95% of the time you are correct, it would be just fine to charge in my garage and who cares if it takes 12 hours as the car isn't moving anyway. However a couple times a year I - like most people - take a longer trip and depends on the infrastructure that allows me to refill my car in a few minutes and get on my way.
With that said, electrical infrastructure is ubiquitous. You can install EV chargers anywhere there is power.
Of course what I'm lacking is knowing how much this will affect things long term. Right no charging stations are being installed on hope they are worth it, if this turns out to be false owners will start to tear them out.
It's a net positive if we push petroleum refueling stations out of business. They sell a harmful product that we're working to phase out rapidly through electrification of transportation, and there will be a cost to remove and remediate petroleum storage tanks that were used at these stations.
In short, the EV charging infra will be built, but if there's someplace you want to go that doesn't have chargers, make it known to those folks you're looking for that amenity (now, or in the future).
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/09/29/210091...
There was a Tesla charging station within walking distance of most of the places we stopped for gas, food or lodging. I don’t think the trip would have taken any additional planning with an EV.
You have a battery pack that you own and maintain carefully, and you absolutely do not want to rent it out to anyone. So you use it day to day transport and charge slowly overnight, perfect to prolong life.
When time comes to make a long, cross country trip, you visit a swap center and deposit your battery, and switch to rented batteries for the duration of the trip, while paying a charge+rent fee. When you come back from the trip, your own battery is waiting for you at the same station, charged and stored in good conditions. Or, you can make the first leg of the journey on your own battery, then have it shipped back to a station near your home before you return; by necessity the network will have to perform rebalancing anyway for the rental stock.
I know Tesla demoed battery swap, but they were only interested in the associated subsidy and not keen on it because it requires a large stock of batteries that they had no capacity to produce in large quantities at the time. When safe and cheap batteries are available in quantity, they will pretty much be forced to revisit this model or face tough competition from charge networks that can handle swap.
DC fast charging seems like a much more practical solution for the occasional cross country trip
It's either that fast charging attains exceptional safe speeds (i.e less than 5 minutes), or that competitive pressures will force electrics to embrace swap. The current status quo of waiting an hour for a full charge cannot stand on the long term; the lost productivity is so large that it completely dwarfs the costs of implementing the swap networks, so somebody is bound to package it in a consumer friendly product and pocket the profits.
The only real margin is the swap hardware and any structural binding parts designed to pass loads towards the battery frame as if it was built in part of the fixed frame. True, it makes no sense to design and include those parts when swap is not on the market, so it's a tradeoff. But is it a salient tradeoff, does it make the car with the built-in battery significantly better? Only very marginally I would say.
The same for aerodynamics, there is really only one place to put a large battery pack, it's not like you can gain lots of design liberty by putting an unconventional shape battery in the bumper or in the roof. Swappability of the underside of the car has no impact on aerodynamics.
There is only one place to put a large battery pack. However there are lots of places to put a smaller battery back. Or you can have a non-rectangular battery pack in that one place to better fit the room you have. Cars are about compromises, so a standard swapable battery pack will be smaller than the customized for the car one you can make. A tiny economy car doesn't have as much space as a large family car so plan is harmful to families that want to go on vacation as they have to stop more often.
In the same way street lights are pretty much everywhere today.
You could imagine a special type of paving stone that has a magsafe socket in, and you just pull a wire from your parked car to the kerb.
People can't get lousy fiber pulled to their houses and you're talking about multimegawatt electricity supply.
Fast DC chargers will always cost more due to the need for expensive power electronics.
But that doesn't mean everybody in your neighborhood can draw 24KW all night long. Those are maximal currents for intermittent loads like heaters, clothes driers etc. You might have a single 100KVA polemount transformer suppling a whole street and a single 15KV / 300Amp line servicing a whole neighborhood.
When everybody attempts to draw even 5-10KW in the air-conditioning season, you get circuit breaks because the main feed is incapable of supplying sufficient power. The upgrading will be done but it will take a decade or more, especially considering the push from local municipalities towards buried power feeds which are very expensive.
The average commute in the US is 50 Km per day and if that is the average it is reasonable to assume some communities will be highly correlated above average, for example if they are 40-50 Km away from a large economic hub, a large proportion of residents will drive the 100Km roundtrip per working day. The lower price of electric comute will prompt many residences to have two electric cars driving the average every working day, for a total, again, of 100Km = 20KWh. So double digit is not exceptional, it will be the average, an extra 3KW of power for each household for the entire night, assuming an outstandingly smart grid that can perfectly level off demand.
Combine that with rare events like hot nights and large movements, psychological reactions like panic, and you have an unreliable local supply that might trip every few months without expensive upgrades.
There is plenty of capacity available, provided charging is spread out over the night and not concentrated at peak demand periods. You just need chargers that are smart enough to ensure this happens.
1 MW would be enough for just ~150 chargers. And where would you get that megawatt at night? More base load, which means nuclear or fossil which means less niche for solar because no one would shut down such amount of base load generation each day.
Besides 60 amps isn't exactly cheap in electronics. It might not require active cooling for the cable and the battery, that's true.
Only if every car in your neighbourhood is plugged in and pulling 7 kW at the same time.
