In Europe it is the same situation. I think they want to prohibit combustion engines for new trucks by 2030, meaning that all new trucks will need to be EV. To charge a single EV truck in 1.5 hours on the Autobahn (this is the common break time for truck drivers), you'll need 80kW EV loading (that's 80000 Watts for a single truck). Imagine there're 20 trucks charging at 80kW on a single autobahn rest area. I don't know who came up with this time schedule, the grid cannot support this and I think it is quite challenging to scale it enough till 2030.
That slow? This is a half of a single average wind turbine.
Tesla already has supercharger sites with over 50 dispensers capable of 250kW. In the UK gridserve has built a charging site with a 10MW solar array, battery storage, and 350kW chargers. Fastned has many 10 x 300kW charging sites in west Europe.
However ICE trucks and cars will continue running for years to come maybe only prohibited in city centers which is fine.
Still the Russia vs Ukraine situation show how europe is vulnerable and dependent of gas from Russia and Africa. This will only give more leverage to external forces to influence european politics.
Just as with passenger cars, ICE trucks will become uneconomic, due to fuel and maintenance costs, before they run out of fossil fuel. The transition will be much faster than you might think. It will be well underway in ten years from now.
I somewhat agree but it will all depends on the capacity of the grid.
This year is the very first one when people were asked in some parts of europe to reduce their consumption and prepare for potential outages during winter. Depending on the geopolitics, things could improve or worsen. A nuclear plant do not get build in 6 months.
A standard European 400 kV power line can transmit more than 1 GW over hundreds of kilometers. Upgrading the grid will not be cheap, but the required technology has been well established for over a century.
"An academic study suggested the e-highway system covering all but the most remote parts of the UK could be completed by 2030 at a cost of £19 billion (£26.4 bn),"
In context that's about the same cost as Crossrail.
Interesting, if that becomes a thing then a lot of trucks could arguably do with a lot less batteries and thus waste less power lugging them around. Sounds like a win-win.
Probably they want to halve the times in your example to 3/4th hour.
They may be able to have 10 charging stations instead of 20, but the overall grid consumption will remain the same 1600-2000 kW is a lot of power and the need for dedicated power lines won't change.
~250-350kW 800v chargers are the current top-dog DCFC charger systems in the EU, US, and elsewhere and they're increasingly common.
Pairing stations with "local" battery buffer is a thing, as it reduces the need for local infrastructure upgrades and the systems can also help pay for themselves by acting as part of a 'virtual power plant'.
The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...
>The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...
Well, HN is not a specialised high power electricity engineers forum, though the original article is (IMHO) a little scare-mongering it seems like delivering a correct message, (in a nutshell) a lot of work for new lines and substations will be needed to be able to charge cars and commercial electric vehicles.
If really-really the transition will happen in the 2030's for passenger cars and in the 2040-2050's for trucks, it's not a bad idea to start working on these grid extensions.
> ~250-350kW 800v chargers are the current top-dog DCFC charger systems in the EU, US, and elsewhere and they're increasingly common.
Yes, but those are mostly for 'residential' / non-commercial applications. For more commercial / industrial application a new system is being developed:
> The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) is a charging connector under development for large battery electric vehicles. The connector will be rated for charging at a maximum rate of 3.75 megawatts (3,000 amps at 1,250 volts direct current (DC)).
The article/study talked about the battery thing and said it was an impractical solution for the projected scale (peak demand times + for all trucks traveling down highways * 71 charging stations) and this will have to require direct involvement with grid infrastructure.
> A growing number of EV-charging sites are adding batteries that can store up grid power at times when chargers are sitting idle and provide it when charging loads exceed available grid capacity, he noted. But that’s far from “the most optimized solution,” he said, particularly as loads grow to multi-megawatt scale.
And if they do want/have to stop, imagine charging at a rate of up to 3750 kW:
> The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) is a charging connector under development for large battery electric vehicles. The connector will be rated for charging at a maximum rate of 3.75 megawatts (3,000 amps at 1,250 volts direct current (DC)).
Why do we need trucks, in this case? All the rubber contaminating the environment when what you describe is the Electric Train that existed for 60+ years.
> All the rubber contaminating the environment when what you describe is the Electric Train that existed for 60+ years.
A freight train won't be able to deliver something to my house. Nor would it likely be able to transport livestock or grains from a farm to a processing plant.
There are medium- and short-distance trips where a truck makes more sense, and they may have to drive on a highway in that case.
And as someone who lives in Canada, where there are large distances between major metro areas, electrifying all those rail kilometres may not be practical, so even trains may have to stay on fossil fuels in certain situations.
> Nor would it likely be able to transport livestock or grains from a farm to a processing plant.
In Europe in the 1920s, every bigger plant had direct train access, it is possible and would make a lot more sense than stuffing precious lithium in millions of trucks that will still pollute the environment. For edge cases (delivery of the last mile), there are a lot of smaller solutions available than 20t+ trucks.
