Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 7
No. of Recommendations: 3
There is a limit on the electricity grid as well.
kWh = V (110v) * current (A) * hours
with V=110, current=20A, it would take 5 hours to charge 10kWh, that's independent of battery technology.
If the grid can push current at 1000A for multiple cars simultaneously at the charging station, it would take only 6 minutes to charge 10kWh for each.
No. of Recommendations: 0
If the grid can push current at 1000A for multiple cars simultaneously at the charging station, it would take only 6 minutes to charge 10kWh for each.
Most EV owners charge at 220V at home (Level 2).
The latest fast DC chargers at stations can do 800V, 350kW.
My car can't use those - older tech - but home charging at 220VAC/30Amps is perfectly fine for our usage.
No. of Recommendations: 5
I’m wondering however where massive demand for EVs will come when you look at these simple demographics and population density statistics:
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/buil...When you have this many living in dense urban areas, in apartments, condos, multi-family dwellings, even venturing out into the burbs, how will the electrical grid recharging infrastructure work in a time efficient manner? Folks have their cars parked underground or in rising multi-level tiers, or even offsite, so where to charge without lengthy delays, and without crawling all over each other? Apartments in the burbs…same thing…will they rollout charging stations accessible to all those dwelling in these condensed areas? I think it will be a huge mess. People in single family homes can install the 220 volt outlets, but what about those who do not have that advantage? Or garages? Or just have off street parking? Gotta look at pop densities if you’re going to try and project future demand and where exactly will the majority of urban dweller's scramble to get their charge at peak times. Again, key fact - 83% of US population lives in urban areas. Critical mass?
No. of Recommendations: 14
When you have this many living in dense urban areas, in apartments, condos, multi-family dwellings, even venturing out into the burbs, how will the electrical grid recharging infrastructure work in a time efficient manner? Folks have their cars parked underground or in rising multi-level tiers, or even offsite, so where to charge without lengthy delays, and without crawling all over each other? Apartments in the burbs…same thing…will they rollout charging stations accessible to all those dwelling in these condensed areas? I think it will be a huge mess.
Oslo is a city of around 700,000, with another 500,000 in the surrounding suburbs. That puts it in the same league as San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, or Nashville. Car registrations show a 40% ownership of EVs in Oslo proper, and a higher penetration in the suburbs. It isn’t “a big mess” by any stretch. This has mostly happened in the last 15 years, albeit with the kinds of incentives we are unlikely to see in this country (exemption from congestion pricing, able to drive in carpool and bus lanes, etc.)
but what about those who do not have that advantage?
There are public chargers, just as there are public gas stations. I was in Boston for Thanksgiving and saw several curbside parking stations. They were on streets where parking was allowed only at night (at least those that I saw), so they clearly would not draw current during the day. There are parking meters all over the place which run on electricity (credit card readers, etc.) so obviously there is power available at many places under the sidewalks, and putting new power lines in place is trivial with an auger boring ditch witch. (They’re using it to install new fiber in our neighborhood just this week.)
Again, key fact: 83% of US population lives in urban areas
That doesn’t mean 83% live in the concrete jungle. I have lived in “urban areas” in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, and now Knoxville, and only in my 20’s was I in the vertical part of cities. There is a big difference between “urban area” and “urban core”. Yonkers, Scarsdale, and Eastchester are considered part of the New York Metropolitan area, yet have thousands of single family homes. And garages.
Critical mass?
People keep finding problems to solve which turn out not to be much of a problem at all, at least based on the places which have - or are - solving them even as the tide rolls on.
No. of Recommendations: 1
I’d like to read more about how Norway’s EV adoption curve is going with respect to the electric utility infrastructure.
In terms of comps, I do wonder whether Oslo’s high rate of mass transit usage and high walkability change the charging usage dynamics compared to a much higher car commuting rate in most US cities.
No. of Recommendations: 5
There are parking meters all over the place which run on electricity (credit card readers, etc.) so obviously there is power available at many places under the sidewalks, and putting new power lines in place is trivial with an auger boring ditch witch. (They’re using it to install new fiber in our neighborhood just this week.)
I've been following the efforts of Sonic (regional internet provider) in rolling out their own fiber network in the SF Bay Area for the last decade+. It may be physically trivial, but it is anything but in terms of logistics and, especially, permitting. Constant battles, differing in every city and sometimes down to the block level, to get permission for microtrenching, use of overhead poles, access to property, etc. I've been waiting through 6 years of promises that they'll run fiber Real Soon Now to my house and will not see it happen before I move out of the area in a few months.
It is hard to imagine that running new high power infrastructure widely along city streets will suffer fewer obstacles than running innocuous optical fiber cables, short of highly unlikely state- or federal-level legislation to force cities to go along.
