[HN Gopher] The grid isn't ready for 300M EVs by 2030
___________________________________________________________________
The grid isn't ready for 300M EVs by 2030
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 131 points
Date : 2023-05-06 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.weforum.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.weforum.org)
| jdeibele wrote:
| I've had a Chevy Bolt EUV for 3 weeks. We are moving to a new
| house that has a 240V outlet in the garage. This house does not,
| so I'm using the stock Chevy portable charging cable with the
| 110V adapter, not the 240V one.
|
| Setting a known location (like home) means that you can charge at
| 12A because you can tell the car there's nothing else on the
| circuit. Otherwise, it will charge at 8A to avoid overloading the
| circuit.
|
| The Bolt charges about 3.5 miles per hour on 110V, which is 35
| miles of range or more overnight, which is fine for this
| situation.
|
| Somebody in the neighborhood has a PHEV Subaru. They park on the
| wrong side of the street (can be ticketed for this in Portland)
| so they can run their charging cable out a window and plug it
| into the car. It is almost certainly another 110V.
|
| The local utility offers $25 off if you let them control your
| smart thermostat during the winter and summer (not spring or
| fall) seasons. You have to participate in at least half of the
| events to qualify.
|
| The typical recommendation for EV batteries is to charge them to
| 80% unless you need more. There are times where energy prices
| have gone negative because utilities have too much electricity
| from solar or wind power.
|
| It doesn't seem impossible to do some combination of "let us fill
| you to 100% if we have too much energy" or "please go plug in
| your EV" along with time-of-day rates. 240V can draw up to 32A
| for the Bolts, other cars up to 50A (on a dedicated 60A circuit)
| and is easily multiples of 110V, which might not be worth really
| worrying about it.
|
| There are solar panels on this house and there'll be ones on the
| next one, too.
| bbarn wrote:
| The company I work for manages those demand response programs.
| Many of them now also support smart L2 chargers that can also
| be controlled similar to the thermostat you mention.
|
| We also still, at the end of the day have a greed problem. My
| local utility, for example (smaller, very monopolized one in
| the socal mountains) has halted being able to get credits from
| feeding solar back into the grid. They've all but made getting
| home solar irrelevant unless you have an expensive battery
| system like a Tesla powerwall or similar. I live in an area at
| altitude where it's sunny for much more than average and we are
| prime candidates to have solar on every home - but a greedy
| local utility has halted nearly all progress that the last
| decade has seen.
| George83728 wrote:
| A lot of people pushing for all-EV laws would be even happier if
| ubiquitous car culture were brought to an end and commoner rural
| / suburban people were all forced to move into cities and rely on
| mass transit. So I'm not convinced such shortcomings in the all-
| EV plan are unintentional. The 2030 timetable seems deliberately
| too short to be realistic.
| kcb wrote:
| Meh, range of today's EVs is more than enough to support
| suburban and rural people. Remote rural areas with 100 mile
| drives to the store exist but are hardly the commoners.
| George83728 wrote:
| Range has nothing to do with it, I didn't say anything about
| EV range. It's a matter of economics, ICE bans by 2030 will
| require people to purchase new cars years before they
| otherwise would have (the economics of running a gas station
| business will be trashed, gas will become much more
| expensive.) It will require increased taxes to pay for new
| infrastructure, or otherwise increase the cost of
| electricity. All around it increases the cost of a rural
| lifestyle significantly, pricing commoners out. Which is
| probably half of the intention in the first place because
| rural living is frequently castigated by the anti-car crowd
| (who never seem to propose car bans for the rich, only policy
| changes that would price commoners out of owning cars.)
|
| Response to sibling comment's _" just buy a field of solar
| panels bro"_: Yeah that's great for the people with money to
| spare. These policies won't bother rich people, but will
| price out the poor from whom the rich will eagerly buy up
| property, creating massive country estates while commoners
| wallow in cities. Just like Roman times. Just the way the
| rich want it.
| kcb wrote:
| But that's pretty much the opposite of reality. The
| "commoners" are increasingly priced out from being able to
| "wallow in cities". The idea that city living is some kind
| of negative punishment is really distorting your
| perspective.
| howinteresting wrote:
| At some level a car is a luxury good which doesn't really
| scale. American car ownership is a historical aberration
| that continues to take its toll on the climate, both due to
| emissions from the cars themselves and with subsidized
| suburban and rural living.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Rural people with the space to put in solar panels and large
| batteries will actually be able to get cheaper electricity
| than urban. With the way prices are falling for batteries and
| solar by 2030 it will be cheaper for most to even replace
| farm machinery running diesel engines with electric motors
| let alone cars.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done. Even
| if not perfect, the tight schedule will get people to stop
| pushing shit down the road.