> I don't know who came up with this time schedule, the grid cannot support this
Definitely the grid cannot support it today, which is why we need goals and a timeline to push ourselves rather than wait, if moving to EVs is our future. Maybe the schedule was known to be aggressive and the point of the schedule is to start now and aim high with the infrastructure, to create electricity supply simultaneously with demand, rather than wait for demand to exceed supply and then be stuck waiting for infrastructure? Either way, even if the timeline is a little too fast, and it takes another 5 or 10 years to get there, it can serve a useful purpose as a goal that aligns everyone and a catalyst that leads to action now, no? What if we’ll be late anyway, will it just take even longer if we don’t set aggressive goals? And hey, maybe we can surprise ourselves. History has many examples of how fast we can move as soon as we all agree on the goal and try hard.
The increase in load will be gradual and the charging & transmission capacity will not need to be built overnight "in 2030". It's just normal power engineering with demand trend known well in advance.
I think a target more like 2050 would actually be feasible but the likely motivating factors at play here are a combination of climate doomerism and degrowth ideology. The mistake is thinking that they don’t want people to suffer.
Certainly part of the problem is the protocol of the highway system itself, and our expectation as consumers. Passengers can get by on 30kg ebikes we need a lane system for those on all roads, not just a 'take your own risks bike lane'. 1500kg passenger vehicle curb weight should not be the starting point for passenger vehicles. But no one takes this on because it's regulatory and a quagmire.
Trucking is an unavoidable issue, but (at least in the US) there is plenty of space for combined solar/wind/battery sites on trucking corridors.
Have you been to The Netherlands? I was a tourist for 3 weeks, and it was quite a common sight to see a family with young kids coming out their apartment stairway, babies loading on to carriers on mom and dad’s bikes and small children riding their own.
Seeing as how children are at extreme risk from cars yet can’t use them themselves, and chauffeuring your kids around because it’s not safe for them to walk or bike themselves is almost the central time sink of parenthood, it is weird to see parents as the primary advocates of car primacy.
Have you been to the United States? The idea of loading 3 kids on some bikes and riding 10 miles to school, then 15 miles the other direction to work in the midwest on a winter day (temps get into negative fahrenheit in many parts of the U.S.) (or the south/southwest on a hot 100F+ summer day) is laughable. God forbid some after school activity is another 10 miles out of your way or you need to pick up something on the way, or carry them to your parents house which is another 25 miles away.
No one is coming to put a bike lane on the kind of seasonally impassable dirt road that is reasonably found 10 miles from the nearest school. If you want to live deep in the middle of nowhere, no one’s stopping you. But when you come into the kinds of communities that actually sustain the institutions you need (school, work, etc) they aren’t obliged to give over all their public space and put their lives at risk for your truck to move as freely as possible.
The closest religious school I'm considering for my son is over 20 miles away currently, and obviously I can't move over night to reduce that. I also don't live on a narrow dirt road - I live in a city in a community with probably hundreds of houses
There's also no reliable transit option to either location.
Am I suppose to just suck it up, throw out my vehicle, and bike 90 minutes there just to drop him off?
Car primacy is not the same thing as the ability to drive at all. Cars are obviously useful, and lots of trips wouldn't be feasible without them. But streets in populated areas shouldn't be designed around this kind of trip as the only or primary use case. People choosing the local schools, for example, should have streets on which they can can feel confident walking or cycling, and not need their own vehicles just because you're using one.
I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal. Even then, you might be surprised - adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars. On balance it could work out in your favor.
They say the car erased distance. I don't think we should go back to a primitive era of distance being literally insurmountable, but I do think it would be healthy to rediscover a bit of respect for it.
> People choosing the local schools, for example, should have streets on which they can can feel confident walking or cycling, and not need their own vehicles just because you're using one.
I entirely agree, but we all have to live with the world that we're currently in. It can take years or decades to re-envision a car-dependent area into something more car independent. For example, painting a white line over a highway's current gutter is not pedestrian/bike/transit infrastructure. It's dangerous for everyone. Yet, that's the type of "bike-friendly infrastructure" we get, and when drivers complain, it's viewed as drivers being anti-transit or anti-bicycle. No, it's just dangerous. The bike route shouldn't be inches from a high speed motorway.
> I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal...adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars.
No, it does not. Maybe in your area, it would, but here, it does not, because it's simply too far and unsafe to bicycle on the highway. It's dangerous and bad engineering. It's 5 miles (or 27 minutes according to Google) on major highways to the local elementary school. No one should ever be on a bicycle on these highways, regardless the fact that a small part of that distance might have a painted white lane denoting a bike lane full of road debris.
Instead, there should be a bicycle/pedestrian path that goes a more direct route - the distance is only 2 miles straight (or ~10 minutes), without crossing any major highways or difficult terrain. The school is also only 1.5 miles from a very nice park, but the highway would cross the path, so that conflict would need to be figured out.
