I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously?
If there's any place in the world that can do this it's Europe.
From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.
The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive.
Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs.
Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use.
Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.
Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing.
Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property.
There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run.
Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption.
Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.
"The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year."
These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.
Rest assured it will, and not only on the power grid.
Back of the envelope calculation.
A modern lamp post (one every 30 mt or so) is (led based) 60-80-100W, if infrastructure (cables) are not so recent, previous generation of street lightning were 150-250W per post.
Cables are dimensioned accurately to carry that kind of current/power.
A charging every 30 mt needs to serve 6-7 cars, we are talking of 7-10KW, i.e. 7000-10000 W, something like 40 times the power the infrastructure was designed for.
And each 300 mt stretch of street will need something in the order of magnitude of 70-100KW, and since all cars will be charged at night, there are very little to be spared for non-contemporaneus power usage.
In areas where the street lights are set onto the property side of the sidewalk (or even into lawns) rather than on the sidewalk abutting the street (most NA residential areas I think) I don't see this idea gaining a lot of traction. Or at least not remaining for long past the sidewalk turning into an obstacle course for the elderly and others with limited movement.
The first customers are people who can install a charging port where they normally park their car. That's probably more than half of car owners, and gets you to at least a double digit percentage of cars as electric.
At that point there are enough electric cars that a charger starts getting installed anywhere there's a lot of parking. Then more people can buy EVs, and do, so more chargers get installed. By the time most cars are electric they'll be everywhere.
Lots of essential infrastructure is cheap because of competition, like for example electricity generation. There is no reason to believe EV charging will be different.
Of course, it might also turn out that while electricity costs are low, other costs of running charging business are high. If that’s the case, that doesn’t bode well for EV adoption in among people who don’t live in houses.
I've been reading HN for years and people from the USA keep writing that this didn't happen there for fiber and other telecommunication service. Is it going to happen for EV chargers?
This is exactly what I'm saying though - motorway petrol stations are insanely expensive, because they have no competition - a company wins a contract to run the only petrol station on a given stretch of the A1, so they can charge obscene prices for petrol. Same is already happening with electricity - some providers along motorways charge an insane £0.69 per kWh, it would be cheaper to fill up another car with premium unleaded and use it to charge the electric car at that point.
There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth. 99% of the one we use is a byproduct of fossil fuel industry. Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it. Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
> There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth.
Not actually true. As I understand it, reserves of natural hydrogen do exist underground, similar to how helium is sometimes trapped underground in certain formations. These could potentially be huge source of hydrogen, although right now it's just speculation.
> Yes, you can produce it from electrolysis, but not only the hydrogen produced this way will never "break even" it's actually much worse than "even" since you then need to spend a whole load of energy to compress it and bottle it.
Since we live in a world of zero priced, and sometimes negatively priced renewable electricity, this is a non-issue. In fact, it's irrelevant. The biggest motivation for green hydrogen right now is the fact that we have far more green energy that we can use for large stretches of time on the grid. We're currently "curtailing" that electricity, which is a fancy word meaning that we're throwing it away. Turning what is in effect a waste product into a valuable new fuel is a big gain.
> Why not...just put the electricity into the existing grid and charge automotive batteries directly? After all, fuel cell cars are electric cars, direct combustion of hydrogen was experimental and extremely inefficient.
Largely because we can't match production with demand. As I mentioned above, we have huge surpluses during parts of the day, but also we have huge shortages at other times. Using hydrogen as a load balancer is an excellent idea right now. We can do this to a certain extent using batteries or pumped water, but we quickly run into the limits of these technologies. Hydrogen can be stored in far larger quantities than any battery in the form of underground salt caverns.
> That brings me to my next point - hydrogen has the smallest molecule of all, which means that it evaporates naturally through any container you put it in. 70kg lead bottle only holds 1L of hydrogen, and it naturally loses all of it in 2-3 weeks. So no underground carparks, garages etc because of the explosion risks.
Carbon fiber tanks have long since solved this problem. We know this since you can buy FCEVs right now, and they are perfectly fine vehicle with none of the above issues. Indeed, I've seen quite a few hydrogen skeptics review these cars, and while they maintain their skepticism of the idea of hydrogen, they seem to be at a loss at describing any kind of real shortcoming in the technology itself.
> But finally - there is no infrastructure for hydrogen. It's like trying to build a network of petrol stations....from scratch.
This is changing. There are now hundreds of hydrogen refuel stations around the world, and many more being built. This is particularly true in Asia, where governments in that region have sponsored huge hydrogen infrastructure buildouts.
> And batteries are definitely good enough to power larger trucks, it's just the cost that's prohibitive(enough cells for a large semi would cost many times more than the truck itself).
There many problems with battery powered semi-trucks. Cost is one of them, and weight is another big one. Furthermore, recharging them in a few minutes is a huge selling point, and batteries cannot deliver on that need. FCEVs are a much better answer for long-haul trucking than BEVs.
You can charge while you get groceries (or a haircut, or dinner, or whatever) and then go on with your day. Certainly not as convenient as charging at home, but not impossible.