| [deleted]
| csours wrote:
| Did you realize you can calculate how many horsepower your house
| uses on average? And you can calculate how far your house would
| drive if it were a car?
|
| Last August I used about 1500 kWh of electrical energy
|
| Horsepower = kWh/(720 or 744 [hours in 30 or 31 day month])= kW *
| 1.34 (hp/kW) = hp
|
| Distance = kWh * 4mi/kWh (Tesla Model 3)
|
| So last August my house used about 2.7 horsepower on average and
| "drove" 6,000 miles
| mozman wrote:
| Everyone is different.
|
| Your calculation omits time. There will be a huge peak demand
| when everyone recharges which is the primary problem.
|
| Using your math above my house is 7hp, or 14,000 miles a month.
| csours wrote:
| That doesn't need to be a problem. We do have the internet
| after all.
| carabiner wrote:
| The wonders of unit conversions.
| ouid wrote:
| A gas pump fills a car at 20 MW, many gas stations operate at
| capacity for many hours a day with a dozen pumps active. EVs are
| ~4 times as efficient, but even being very generous, you've still
| got gas stations with the sustained power draw of an industrial
| arc furnace. This is not a trivial infrastructure problem to
| overcome. Very high power draw like that requires very high
| voltage transmission, which is dangerous and difficult.
|
| Plug in hybrids are an extremely sensible intermediate step, and
| perhaps the only feasible endpoint. They solve almost every
| problem that electric vehicles solve, and also almost every
| problem that electric vehicles _have_.
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| Nah, solutions are already built and operating:
| https://youtu.be/FoN4WCpuxHY
|
| Pretty easy to stick a big battery in between grid and cars and
| balance the load.
|
| Not to mention you can't top up your gas car at home everyday
| like you can an EV.
|
| EV charging will end up far more distributed than gas car
| filling.
|
| I actually worked in a gas station for quite a while. Demand is
| never constant 24 hours a day. There are always peaks and
| troughs as the daily cycle of life revolves. EV charging will
| be just fine.
| ouid wrote:
| load balancing doesnt work like that. the draw on a high
| throughput gas station is hundreds of megawatts for hours.
| Are you proposing 100MWh batteries installed at charging
| stations?
|
| Sure people can top up their cars overnight, but what about
| people who street park? Charging a tesla battery to full
| overnight (16hr) is still 5kW.
|
| On the other hand in the world where gas is very expensive,
| and you have a PHEV, you can pkug in most of the time and
| solve almost all of your gasoline demand, while still being
| able to fill your car at 20MW in critical situations
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| > the draw on a high throughput gas station is hundreds of
| megawatts for hours.
|
| Did you watch the video? For a 36 charger station they're
| using a 6Mw battery.
|
| It works because the assumption that draw from the chargers
| is constant is wrong.
|
| > What about people who street park?
|
| They can go to the charger station. And all the people who
| don't need to because they do it at home...don't go to the
| charger station. Reducing demand even further.
|
| > Charging a tesla battery to full overnight
|
| Do you use your entire gas tank everyday? Because 90+% of
| vehicle users don't. So there's no need to pull that much
| power, again reducing peak demand and spreading out the
| load.
|
| The things you are highlighting are rooted in fear, not
| reality. The reality is that ev's work without the
| downsides of PHEV. And i say that as a ICE owner jealous of
| the ease of use, lower maintenance and savings being made
| by friends with ev's.
| cco wrote:
| To echo others here, its always strange to me when (non-status
| quo beneficiaries) people react like this. Is this not a great
| thing? We need to invest in our grid, that means lots of
| relatively well compensated folks tackling interesting problems
| at a huge scale.
|
| More (good) jobs for tradesmen, engineers, a net benefit to our
| environment, cleaner air...it just sounds pretty good all around?
|
| The grid wasn't ready for laundry machines and power tools in
| 1910.
| tarr11 wrote:
| > The Stanford study points out that since charging electric
| vehicles takes time using conventional chargers, owners tend to
| leave their cars charging in the evenings and overnight, putting
| added pressure on the grid. Demand peaks between 5-9 pm as people
| return home from work and use electric appliances like
| televisions and kettles.
|
| > If vehicle owners were to charge them during the day, this
| could cut costs and help the grid as the number of electric
| vehicles increase to meet sustainable goals, the authors say.