Sorry if this comes of as combative, but what I'm pointing out that "painting a lane" simply does not work in the US, but that's all that is suggested and done. Streets and Roads need to be separate, and bikes should remain on streets or non-Road routes, and high speed vehicle travel should remain on roads. Not Just Bikes says this in his channel "Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous", but does so more to clarify/elevate the "Street". However, the discussion tends to miss that the "Road" is still important and needs to be respected. Putting a bike lane on a "Road" is another form of creating a "stroad".
If you're plugged into Not Just Bikes then I'm guessing you've heard the phrase "paint isn't infrastructure." Painted bicycle gutters are not anyone's idea of a solution here, more of a lazy DOT's way of shrugging at the problem without rocking any boats.
What I think we need to reimagine is having the only connection between where people live and where they go to school be a highway. That's unfortunately a fundamental construct in suburban design - subdivisions hanging off of bike- and pedestrian-hostile highways - and it shows up everywhere. Creating new rights of way might be doable in some circumstances. But in others, these things are going to have to stop being highways (or at least lose some lanes) in order to get genuinely safe, separated walking and cycling infrastructure along existing rights of way.
US suburban sprawl, enormous parking lots, and generally inefficient land use is what puts everything 10 to 15 to 25 miles away from home. It didn't have to be like this.
Not everybody can live in the Netherlands though. The Netherlands has just the right weather, just the right geography, just the right urban planning, and just the right social climate.
For a parent, it doesn’t matter how much you advocate, your kid will have their drivers license long before you can change any of the above situations.
The social climate and the urban planning are no more and no less than how people in your community conduct themselves behind the wheel and at the microphone in the community hearings. Incremental bike infrastructure improvements can take a few years in very dysfunctional polities, but 16 would be an outlier, and they can also be done very quickly in healthy ones.
My area has people who have been fighting for better infrastructure for decades. I have voted for the issue as well for decades. The social component is important. When commuters lose a lane on popular roads, they responded by voting the people out of office who were responsible for it.
I know you think it’s simple, but I know from experience that it’s not. Deep car-centric cultures demand more of the same. Maybe where you’re from these attitudes seem like outliers, but in middle America, it’s really not. It’s not an awareness issue, an insignificant number of people here resent the idea. There’s no convincing them.
Also, planning is definitely important. If the lanes don’t go between differently zoned areas, they’re useless for primary transport. What little success we’ve had is used against us as evidence that “nobody wants bike
lanes”.
Having some people fighting for it is of course not enough, the community has to want it, but once it does it is fairly easy to make happen. This is in contrast to e.g. trains, which take decades from authorization to passenger service in the best case and often fail for technical or project-management reasons despite voter support.
This random source on the Internet [1] suggests most car miles are single passenger. Just looking out my window (main street in average American town) this number looks about right. So for the vast majority of passenger transport the car is not the best choice.
"Ban cars" is a fringe position very few people actually hold.
This being said. I mean. Cars have only been around for about a century, we've managed without them for millennia. Surely there is a way to reorganize many places so that their use can be slashed by 95%+, including by families.
One key thing is that it depends on the place. I think that in a lot of big cities it would be possible (not politically, but theoretically) to e.g. ban all curbside parking, reserve all central lanes for high frequency buses, limit all (non-bus) car traffic to 10 km/h. Car traffic would vanish on its own and the QOL increase for residents would more than make up for the inconvenience (less noise, less eyesore, more trees, safe biking, jaywalk everywhere, play in the street, etc.)
On the other hand, you can't really get cars out of hellscape car-centric suburbs (which mostly exist in the US, from my understanding) because they have been designed around the assumption that cars exist. You wouldn't get QOL improvements from slashing car traffic like you would in cities.
So I would argue to leave all these places alone, but we should try to suppress cars in dense cities as much as possible. As someone who lives in one, I would particularly like curbside parking to be nuked, because cars are an eyesore, they block visibility, and they are wasting so much usable space.
Yours is the first comment in this thread about a car ban. Nobody is arguing that cars don't have uses, but that also doesn't mean we should ignore their negative effects and skip investing in more efficient options.
If you redo roads to only permit bikes instead of cars, it's an effective car ban. Sure, you can still have your car, but you can't take it anywhere because the roads only fit bikes now.
Of course there's nuance to be had, but most discussions just devolve into "why would anyone need a car?"
No one wants that. We want separated bike lanes. I also don't see why this angers drivers, you should want it too because now there's no cyclists on your car road. Everyone wins.
Regarding the obvious tax comment someone will make, infrastructure budgets usually come from city and council taxes, it does not come from car registration or even fuel tax when you wring out the details.
In other words cyclists have been paying their share of infra budget and getting nothing for it for a long time.
If you can't picture what it actually looks like, look up the Not Just Bikes video on Stroads. It does a good job of describing the current situation, and why it's hard for people to imagine how bikes could fit with current road infra without impacting them.
> No one wants that. We want separated bike lanes. I also don't see why this angers drivers, you should want it too because now there's no cyclists on your car road. Everyone wins.