Smart charging solves this, by reducing charging during demand peaks (ie: 6pm when everyone is arriving home from work and plugging in at the same time), and increasing it later in the night when more capacity is available.
That's about 37 miles per day, so about 12.5 kWh per night on average at ~3 miles per kWh. And remember, those who are driving long distance are probably going to be using fast chargers on-route, so their domestic charging demand will be lower.
Secondly, even if they did need 40 kWh every night, that only equates to 4 kW over a 10 hour charging cycle. Easily manageable by avoiding the typical late afternoon / early evening peaks. Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM.
So no. Switch most commute to electric - then at first grid goes down, then power plants struggle.
"Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM" - that's not the grids we're talking about. HV circuits might not feel it, but something laid down for a suburb was scrupulously designed to carry only just enough, because it's basically burying refined metal, be it copper or aluminium.
There is no spare even 4KW for every house and never has been because that would have cost more in about everything - meters, cables, multiple stages of step-down transformers, transmission lines, generation.
Electicity is not free, never has been, and distibution costs are surprisingly a very important consideration.
Yes, there is. It's just the timing that matters. Domestic electricity demand during off-peak overnight hours is as little as 1/3 as it is at peak time. If all those houses can run 4 kW of air conditioning, or heating, or electric ovens at 6PM, then there is 4 kW to spare at 2AM.
This issue has actually been studied in some detail by the UK's National Grid. The conclusion was that additional demand from millions of electric vehicles would cause issues if they all were charged at peak times. But, provided demand can be managed, existing grid infrastructure can cope with an entirely electric vehicle fleet with modest investments in the coming years/decades.
Fun fact: UK grid demand used to be significantly higher than it is today. It peaked at 62 GW in 2002, but it now rarely gets above 45 GW, despite significant population growth! Much of this reduction in demand is due to improved energy efficiency.
If we could handle 62 GW in 2002, then there's no reason that we can't handle 62 GW again in, say, 2042.
There is - supply and grid maintenance was scaled down with demand.
The grid certainly can be rebuilt to 2002 state in UK, but this will not be cheap.
The other point that I was making is that any deviation from current patterns, like night demand significantly growing will require significant changes in generation.
It doesn't need "rebuilding". The grid, broadly speaking, hasn't changed since 2002. Generation has changed dramatically, but generally the transmission lines that served old power plants do not get removed when the plants close. They're still there, still active, and are often reused (for example, off-shore wind farm built off the coast from closed coal plant).
> "The other point that I was making is that any deviation from current patterns, like night demand significantly growing will require significant changes in generation."
First you were talking about lines, now you are talking about generation. But it's the same story. Power plants get turned off and curtailed at night because there is less demand. If demand increases at night? Plenty of spare capacity available, they just need to run for longer.
I do not account for transmission inefficiencies, as this is highly variable depending on your location and grid infrastructure. But it would be extremely unusual for transmission losses to be as high as 66% like you suggest!
As for charging losses, that's something like 10%. About 90% of the energy as measured at your domestic electricity meter will make it into the battery. I did account for this, by giving a deliberately low miles per kWh figure. In reality, most EVs will get significantly better efficiency than the 3 miles per kWh that I quoted.
These are quite widely deployed in a few London boroughs.
(I totally agree about fewer cars, but remaining ones must be electric. And electric cars need charging infrastructure.)
- Heviz to Saint Tropez 1200km
- Empuriabrava to Malaga 1100km
- Porto to Andorra 1100km
- Krakow to Bucharest 1200km
- other shorter trips (700km-800km)
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- business trip Bucharest to Leipzig 1600km (I go much farther without passengers)
- Leizig to London 1200km (slow ferry)
- etc
I drive a diesel and it's just excellent for my family's holidaying, we would be wasting considerable time charging, reducing the overall time to enjoy the tour's destinations.
That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time.
(I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
It may not be viable to maintain a large fleet of family-vacation-type vehicles just to satisfy the demand for summer holidays in August and ski trips in February.
This is merely an interstitial time until you can run from Bucharest to Leipzig with fast charge stations in every town and village along the route.
The vast majority of car users do not refuel a full tank daily, which is a good indicator of their driving habits being perfectly compatible with overnight slow-charging with plenty of capacity to spare. (If the user normally refueled a full tank daily, and got an electric car with a small battery, work-place slow-charging might be needed.)
The vast majority, should they go on a long car trip (note that this universally popular), will not be doing completely uninterrupted driving for 12 hours. They will need at least a few sizable breaks for food, toilet and leg stretching. If breaks are taken around a fast charger, a 20 minute break can give you 50% charge, 40 minutes giving 80% charge. If the drive is for vacationing, the stops will likely all be long enough for full charges as people see the sights.
Even with your driving, it seems reasonable to pull off with fast charging, assuming you have human physiological needs and assuming you drive safely and responsibly (i.e. break with rest every N hours to not lose attention and fall asleep, where N is usually ~4). Maybe your average speed would drop a bit, but that's not that important.
Aren’t you “wasting considerable time” by having to sleep as soon as you arrive at your tour destinations?
Perhaps "each night" isn't the right choice of words, "every 3 nights or so" would be more accurate.