For hydrogen you have to do much more significant build out. Apartments already have grid connections.
It's not just that. The grid is nowhere up to what is needed to support the majority of vehicles being EVs; take a look at this study[0] done by National Grid in New England, which shows the problem clearly. "Already have grid connections" is not enough for electrified long-distance travel or cargo-hauling, simply due to the amount of power required that far exceeds current capabilities.
Wires are just cheaper and lower maintenance. They are also more general purpose. Improving the grid will improve its robustness generally.
You are aware that liquids can be transported over land, not just in pipes, right? Like we already do for gasoline, in case you need a very concrete and relevant example. At least GP provided data, which is too rare around here.
You lose a lot in oil and gas trucking too, which is part of how you end up with stuff like "driving an EV powered 100% by coal emits less carbon per mile than an average gasoline car." It's not just the vehicle efficiency but the whole end-to-end system efficiency. Trucking fuel around is very expensive.
If you look back a bit, you might see that this whole thread started with me saying that I wasn't that keen on hydrogen. This is one of the reasons that I was suggesting ammonia or swappable batteries instead.
> Trucking fuel around is very expensive.
So is transmission over power lines. Transformers and wires are not free, nor are the rights of way they sit on, or maintenance of same in remote locations. 5-7% is lost in transmission, and more within consumers' homes. Sometimes there are fires. Let's not be too selective about which advantages and disadvantages we focus on for which alternative. That's called cherry picking.
sigh People presenting their personal, and often anomalous, experience as some sort of universal rule is the absolute worst HN habit. You took a statement about two categories of people for whom L1 is not enough, stripped one off, and only addressed the other with an untrue statement (clearly messing up on the difference between L2 and L3 in the process BTW). Are you that sure there isn't one person who's not getting by fine with level 1? That's all it takes for your statement to be false, and in fact statistics show there are many, making your excluded-middle pseudo-argument a bit pathetic.
Let me introduce you to the concept of thresholds. It's not necessary for everyone to need more than L1 regularly for lack of same to be a problem, nor did I claim that. There is simply some percentage of people being "left out in the cold" because of a bad ratio between vehicles and chargers, and we're already hovering right around that level. Availability of charging is already a major limiting factor in adoption, which wouldn't be the case if anything you said were generally true.
The reason I know this is that I own an EV myself. The ad hominems elsewhere in this thread about discouraging EV usage made me laugh. I'm personally doing fine because I own my own home and had my own dedicated 240V circuit put in for charging, but I know many people for whom that's not the case. I'm well aware of things like how cold or speed affects range, or the actual availability of L3 chargers. I want EVs to succeed, and (unlike some here) I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is.
When you see someone claim that working unoccupied public chargers are plentiful, there's always a good chance you're dealing with someone who doesn't even own an EV (the most common case), hardly drives it at all, or works at a FAANG where free charging is a perk. None of those are the real world of most EV drivers.
Please don't parrot lies pushed by the fossil fuel industry. I've seen far too many people on this site that have clearly never been within 100 feet of an EV repeating obviously wrong "information".
There are plenty of first person accounts on YT, Twitter, and other social media where people report being unable to charge their EV because the energy needed to keep the battery warmed exceeds the available power for charging
Please stop blaming everything on some kind of conspiracy by the evil oil industry, you sound like qAnon when you do that.
This bad behavior is well-documented. Start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Please stop trying to dispute facts. If you're going to argue, you should at least attempt to not be ignorant of the basic relevant facts.
Your car is likely going to be using 400-450 wh per mile until it’s warmed up and maybe down to 320 wh per mile for the rest of the trip. That’s ~10 kWh for your one day commute.
Now this is assuming basically a lot of perfect conditions for winter time driving. Also it’s assuming no traffic, because once you add waiting in traffic while heating up the interior of the car the power use skyrockets.
Also this is assuming you’re even able to hit 90% charging efficiency on 110V which honestly I’ve never seen personally.
It helps that I've got a 62 kWh Leaf, so I've got lots of range to start with.
I don't know what your situation is, but you'll honestly probably have good luck with just finding a regular outlet somewhere at work and trickle charging. I've done several vacations where I just asked where an outlet was, and left the car to charge up to 100% for the return trip. It's a lovely trick that gas cars can't duplicate.
This is one of the things non North Americans don’t have to worry about.
Think for a sec. Large concrete structure right?
So you can't lay your wire in the concrete parts, which means you're putting it in conduits...that are exposed, and open to be harvested by people looking to repurpose the copper wiring for other things.
Or you're doing inductive charging via copper loops in parking spaces, but then maintenance is potentially impacted.
Point being "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Nothing is technically complicated about it, but a great many landlords are unwilling to incur even the tiniest expense. Have you never seen an apartment with inadequate insulation? With leaky plumbing? I've seen plenty, even when it was the landlords themselves who ended up bearing a cost greater than simple improvement would have incurred. Sometimes it's a liquidity issue, sometimes it's "boiling frog" syndrome or pure laziness, but no matter the reasons it's reality.
> My apartment in Brooklyn had plugs 3 years ago
How nice for you. Are all of your experiences universal?