You may want that, and indeed, I would highly prefer that, but most people who discuss this can only think about political punishments to affect behavior and go back to thinking that driving must absolutely suck in order for people to choose other options, rather than making alternatives even better than driving.
You don't need to begin with the mindset of "too many car lanes, destroy them until people are forced to use the nonexistant bus". It should begin with "people prefer driving. How many we make something even better so they don't prefer driving anyone?"
Sure, that will begin a competition between transportation modes, but when it comes from trying to make something even better, not out of wrath of driving/cars, then perhaps people will listen.
I'm in total agreeance, this can be a hard conversation to have online because I think each side assumes the worst version of the other.
Separated bike lanes does not imply removing total car throughput, in many cases separated bike lanes can be routed down low-traffic areas, alongside drainage canals or railways, through parks and such. Areas where maybe a handful of cars are using it, but hundreds of cyclists would use since it's the bike thoroughfare.
Modern city planning is often a story of "Worst of both worlds", in that because we can't even get these small projects done, people are are on foot or cycling have no choice but to be in the way of car traffic (be that cycling in traffic or making it so there has to be pedestrian crossings on major roads and that kind of thing). It's terrible for everyone when it could have been excellent had there just been some better planning and more budget toward non-car infra.
> No one wants that. We want separated bike lanes. I also don't see why this angers drivers, you should want it too because now there's no cyclists on your car road. Everyone wins.
The reason why you don't see why this "angers" drivers, is because it doesn't. No driver is angered by a bicyclist on their own road not interfering with the flow of traffic. Drivers are angered by cyclists that impede the flow of traffic and create safety hazards (yes, mostly for themselves) by having a bicycle share the road with a 2000 pound steel car going twice the speed. Move cyclists to a grade separated lane and no one will be bothered.
The problem is the population of bicyclists is large enough to support such an infrastructure project in only a few places. Whereas the cost of laying down a white strip of paint is sufficiently cheap that it can be done in many more places. So it boils down to money.
Arguing that cyclists pay taxes which are used to fund roads and so should have this major infrastructure project funded just for them (if they can direct their taxes this way, will they promise to never to drive a car? Are other people allowed to dedicate their tax funds to support projects just for them? Can childless people opt out of funding public schools and instead fund special centers just for them?) -- is not going to work. Public spending is about pooled resources and public benefits. Everyone benefits from roads -- e.g. even the bicyclists purchase goods shipped to them via roads. Roads allow the economy to function so that bikes can be produced and purchased, etc. At the same time, one can argue that cars benefit from cyclists who reduce traffic. These things are sorted out via a political process -- as a result of power, not some kind of mathematical algorithm.
Gain political power and you will gain the power to have these types of infrastructure funds directed for your group, otherwise it wont happen. That means cyclists need to win over the rest of the public whose representatives vote on these matters -- which up to this point is not something cyclists have been interested or capable of doing -- e.g. having good public relations and outreach to other taxpayers who aren't cyclists. Cyclists have an image problem with the rest of the public, which results in their political power being disproportionately small. That is why, in most places, all they get is the white strip of paint.
Your comment is rooted so far into car centrism it's hard for me to read through such a different lens. We see the world, very, very differently. That makes for an interesting conversation I guess. I have cars, I am a car enthusiast even. I use roads. But I also know there's people in the city who don't drive, and for them life is still dominated by cars. Sometimes that's me, sometimes I'm in my car.
Every sliver of spare space in our cities has been claimed by car infrastructure, and that's not fair to every other possible way to live. I'm not suggesting we remove roads, but we can do better than this for everyone else in cities.
> Arguing that cyclists pay taxes which are used to fund roads and so should have this major infrastructure project funded just for them
I only drive on a handful of roads, but I'm happy to fund all the others because other people do. That's exactly the same position cycle/pedestrians are in, they pay taxes too so why can't the community cater a little bit to them as well? People far and away pay for more car roads they'll never use than they ever will bike lanes they don't use.
My taxes go to many things I don't use and that's fine, because that's how communities work. I'm even glad we're building a car super-highway project because it'll improve commutes for people who do drive. It's fine to drive, I'm not against it.
I get it, we're not going to be paying for bike highways in suburbia where there aren't even footpaths for walking, because it's so far entrenched that no-one is even trying to walk or ride. But there are so many places in our cities that with just a bit of planning we could have catered to both cars and peds/cyclists at the same time.
Again, I don’t think anyone is arguing for making regions of the US unreachable by car. But when there are 6+ car lanes and no separated bike infrastructure there are clearly regions unreachable by bike.
Of course, the only reason you need a car for your family is because we built car centric cities that require it. We haven't had that for long, less than 100 years.
I wouldn't suggest someone run a family without a car in a modern American city, but there are still places even in America that didn't get rebuilt around cars and of course plenty of places around the world where you can raise a family without a car.
It can actually be easier to raise children in places with good bike infrastructure, because you don’t have to be their chauffeur. They can bike themselves around.
