people don't need to charge 300 miles a day so even if every single employee drives an EV you probably only need to install enough chargers for somewhere like ¼ of the cars on site. Yes some people need to drive for work, but there are a lot of cars that sit all day and could be running on solar instead of charging off something else at night instead.
Convert the Office buildings into charging/parking garages 😎 /s
At home? Not like we are lacking electric outlets.
The problem is apartments without garages or without parking lots. See San Francisco, New York, etc.
As electric car ownership increases, apartments will be incentivized to install ways to charge them. Just like electric cars it'll start with high end apartments and trickle down. This may also incentivize apartment owners to install solar on their buildings to charge battery banks to save money on electricity.
Yeah, go on and charge an EV with your slow standard wall plug.
Unless you use most of the charge during the same day, it is quite doable.
Sure the charge is slow, but you can plug it in the evening and let it charge during the night, like you'd do for a smartphone.
Depending on the capacity you may not get a full charge, but it is enough for most uses. If it charges enough for what you'll do during the day, it isn't a problem at all.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A big advantage of repurposing existing lampposts is that cities don't have to dig in order to lay new cables, says Artis Markots, the chief executive of the Latvian start-up SimpleCharge, which is focusing on Central and Eastern Europe.
Trojan Energy is a Scottish company whose chargers sit flush with the pavement, resembling miniature manhole covers from the outside.
The UK company Nyobolt recently created Bolt-ee, a compact, ultra-rapid charger that can provide up to 300kW of DC power to charge a car within minutes.
Fully mobile charging could be useful for people with disabilities, says Liana Cipcigan, a professor of transport electrification and smart grids at Cardiff University's School of Engineering.
In terms of fire risks, Mr Shivareddy says that Nyobolt has carefully designed Bolt-ee to be ultra-efficient, and thus to generate very little waste heat.
As Prof Cipcigan says, there is much space for innovation in the EV charging market, and younger and smaller companies "could make an interesting impact on this very complex landscape".
The original article contains 1,108 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It will be interesting to know if the cables for these things can handle the load. On an individual level probable, but on larger scale?
It will be interesting to know if the cables for these things will be stolen for their copper or other metals on a regular basis.
Wherever they are, by installing a small diesel generator in the back. Just stop, start up the generator and recharge your car!
Do we have to read them their Miranda rights each time they are charged?
At your mums house gottem
My outlets bring all the boys to the yard.
She's been known to handle quite a few plug-ins at a time.
👉👉