No. of Recommendations: 1
I’d like to read more about how Norway’s EV adoption curve is going with respect to the electric utility infrastructure.Here's an interesting article. It is nuanced enough that probably, everyone in this thread can read their own preferences into it.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and...
No. of Recommendations: 19
London, city proper, has been converting to electric doubledecker buses and electrified classic black taxis. Pollution is noticeably down.
There are slow charging plugs in many of the *lampposts* next to street parking spaces outside apartment buildings and hotels. More are going in all the time. There's no fighting over EV parking spaces because there are plenty of them, and - shockingly, right? - the chargers just work. Unlike here.
There are a variety of BEVs and hybrids on the roads. Being Europe, they're smaller than ours. Gas is 75% more expensive than here. People
It just takes commitment and thoughtful application of science with common sense. It all points to a much different social compact than the gun-toting, every person for themselves and screw the little guy / corporate kleptocracy mentality that's gripped a lot of this country.
No. of Recommendations: 16
I’d like to read more about how Norway’s EV adoption curve is going with respect to the electric utility infrastructure. Here’s a short article I found about Oslo, more about the city history with EVs and the consequent decrease in pollution, but still interesting. For your listening and dancing pleasure I’ll hit a few highlights for those who can’t be bothered to click.
https://www.infrajournal.com/en/w/oslo-capital-ev-... It’s not just about acting on vehicles: the Norwegian city took a whole plan about infrastructures, incentives, mobility and public transport, to abate its emissions and thereby encouraging the passage from fossil fueled car to EVs.
* * * *
By 2021, the number of EVs entering Oslo's toll ring exceeded the number of petrol cars, and Oslo’s EV adoption set the pace for the country’s mass market. Christina Bu, NEVA’s secretary general, says 79% of new cars sold in Norway in 2022 were EVs.
Growth and maturity in the EV market inevitably leads to end-of-life battery challenges such as recycling, repair and safe reuse of old batteries plus recovery of valuable materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel. Ruter AS, Oslo’s public transport authority, is taking steps to meet these challenges by including circular recycling requirements in e-bus tenders. * * * *
Here’s another article that’s more on point:
https://pditechnologies.com/blog/norways-ev-growin... One big issue cropping up in Norway is the capacity constraints on the electrical power grid. With thousands of new EVs hitting the roads, the grid is getting overloaded in some areas of the country. It turns out that Norway’s electrical grid was never built to handle large clusters of EVs charging at peak times. And upgrading the infrastructure turns out to be extremely expensive and time-consuming.
In other words, it sounds like the same issues facing every other country. I’d just point out that progress - any progress (and especially disruptive progress) comes with costs. The Internet hasn’t been kind to newspapers, and Amazon didn’t make friends with Borders. WalMart shoved K-Mart and Sears aside, and cell phones obsoleted a lot of AT&T copper, while building ugly towers all over the planet.
EVs will not be without growing pains or costs, but they are coming regardless. Unlike Norway, which provided multiple financial and convenience incentives, the rest of the world is moving more glacially. With the arrival of Chinese entrants, at least in the non-US world, it could herald the end of the ICE age (get it? Ice age? Glacially? Oh, I amuse myself.) Eventually. But it’s coming, and the effects will be significant to a whole range of countries, companies, products, and industries.
No. of Recommendations: 1
There are parking meters all over the place which run on electricity (credit card readers, etc.) so obviously there is power available at many places under the sidewalks, and putting new power lines in place is trivial with an auger boring ditch witch. (They’re using it to install new fiber in our neighborhood just this week.)
The grid is the bottleneck, installing 100s of charging stations is quick and easy, getting them operational on the grid is a BIG problem.
tecmo
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No. of Recommendations: 4
The grid is the bottleneck, installing 100s of charging stations is quick and easy, getting them operational on the grid is a BIG problem.
My understanding (and I could be completely wrong, I didn’t investigate) is that the curbside chargers I saw in Boston were Level 1, that is 110v. You could get 30-40 miles of charge overnight, certainly enough to get you to a commercial fast charger if you needed to. And even if you put 1,000 of them in, as they were located in “night street parking” only, it would have virtually no effect on the grid, using only base power at times when the grid is already under-utilized (having been built for peak times in the morning and late afternoon.)
As for deploying it, I’m pretty sure National Grid or whoever is constantly maintaining their underground lines; I know in Chicago’s Loop there were actual tunnels you could walk (hunched over, but still…) through which carried electric, telephone, fiber, and coax delivery throughout the area. While I doubt Boston has anything similar, they also don’t have overhead wires and they somehow managed to get cable TV installed everywhere when that industry came along.
There will be different situations and different solutions I am quite sure, but solutions there will be.