|
| My EV (Tesla) already has a charging option for when rates are
| cheapest. I would assume that most EVs will have that feature if
| they don't already?
|
| Not sure I understand why this is considered a big problem.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| My 2014 BMW i3 knows to charge during cheaper electric rate
| times. (Like your Tesla)
| bombcar wrote:
| I think they're saying people don't charge at work - a
| disconnected Tesla can't charge.
| klyrs wrote:
| Which is odd, I know people who only charge at work. Who
| knows, maybe that could be a perk to encourage RTO if
| management was so concerned.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| How does that work?
| klyrs wrote:
| There are chargers in parking lots at/near office
| buildings. People use them during the day. In residential
| areas without offstreet parking, there are few to no
| convenient chargers.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Interesting. My suspicion is that the amount of
| workplaces where this is an option is small compared to
| workplaces as a whole, but I've no idea! My (incorrect?)
| assumption is that the primary convenient option is for
| homeowners in suburbs to charge in their driveway or
| garage when home.
| klyrs wrote:
| I live a city where the charging infrastructure matches
| my description. I do not speak for suburbanites with
| garages.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Even my rather ancient Leaf has a simple charging timer. I plug
| mine in when I get home from work, but it doesn't charge until
| after midnight.
| bengale wrote:
| In the UK, my provider has a thing called Intelligent Octopus
| that allows them to control when my car charges.
|
| They offer me discounted rates (41p KWH vs 7.5p KWH) if I
| charge between 2330 and 530, but I can plug it in when I get
| home, and they control that charging block. It allows them to
| turn on charging anytime they like if the load on the grid is
| low, and they charge me that lower rate even if it's outside
| the off-peak time.
| schiffern wrote:
| With a connected car, the "charging block" can just be
| software running on the car.
|
| More importantly, the direct payment plan with the utility
| company (which means waiting for 10,000 different utilities
| to switch pricing models!) can be replaced by an aggregation
| company (which only needs a handful of companies worldwide).
|
| On the grid side, the aggregation company behaves just like
| any other company that owns a big battery, bidding on the
| wholesale electricity market like a power plant would. But in
| reality they actually command a "fleet" of smart car chargers
| and stationary batteries. By splitting some of the profit
| with these car/battery owners, an aggregation company can
| magically align the pricing model for _everyone_ , without
| waiting for 10,000 utilities to get their act together.
|
| If you follow JB Straubel's public talks[0] over the years,
| none of this should come as a surprise.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/4hNdbGjZfFU?t=2401
| LegitShady wrote:
| I don't want a connected car where the manufacturer or
| whoever compromises them can remotely disable charging on
| my car. I don't understand why that sort of access would
| need to be included in the car instead of the charger. It
| seems an unnecessary compromise of autonomy.
| schiffern wrote:
| If you don't want any data connection, then--by
| definition--you must reject any sort of grid-interactive
| charging features of any kind. Baby, meet bathwater!
|
| Fortunately the vast majority of regular users (eg
| bengale with their Intelligent Octopus device) aren't
| bothered by it. They'll happily save money on EV charging
| _and_ improve grid stability at the same time.
|
| > I don't understand why that sort of access would need
| to be included in the car instead of the charger
|
| I didn't say it _needs_ to be included. However if you
| already have a fleet of connected EVs (eg Tesla), you
| could instantly roll out this feature overnight without
| any additional hardware investment.... _(hint hint...)_
| LegitShady wrote:
| >If you don't want any data connection
|
| Thats not what I said.
| schiffern wrote:
| If there's a data connection which is used to stop
| charging, then if the data is hacked or spoofed it can--
| by definition--stop charging.
|
| You can't have your cake and eat it too.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I don't think you understand what I said, and are arguing
| something else entirely.
| schiffern wrote:
| That's always possible! Can you clarify your position, so
| we might better understand each other?
|
| For a minute I did considered the possibility that you
| were leaning hard on the word _manufacturer_. However, I
| thought it was quite absurd that you _would_ be fine with
| a situation where "[a third party] or whoever
| compromises them can remotely disable charging on my
| car."
|
| I intentionally avoided that less-than-charitable
| interpretation of your words, since IMO it would violate
| the HN guidelines:
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
| DennisP wrote:
| Seems like charging at night is a problem if the grid is
| powered by solar, but a benefit if the grid is powered by
| nuclear. At least, if the chargers are timed to start later in
| the evening, when rates are cheaper.