And for smaller children, in cities like Amsterdam, it’s common to see a mom riding with multiple kids sitting in a cargo bike.
Netherlands are flat as a pancake, yes e-bikes are somewhat of a solution to where it is a problem, but snow and sleet are something else… I’ve got kids and an e-cargo bike and it isn’t fun (braking downhill on ice with kids in the trunk… let’s just say I revert to the car in this weather.)
Yep, 100% of it. Please ignore the hill down the street from my house that two wheel drive cars often can't climb when snowy. It only has about 90 feet of elevation gain over about 2000 feet of distance. The steepest section is about 10% grade over 600 feet. No problem for a typical person riding a cargo bike without electric assist.
Note that the maximum grade for a wheelchair ramp is 8.3%.
I'm pretty sure 10% was what i had in Limberg. Can we agree that both midwset and netherland are generally flat, and while there are hills in both places, this isn't San Francisco?
By the way, i visited Chicago, Michigan and Colombus, Ohio: I might now have seen everywhere, but those are closer in elevation difference to Amsterdam than Paris and Lisbon are
Aside from the hilly areas of San Francisco, it is quite flat too. Whenever I've visited SF my primary mode of transit is walking. Except for the time I stayed in a hotel at the top of Nob Hill, I was generally walking on land that is flatter than that found in my neighborhood and the older parts of the UW Madison campus.
From what I recall of Columbus, it is every bit as flat as you say. I'd have a hard time telling you about a hill in Chicago. Then again, I'd have a hard time telling you about a time that I was on something other than an 6+ lane highway in Chicago. The view you get from a major highway is often different from what you get in areas where you think of your kids having a casual bike ride.
Part of why you feel that way I assume is because of how where you live is set up, it probably is unfathomable to operate a family without a car, and you shouldn't be worried about that changing any time soon. But proponents for bike infrastructure are not suggesting you put your kids in a bike trailer and ride 40 miles to school, and they aren't suggesting we remove the highways taking you from suburbia into the city. They are usually suggesting that we need more bike or walk friendly neighborhoods. But we also can't all live in the city, so bike friendly infrastructure is also necessary between suburbia and the necessities like work and shopping.
Replying in good faith: yes! Two! And having them has made me all the more committed to not owning a car as I try to minimise how much I destroy their future.
Depending on where you live, you can cargo bike with your kids. If you check out the cargo bike forums there are always posts on how to attach baby seats to a bakfiets and such. I've got two kids and my ecargo-bike replaces about 20 car drives a week.
They weren’t saying “everyone must do it thusly”. They were making the point we should have options.
Right now the only option that infrastructure is actually built for is using a car for everything, even for the single person to run an errand 3 miles away. It’s possible they can be an unintended user of the car oriented roads, but it is much riskier.
it would be nice if the people going on solo trips could take bikes without worrying about their dependents becoming orphans. That way when doing something that actually requires a car highways would be less congested too! Win-win.
The only reason you need an SUV to keep your kids safe is all the other SUVs on the road. It's become a weapons race of ever bigger tanks. This really has to stop sooner or later.
New York recently shut down one of its main power plants. Indian Point Nuclear power station.
From Wikipedia.
"As a result of the permanent shutdown of the plant, three new natural-gas fired power plants: Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center, and Cricket Valley Energy Center were built, with a total capacity of 1.8 GW, replacing 90% of the 2.0 GW of carbon-free electricity previously generated by the plant.[6] As a consequence, New York is expected to struggle to meet its climate goals.[9][3]"
People on HN question from time to time about what to do. This article points out several key issues, and battery recycling must be added:
Where do the amps come from? How do they get to the chargers? How much delay is introduced by charger operation/bottleneck? Plug/voltage compatibility? Current safety? Disaster handling (can’t carry a bucket of electrons)?
This suggests material science, power generation, portable aux power sources and real time load balancing are going to be critical. Along with a whole lot of infrastructure that might have difficulty getting built. I’m not an EE - is it possible to create a solar cell that has any impact on an EV? Even enough to move it at trivial speeds? Might portable wind turbines have an effect? Will this force a return to smaller lighter cars?
Would be nice to replace some/much of the medium long haul/intercity travel with trains but that’s a political problem. So is a paying for all the steps in changing from a gas to an electric environment. Man, that Nobel-to-be for high temperature superconducting will be very much appreciated.
Just some back-of-the-napkin math. An electric car uses approx .25 kWh per mile. Household solar gives you 15 watts/sq ft. Assuming a car 5 ft wide, the hood 5 ft long, roof 4 ft, and trunk 3 ft, that's 60 sqft of sky-facing surface. Accounting for rounded edges, let's make that 50 sqft. So 750 watts, or .75 kWh per hour.
That comes out to 3 miles of driving for every 1 hour charge. So your car sitting at work for 8 hours will give you 24 miles of power to drive home.
Adjust up or down based on location, summer vs winter, cloud cover, solar cell efficiency, etc.