| 78x8cjfoJUx9 wrote:
| [flagged]
| xnx wrote:
| As others have pointed out, the title of the article is "As more
| electric vehicles hit the road, our charging habits must change -
| here's why"
| ajpgrealish wrote:
| The post title misses the important "without investment and
| changes in charging habits". Most EVs can already be controlled
| to set charging preferences to match lower cost, off-peak
| charging overnight. However, this isn't the full solution as it
| can create secondary demand peaks. For example, if everyone in
| one region has an off-peak rate starting at midnight, you will
| get a step-change in demand at that time. Midnight onwards may
| also not be the lowest carbon time to charge as this will change
| every day as renewables are not predictable. In California right
| now, charging during the day would have lower emissions Source:
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO
|
| Many people are already thinking about this problem, including
| https://ev.energy. We go one step further and actively control
| EVs and EV Chargers to match their charging to when the grid is
| most clean. This may be overnight, but it could also be during
| the daytime when solar generation is highest. It is better for
| the grid not to use simple peak/off-peak pricing, but instead
| create tariffs that reward flexibility and move the exact
| charging times to best suit the grid.
| mooktakim wrote:
| How did we get petrol cars without already having petrol stations
| everywhere??
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| It was common to carry containers of gas when traveling cross-
| country (USA) in the 1930s (source: my grandparents). I don't
| know the size but would guess several 5-gallon containers would
| do it.
| manquer wrote:
| It probably mirrored how some of the alternative fuels are
| setup today like hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles
|
| California has around 45 hydrogen pumps I am always aware where
| my car can go and not , and the dynamics change every time a
| pump comes up or shuts down
|
| The pattern of gas pumps probably looked similar to how
| hydrogen pumps are distributed today - Most clustered in urban
| areas of SF bat and LA with some in smaller centers like
| scaremento and rest scattered on high traffic key road ways
| between them like the one on I5 .
|
| And if you got fuel stranded you are going to pay a lot for
| someone to bring fuel by traditional means to you - horse drawn
| then, towing now
| kortilla wrote:
| Spare gas cans can get you hundreds of miles. When I was
| growing up this was super common for long road trips just
| because gas stations usually closed at night and there weren't
| credit card readers for 24 hour pumps.
| mooktakim wrote:
| I'm talking about 100 years ago when cars were invented. We
| didn't stop and wait for the infrastructure to be ready. We
| built it, got it out there. Everything else will come when
| and as we need it.
| [deleted]
| manquer wrote:
| Early car adopters probably were range conscious as
| hydrogen car owners today like me are .
|
| Built it and it will come doesn't always work for the early
| adopters, early investment in a technology can be risky it
| might take longer than expected or some other tech might
| replace the current front runner.
|
| Gasoline powered cars weren't the only tech in early 1900s
| either, steam powered cars were being as late as 1930s.
|
| The diesel and petrol engines were competing too, very
| different kinds of engines and fuels
| kortilla wrote:
| Gas cans (a.k.a. cans) existed before cars were invented.
| The point is that additional range was a trivial pre-
| existing technology.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| You could literally stop at a hardware store or pharmacy to
| buy a can of gasoline. It didn't need dedicated fueling
| infrastructure.
| signatoremo wrote:
| How did the hardware stores store the fuel, how many time
| a day did they get delivery, what were the distribution
| networks? Those questions didn't get answered overnight,
| yet the car industry didn't wait until all of the
| components were in place. It will be the same with EVs
| [deleted]
| kortilla wrote:
| What are you talking about? The whole point is that you
| can buy a spare 10-20 gallons of gas and take it with
| you. And the technology (a metal can) existed long before
| cars.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| moomoo11 wrote:
| is there any investment in moving power from say a massive solar
| array in some Arizona desert to Colorado and Texas?
|
| I remember reading somewhere that a 100x100 miles sq plot of
| solar panels would be enough to power America. That doesn't seem
| so bad.
|
| Or maybe we put massive arrays in the atmosphere and have a 100
| mile cable to earth (maybe in the desert) as a precursor to a
| space elevator.
|
| Solve global warming and energy needs two birds one stoner lol.
| dghughes wrote:
| I'm not in the US but my idea of a good system is EV vehicle,
| solar panels, home battery storage, and a ground source heat pump
| w/ water heater. That to me is the perfect set up since the
| energy production is only at that single home.
|
| The exception being very cold winter days, hot humid days, and
| EVs away from their home base needing to charge.
|
| But even with rebates it's too expensive for nearly anyone who
| owns a home. Anyone of those items is minimum $20K to $50K and
| beyond multiplied by each of the four items.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Why would we necessarily need the small scale storage systems
| when we have the whole energy grid, though?
|
| Solar panels on homes, sure, because that's free real estate.
| But generally, if something is cost effective for a single
| home, it's probably more cost effective for the full grid.
|
| The solution seems almost certainly to just reduce prices at
| night and during the day, installing more chargers at
| workplaces, so people are incentived to charge at off peak
| hours.
|
| If I can reduce my electricity bill by 30% by smarter charging,
| I'm going to do that for sure.
| foogazi wrote:
| Then you can disconnect and not put any pressure on the grid
| asdfman123 wrote:
| But someone has to pay for the energy storage and
| generation: either you or the power companies, but you
| don't benefit from economies of scale.
| llsf wrote:
| If cars drive by themselves by 2030, then would US still need
| 300M vehicles ? I own an EV now for 4 years. My commute is only
| 20min x 2 per day. I only charge one night per week. Not all EV
| charge every single night, and in full. It would be nice to
| charge at work during the day, even at lower rate/speed when sun
| shines and wind blows. Maybe by making it easier for companies to
| offer charging at their parking lot would help ?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| There's no way the grid will be ready for EVs unless we can
| somehow provide about 300M batteries of roughly 50Kwh storage
| that can absorb some of the cheap renewable power we'll be
| building.
|
| I just don't see any way of doing one without the other.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Is 300M EV's the best use of manufacturing resources over the
| next 7 years to minimize climate change? Wouldn't it make more
| sense to upgrade old factories in Asia with advanced equipment to
| minimize their carbon footprint?
| nine_k wrote:
| People who want to upgrade their cars anyway will pay form 300M
| EV cars.
|
| Who will pay for upgrading an old coal plant in Asia to a new
| nuclear + solar plant, or something like that?
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Taxpayers will, just like taxpayers have been paying for EVs
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Seems to be sloppy research. Doesn't seem to understand the
| difference between world/US and US grid doesn't have to supply
| the worlds' EVs.
|
| >> There were 16.5 million electric vehicles on the world's roads
| in 2020
|
| That's the world, not the US. The US has less than a million EVs,
| maybe 2 at most.[1][2]
|
| >> this is expected to rise to 300 million by 2030. But with
| these rising numbers, the US grid could struggle without
| investment and changes in charging habits, a Stanford study
| finds.
|
| Projections are 26 million[3] by 2030 in US, 300 million is
| worldwide, but what has US grid got to do with it?
|
| But, even if it were true, it won't be as big as a challenge as
| its made out to be.
|
| a) There is plenty of free renewable power. Renewables
| oversupply, which is currently being curtailed. Renewables are
| growing, this will mean plenty of oversupply coming online. If
| only there was a way to create demand.
|
| b) Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times across
| the seven US grids in 2021
|
| c) EVs can absorb all of this free energy or get paid to absorb
|
| d) Right now, energy bill is split between gas, electricity and
| nat gas. Households switching to EVs will have solar, bringing
| their bills to zero as well as no new demand on the grid.
|
| e) Quite possibly, there is no net new demand. A comment on HN:
| It takes about as much electricity (or energy) to refine a tank
| of gas as to charge an EV. [5]
|
| [1]https://environmentamerica.org/articles/youre-not-
| imagining-...
|
| [2]https://electrek.co/2021/11/09/the-number-of-us-electric-
| veh...
|
| [3]https://www.eei.org/News/news/All/eei-projects-26-million-
| el...
|
| [4]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r...
|
| [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35653034
| nasmorn wrote:
| During WW2 the US built e.g over 300 destroyers in 6 years. Now
| they struggle to complete 2 per year. It might not be impossible
| but something has fundamentally changed.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _During WW2 the US built e.g over 300 destroyers in 6 years._
|
| Yes, with 40% of GDP going to war production:
|
| * https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-
| economy/2020/february/w...
|
| And every other form of manufacturing shutdown or rationed for
| the war effort. Even how jeans were stitched together was
| regulated (to save on resources):
|
| * https://www.ropedye.com/2013/05/levis1944-501/
|
| * https://www.levistrauss.com/2020/09/30/world-war-ii-levis/
|
| > _It might not be impossible but something has fundamentally
| changed._
|
| Societal priorities and focus against an existential threat.
| manquer wrote:
| War time procurement subverts entire industries and reserves
| everything anybody produces first for the military.