Now what you can do is have your garage roof covered in solar, charge a stationary battery, then transfer from there to your car every night. Or swap-able car batteries.
Another possibility is have a design that keeps the solar on the car following the curves of the vehicle when driving, then have a parking mode that would extend / unfold solar to cover more of the car when it is parked. That would be good for people who live in apartments without charging ports, although if parking is provided for tenants then adding charging ports (for a fee) may be a thing.
And, importantly (which you imply, but I feel needs stating outright), this car-roof solar does not have to be the sole source of charging. It can be a convenient (and energy-efficient) supplement to whatever other charging options we can make work.
Close enough enough for what? For the typical Californian or New Yorker, who drives about 30 miles a day, on-car solar would cut their charging needs in half. That's "close enough" to useful that dismissing it out of hand seems wrong.
You're assuming something like 24 hours a day of having the car parked in full sunlight, which is not realistic (even ignoring that night exists). For it to make sense, you'd need the solar arrays on the car to provide a reasonable percentage of the energy needed during driving. If this isn't the case, you're way better off putting the solar panels somewhere other than the car (where they can work much better), and charging the car when it's not driving.
solar cells can have a decent impact on very exotic efficient designs like the aptera. On a normal sedan it is better to put the solar panel elsewhere than the car
what about power generation at the charging site? i.e. solar on the roof of the charging station. Small scale hydrogen cells? Local battery storage on site so its not all simultaneously drawing from the grid? (I'm not an engineer, just curious)
One of the nice things about this tech is that we can adapt over time. Today we might burn some coal or natural gas to generate the additional power we need, which doesn’t help the environment, but tomorrow we can expand the amount of solar, wind, and water energy we produce.
It actually is better for the environment to run an EV off of even something as dirty as coal power, than to run a gasoline car because the EV drivetrain is so much more efficient.
That being said, I agree of course that transitioning the mix toward a lower proportion of dirty sources will be good.
Another plus for the dirty powered EV is that when you burn fossil fuels in a car then (1) any add-on equipment you want to use to capture or reduce pollution has severe size and weight and cost restrictions due to being part of the car, and (2) you are releasing your pollution in population centers.
With the EV powered by electricity from a dirty power plant (1) you can afford bigger, heavier, more expensive pollution control, and (2) you can build power plants away from population centers so whatever pollution does escape ends up being a small increase for people over a wide area instead of major increase for just one city.
It's still more efficient to power an EV off natural gas/goal than a combustion vehicle, due to the improved efficiency at the larger power plant vs the small vehicle.
There are a number of cities around the world that do get the majority of their power from renewable sources as well, so it depends on where you live as to what the impact is. Where I live an EV would be solar or wind powered if you charged it during the day. At night, a blend of wind and gas.
This is a Good thing. The demand curve is high during the day and low at night. Drastic increase in night demand brings the night dip up towards the day peak. This is a really good thing for the power companies because they can deploy more steady, baseline capacity (which low carbon sources are good for) and have less need for rapid start on-demand capacity. (Which is fulfilled with gas turbines)
If charging commuter cars how much does this change the equation?
Where I live, law dictates that power companies don't have to pay for excess power that not-the-power-company puts onto the grid. Thus, everyone that puts solar panels on their roofs shoots for putting up capacity to that is slightly under what they expect to consume. Businesses that have large roofs but comparatively little electricity demand are disincentivized from rooftop solar.
We need to change this. Building codes should require that every roof that faces a suitable direction and is not obscured by landscape, buildings, etc., must include rooftop solar. Every new garage stall should be equipped with a charger. Cars that spend the day at home can be topped off (or to 90%, whatever works best for the battery tech) during the day and be drained to run the house/neighborhood and charge daytime commuters during the night.
I have a pretty good idea when I will need to have more than 50 - 100 miles of range in my car. I don't feel like my gas tank needs to be full every day. Likewise, if my EV with a range of 200 - 300 miles has 100 miles of range most days, I have no worries at all. If I'm expecting a longer trip, I should be able to say "be sure I have 300 miles of range by 8:00" or pop in for a one-off charge at a charging station.
Surely this doesn't address dominated by multi-story apartments. Arguably, those are also the areas that have less dependence on cars and make up a minority of the housing in the US. According to the US census, 29 million people live in urban clusters and the remaining 220 million live in less densely populated areas.
I wish we spent more time as a society thinking about how to reduce dependence on long-distance highway trips, rather than just making cars electric. They’re the vaping of the sustainability movement, which is not worthless, but nowhere near an unalloyed good.
Teslas still kill kids. Electrification doesn’t solve the health problems of sedentary commute time.
There is huge demand to live in cities, close to jobs; we should be putting more resources towards that goal, reducing the demand on highway electric charging stations along the way.
Providing electricity for EVs can be a much higher business than selling EVs (where batteries make them more expensive than ICE cars), as electricity/km is cheaper than gas.