|
| Sure the country produced 300 destroyers, tens of thousands of
| aircraft and tanks, and that production is what ultimately won
| the war , but you have to keep in mind the country produced
| little else any other normal economic activity was severely
| curtailed and even basic life needs were rationed.
|
| It not only ramping up but also ramping down are problematic,
| for example even though military doesn't really want congress
| keeps budgeting for M1 tanks so it can keep those jobs.
|
| Suddenly producing 20 destroyers in one year and nothing for
| next 15 is going to impact labor market massively and also you
| are going to loose all the skills acquired
|
| In peacetime you want a low constant throughput for your
| military.
| yongjik wrote:
| The current title of the article is:
|
| > As more electric vehicles hit the road, our charging habits
| must change - here's why
|
| With these bullet points:
|
| > The race is on to decarbonize road transport and get drivers to
| switch to electric vehicles (EVs).
|
| > There were 16.5 million electric vehicles on the world's roads
| in 2020 - this is expected to rise to 300 million by 2030. But
| with these rising numbers, the US grid could struggle without
| investment and changes in charging habits, a Stanford study
| finds.
|
| > Modelling this future scenario, researchers predict that peak
| net electricity demand could increase by up to 25% and by 50%
| with full electrification.
|
| I'm not really sure why OP decided "The grid isn't ready for 300M
| EVs by 2030" as submission title. (I mean, I can guess, but...
| _shrug_ ) Seems like a violation of HN's "no editorializing
| titles" policy.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| EV's use about the same amount of energy as an air conditioner,
| they both average about 10kWh per day. Is it a challenge? Yes.
| But it's a challenge we met before when we went from 10% of homes
| being air conditioned to 90% in under 2 decades.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| If people are given the the ability to charge their cars during
| the daytime, this will be a non-issue. That, however, is a big
| if.
|
| https://twitter.com/MegaWattXinfo/status/1650913384206942414
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| The grid will never be ready for that, but smart charging may be
| the solution.
|
| What do I mean by that: there is already a number of solar panel
| installations that are feeding the grid at daytime, sometime even
| more than what the grid can consume. There is no way currently to
| link the PV systems and the cars so that when the PV generates a
| lot of electricity all the cars in the area will start charging,
| maybe discharge at night to cover home consumption, practically
| using the cars as very large and intelligent batteries with the
| side effect of using all the excess PV energy to change cars for
| driving.
|
| Otherwise we will be in the situation of cars charging at night
| will fail the grid and PVs overproducing at day will fail the
| grid, while most cars are used less than a couple of hours per
| day on average (ignoring commercial vehicles and taxi/Uber, cars
| carry people from home to work and back, eventually with a round
| trip to shop for groceries).
| syllablehq wrote:
| Sure, we can try to change people's behavior, which of course
| will only work with smart incentives. And/or we need a lot more
| grid-scale energy storage. Changing people's behavior is really
| hard. And before it's even possible to implement "surge pricing"
| in a way that's exposed to individuals, we need a ton of
| infrastructure changes. Those are good goals, but it might be
| simpler to incentivize behavior at a larger scale than consumers
| and cover the gap with storage. For example, add storage to car
| charging stations instead of telling consumers when to charge.
| The charge station would then charge up at low demand so it won't
| pull from the grid during peak demand. Maybe we need all of the
| above, we'll see.
| Havoc wrote:
| Of all the problems out there this, seems like a fairly
| insignificant one.
|
| They have built in connectivity and storage making them
| inherently suitable for demand side management and variable
| pricing. Hell they can even discharge into peak times and can
| thus be a net positive for grid stability.
|
| More concerned about how are we gonna get the energy source clean
| by then. Because without that all this "clean" EV stuff is a
| giant waste of time
| Atheros wrote:
| They'll never Ever discharge into the grid. If it's ever close
| to economic to do so, it'll be more economic for utilities to
| buy and install cheaper grid-scale batteries on their own.
| Batteries designed to move around safely will always be more
| expensive. Because of that, during the exceptional times when
| it would be economic to use the cars like you suggest, like the
| Texas freeze a few years ago, the infrastructure won't be in
| place to do it.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| > Hell they can even discharge into peak times and can thus be
| a net positive for grid stability.
|
| Batteries are the most expensive component of the car and won't
| get me as far as gas when they're at 100% capacity. If I were
| to buy an EV I would never allow discharging the battery back
| into the grid without hefty compensation, and probably not even
| then. I really don't want you putting cycles in my battery, I
| have battery anxiety from all my other devices already.
|
| Not an EV hater, I covet the Teslas but I'm not willing to pay
| the premium and charging is impractical in parts of TX that I
| visit family in.
| lipoid_ecole wrote:
| 1. We must switch to EVs because of climate change.
|
| 2. The grid cannot support everyone having EVs.
|
| 3. Everyone must live in 15 minute cities.
| klyrs wrote:
| Will there even be 300M drivers by 2030?
| Ccecil wrote:
| Temporary fix for some places
|
| Convert current remote gas stations to high efficiency turbine
| generators, still "dirty" but should be able to be made cleaner
| than the same number of cars. Once the charging structure is in
| place...then you have a bit of time to get the proper power lines
| and/or alternate power generation running.
|
| Might seem dumb...but the stations are typically where cars go,
| have large tanks...etc.
| grokx wrote:
| I would argue that EVs are just the tip of the iceberg.
|
| >The race is on to decarbonize road transport and get drivers to
| switch to electric vehicles (EVs).
|
| Actually the race is on to decarbonize all the things (at least
| here in France). My wife works at RTE (Reseau de Transport
| d'Electricite), which is the grid company here. She makes studies
| for customers that require more power, so she basically see where
| new power lines could be placed, whether a new high voltage
| station is required, etc.
|
| These last years, she noticed a rise for such demands, as the
| whole heavy industry has been decarbonizing their processes:
| chemicals, metallurgy... Coal and other fuels (used for heat
| production for instance) are being replaced either by
| electricity, or by green hydrogen (so even more electricity).
| tiku wrote:
| As it happens tomorrow is still 2023 and we have some time left.
| xyst wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe. We should design our cities around more
| sustainable and scalable forms of transportation. American (yes,
| Canada is included) city planning and design is terribly
| inefficient.
| reactspa wrote:
| [dead]
| juujian wrote:
| Well what a coincidence. Chances are there won't be 300M EVs on
| the streets by 2030 anyways, because by then we will have moved
| the goalpost far into the future anyways.
| mbgerring wrote:
| Are people aware that there's an entire industry with 100s of
| billions in capital already working on these problems? Every time
| I read one of these articles and the comments on them, it reads
| like a reason why we can't or shouldn't decarbonize, rather than
| a call to do the engineering work to fix the problem. Which
| plenty of people are doing already! This is Hacker News, right?
| api wrote:
| It's not a technology problem. I expect to see grid failures in
| some areas for a while because of general NIMBY opposition and
| bureaucratic inertia preventing expansion from occurring until
| it's an acute problem.
| ianai wrote:
| Not only that, but it's obviously a huge market opportunity
| from bottom up. Kids looking to enter the workforce should be
| able to expect all sorts of work related to electrification-
| electricians, engineers, etc. It's likely to actually create
| niches and market segments.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Where? I haven't seen anyone upgrading all the powerlines and
| power stations around my home... I haven't even seen any plans
| to do so. The local power distribution monopoly says it can't
| be done unless they raise prices 5x - which nobody wants to
| pay.
|
| Also, power generation - if everyone wants to charge at night,
| we need to completely change the concept and stop the move to
| solar energy in favor of nuclear.
| notatoad wrote:
| the power lines around my house got upgraded last summer.
|
| if we think that's somehow relevant here.
| fourseventy wrote:
| So because you don't see anyone upgrading the powerlines by
| your house that means that there is no work taking place on
| the power grid?
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Yes, exactly. Where I live it's a political thing so I'd
| know. The situation now is that they say they're not going
| to do it because people oppose the higher prices.
|
| They even stopped allowing people to connect their solar
| arrays without large batteries because the grid is that
| overloaded.
|
| (of course they're doing work on it - but definitely not
| the sort of work required to allow everyone to charge their
| 1-3 cars per household).
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| There's none in the Brussel area of Belgium. In fact, we're
| stuck for the foreseeable future to a grid at 3x220 (nearly
| the only one in the world) because it's too costly to
| update the network, cabin and so on. We're speaking about
| industrial level of power delivery to charge all those EV.
| Things need to change at a huge scale and the operator are
| not ready for that. Source ? I discussed that with my
| operator for high power need - their answer was to move
| elsewhere.
| SECProto wrote:
| I was curious about the "grid at 3x220" mention so I did
| some research. Couldn't find what you meant by this, but
| did find a page from the electric utility in Brussels
| explicitly saying there are no problems or work required
| by the EV conversion plans by 2030.
|
| https://www.sibelga.be/en/about-sibelga/projects-
| challenges/...