The hard part is compatibility of all EVs with the charging stations, where segmentation might be in iterest in some car makers for the short term, so that's the only part where government intervention can help, but it has improved since the early days as far as I know.
It seems like a swappable battery model would help with grid balancing especially if we are in remote areas where we need to average out the total power draw requirements over time.
Swapping batteries also makes cheaper/lighter EVs more practical as well as street parking EVs in cities. constraints that have led to the battery integration we see today may not be as applicable further down the adoption cycle.
Few notes: quick charge on highways is NEEDED simply because we need to travel from A to B even if the trip is longer than the vehicle range in a reasonable amount of time. Renault in the past have testes swappable batteries and failed so quick charging is the sole current option.
For a car this means 100kW, a truck I suspect must get at least 400kW. IF EVs get spread at the current peace we need at list 10+ concurrent charging ability every 50km or so.
The other option is electrifying roads, witch means cars can suck power with something like a long trolley, the phase in a grid-like roof, the neutral on ground, mandatory AC for a minimum safety. VERY costly and problematic for big transports. That's is already today.
Having cars with bigger range might help A BIT, in the sense that most do not do such a long trips one after another but stay ad the first long destination for a long enough time for a 22-50kW charge, but that means cars with around 1000km range with a price people can buy, of course. Even if we can achieve that trucks remain out of options anyways.
Here's a silly idea... so when you run a coil past an array of alternating magnetic fields, power is generated. What if we just installed an array of (non electro-) magnets into the road? Or would it increase the fuel consumption more than it would save? (My "perpetuum mobile" detector is tingling...)
Yes, it would be a braking force on the car. You've basically made one of those "magnet in a copper pipe" toys (the pipe is the car).
If you make them electromagnets and drive turn just so as the car passes, now it's a linear motor and would work to accelerate the car (this is how some rollercoasters work), but still doesn't magick energy out of the ether: something has to generate that power.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's certainly no such thing as a lunch you get paid to eat.
I'm gonna lean into newtons third law here. When you pass a magnet through a coil the coil also pushes back on the magnet. So magnets in the ground would essentially be brakes and not a source of "free energy" for the car. That's basically what regen braking is anyways.
A series of electromagnets driven by A/C could possibly work, either as a linear motor (fixed magnet in the car, and the road pushes or along) or at a much higher frequency as a wireless charging thing (if you can get the power high enough without being dangerous).
But at that point there are probably cheaper options.
All propane tanks around here have a "do not refill past this date" stamped into them.
There are 2 ways of "refilling" a tank -- the first is to swap your tank for another tank that's filled; the other is to go to a place that can refill your tank.
99% of the time when I do the tank swap they try to give me one with an expiration date that's coming up in the next 6 months. I almost never am offered one with a very long expiration date.
Do you really think that, in a situation where you own your car and battery, you'll reliably get a battery that's as good or better than the one that's in your car? Keep in mind the value of the vehicle is 40-80% tied up in _only_ the battery.
Battery swaps aren't a realistic plan unless someone else owns the battery, and then you'll get all sorts of other nonsense in the ecosystem.
Maybe we need some type of credit system that takes the health of the battery into account.
For example, if you have a new battery you also have 1000 credits. If you swap it for an older battery (which is worth, say, 500 credits), you'll have a battery and 500 credits in your account. Next time if you get a newer battery which is worth 800 credits, you'll have only 200 credits left in your account.
Also those credits could decrease as you use batteries. You could replenish them with payments.
Sure, a credit based system or some kind of "remaining miles" calculation would work, I think. Personally I would prefer just pay for what you use with interchangeable systems, but we'll only get that if governments step in to prevent "ecosystem" style rent-seeking where every battery is incompatible with every other battery.
We know battery capacity decreases with age and number of recharge cycles. There's randomness due to how hard the battery was used, temperature, manufacturing defects, but you could make an estimate about "miles remaining" and charge for that.
Then when you visit the self-service battery kiosk, you can can select "40 miles" or "30 miles" or "27 miles" (etc.) from a list of options. Pick one and the corresponding set of batteries lights up. Maybe the kiosks already do something like this? I've not seen one in real life yet.
The solution should be fairly straight forward: batteries.
If you think about it .. petrol is not pumped in your car straight from the refinery, right? It's brought in from time to time and stored in underground tanks.
Energy can be sipped non-stop into large capacity batteries (stored underground?) . Said batteries will have very high-discharge capabilities. When you come in to charge your car it's just a matter of grabbing a "pump" connected to the "underground tanks".
This article seems to be mostly fear-mongering? I am surprised to see it this far up on HN.
Highway charging stations will need a lot of power to charge all the cars and we’ll have to build the infrastructure to make it happen. Literally no surprise here.
> If state agencies and utilities don’t coordinate on how to supply high-voltage grid interconnections to the mega-charging hubs coming down the pike, the result could be delays and higher costs that hinder expansion of a technology that’s key to decarbonizing transportation.
>“If we wait 10 years or 15 years to make these investments, I can guarantee you they’ll be double or triple” what they would be if they were planned well in advance, said Brian Wilkie, National Grid’s director of transportation electrification in New York.
When it comes to green/progressive tech/infrastructure like wind/solar, electric cars, and so on: fear-mongering, conservatism, and misunderstanding is pretty much how HN rolls.
HN commenters love to shout about wind and solar being stupid ("WhAT haPPens at nIGhT!? wINd DoESN't ALwaYs bLOW!!! GOTCHA!") yet grid-scale energy storage systems are quite common and one of the fastest areas of capex investment by utilities...and then there's the constant stream of "nuclear is the future!" nonsense.
The power generation debate is over; utilities and grids aren't buying nuclear, they're buying wind, solar, and some natural gas backup capacity...and not because "liberal brainwashing" or some other nonsense, but because wind and solar are the cheapest source of power right now, and wind especially keeps dropping in price. Neither presents anywhere near the level of headaches of nuclear, and it takes months to build out and a few years to break even on carbon footprint, not decades.
There's a fair bit of dunning-krueger effect as well; scroll down to see comments from "not an electrical engineer" who is talking about "buckets of electrons" and thinks that EV charging is something where there's so many "amps" we need to think of the chil...er, have safety protocols.
Like DCFC stations and L1/L2 charge adapters don't already do a whole suite of electrical safety checks every time they start charging a vehicle....
A plan in case we're really desperate. Gas stations already have large tanks full of gasoline. They burn that gas in generators to charge batteries to charge EVs from. No need for extra infrastructure except the generator: the energy is delivered to the gas station in the usual way, a truck. Then gradually build the infrastructure and deliver electricity directly to the gas station, that won't be _gas_ anymore.
Gas stations do not universally want cars taking up space in their parking lots for the requisite amount of charge time at a much lower expected revenue per minute than equivalent gas fillup capacity.
They make money off of X% of N travelers per day stopping to buy a coffee, cigarettes etc. If you require a substantial amount of space to be taken by travelers who sit there charging for 30 minutes, you're reducing peak travelers (eg during the morning and evening commutes) and significantly reducing total traffic. Claiming that they're all going to come in for a slurpee and this will happen to work out neutral or positive for the gas station is pure handwaving.
Indeed, gas stations would probably love if all cars were electric. When you stop to charge, you know that you will be stopping for at least 15 minutes, so why not get a cup of coffee and a snack while waiting?
If we're lucky, gas stations might turn into alcohol-free third places where people watch sports, have a meal and hang out while waiting for their car to charge.
Driving ranges are generally high enough that driving from 100 to 0% charge means you should take a legally mandated break. So why not embrace that?
Or don’t and drive gasoline power cars and save the energy loss converting gasoline to electricity, and the 1% per day energy loss that evs have if you just leave them be. Or maybe let’s just make hybrids and not lug around 2 tons of batteries.
Let’s make a gasoline powered micro energy grid for ev powered cars.
The whole ev craze is wildly stupid, inefficient and worse for the environment. Your double AA battery powered toy with an iPad isn’t going to save to world.
I hate having to waste time a couple times a month driving to a gas station to pour stinky stink juice into my wife's car. It's filthy, smelly, and a huge waste of time.
I much prefer plugging my car in in my driveway (I'm lucky to have a driveway; lots of car owners don't) and I basically never think about fueling my car or range. My car charges on a 20a / 240v circuit (IE a totally normal one that didn't require a huge amount of effort or expense to install).
As an added bonus, my car's more pleasant to drive, quieter, and costs way less per mile driven.
it's actually totally feasible to convert gas to electricity and use it to power an EV and lose less energy than just putting the gas into an ICE. Car engines have to be designed to minimize weight and volume to fit in a car. a ground based generator can be significantly more efficient than a car engine.
In my head, the future history of car like transportation will be something like: horse, gas, battery, gas. The second phase being "fully green" gasoline — perhaps via air reclamation?
Obviously, the real long-play would be a cyberhorse on the far side, somehow...
From an energy perspective, gas is a pretty terrible battery. It's 25% efficient for a car to discharge, and currently very inefficient to synthesize. EVs on the other hand are over 90% efficient for charging and discharging. Gas is energy dense, but it's hard to imagine quadrupling vehicle energy consumption being a good idea. For uses like airplanes and trans-oceanic boats, carbon captured gas might be the best zero emissions option, but for anything where a battery works, you would never go back to gas.
Near where I live the majority of Tesla supercharging stations are connected to fuel cell < - > natural gas gizmos, so in fact what you're describing is already done.
Commercial power billing is typically for the peak draw of an installation over a period of time, so there's huge incentive to chop the tops off of these peaks with fuel cells and batteries.
The DC Fast charge power requirements are enormous and I'd be surprised if more than a small fraction of gas stations had direct grid ties suitable for reasonable DC Fast charging.
They also pollute the air, make too much noise, and take incredible amount of space. The vast majority of cars are clearly not needed, they are desired.