| martijnvds wrote:
| Parts of Belgium have 3 phase power with 220V between
| phases, and no neutral. And protective earth of course.
|
| The rest of Europe has 230V, 3 phases + neutral, with
| 400V between phases.
| mbgerring wrote:
| In many, many places all over the world every day, just maybe
| not in your backyard just yet. Your local power distribution
| company is lying, and if you want to solve a fun problem you
| could get into the weeds and figure out how to work around
| them.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Not really my problem - I have a car for long distance
| trips only and that's going to be diesel at least for
| another decade or two.
| jackmott wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| huijzer wrote:
| Global warming is your problem just like it is everyone's
| problem
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Diesel doesn't have to be fossil. Unfortunately, I can't
| make them switch to algae. But I'd be OK with paying more
| for it, if it was available. My regular long distance
| trips are impossible with current electric cars, so
| that's really not an option. Yes, I considered an online
| call.
| thomasmg wrote:
| Non-fossil diesel is going to be very expensive... The
| alternative is battery swap stations. Nio seems to be
| successful with that.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| I wonder if that could work on my 1200km-long trip. It'd
| have to be a truly pan-European company and network. So
| far we don't even have telecoms like that - I switch
| between 3 different national networks during the trip...
| But on the other hand, the Tesla Supercharger network
| spans the route, so why not I guess.
| ajpgrealish wrote:
| Upgrading the power lines isn't the full answer, certainly
| some upgrades will be required, but the wires are designed
| for peak demand. EVs have flexibility, and can mostly be
| charged in non-peak times, drastically reducing the powerline
| and power station upgrades required.
|
| This flexibility has to be managed, and there are many
| companies working on this. For example: https://ev.energy/
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| The energy requirements seem high enough that it'd create a
| new, even higher peak during the night...
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I did a back of the envelope calculation some time back
| for both Canada and the UK (I imagine the US numbers are
| proportionally similar to Canada). If we replace all
| private passenger cars with EVs, using average mileage,
| it increases annual electricity demand by about 20%. The
| difference between daytime peak and nighttime off peak is
| more than 20%. In a lot of cases, there will be no need
| at all for new power plants or distribution networks. The
| reality, of course, is more complicated as we are
| electrifying much more than passenger cars.
|
| You better believe, however, that the distribution
| networks are planning around this. I was in a meeting
| with someone from the National Grid (UK central grid
| authority) who is responsible for planning for the
| transition. Basically, all new housing developments are
| being provisioned assuming heat pumps and EV chargers.
| Existing areas are being monitored and upgraded as they
| near the grid limits. Plans go out years in advance. It
| is a lot of work, but I am confident that it is being
| well managed. I cannot say that everywhere is as well
| managed, but I think it is safe to assume that many of
| these people and organisations do, in fact, know what
| they are doing. It sounded like the biggest problem in
| the UK was NIMBYs fighting against the new distribution
| networks needed to land the power from the offshore wind
| farms which are rapidly replacing the old fossil fuel
| generators.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| NIMBY is indeed the issue here as well. People don't want
| wind and solar arrays and they don't want to pay even 20%
| more for electric distribution or electricity itself.
|
| The power distribution company is competent, I have full
| confidence in that. Yes, they have plans and know what
| they're doing and what's coming - but they need money to
| do it, and they're not going to get it anytime soon.
|
| At least this country is very pro-nuclear.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Upgrading is only one way to achieve this.
|
| The most likely solution is house battery backups attached to
| a virtual grid.
|
| https://youtu.be/_UJiglrYgJY
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's just not happening near _your_ home (probably
| intentionally). Go down to the Mojave desert between Barstow
| and Vegas and there are _massive_ solar farms built over the
| last decade. Same with the California mountain passes and
| wind energy - there are large wind farms on the Altamont,
| Pacheco, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio passes. Many of these
| are also getting large upgrades with more energy-efficient
| turbines, eg. the Pacheco Pass windfarm (18 MW, 162 turbines,
| built in the early 1980s) is getting upgraded in 2023 to
| 147.5 MW and 200 MWh of battery storage with fewer turbines.
|
| Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs.
| With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way
| to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives
| for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as
| charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Well, that's US. I am in _much more densely populated_
| Central Europe - several orders of magnitude compared to
| California. For most people here, workplace is 15-30
| minutes walk /public transit away, that's not going to
| solve anything about car charging.
|
| Wind is now opposed by people here because it ruins the
| landscape. Funny but it's what it is. And there's not
| enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
| nostrademons wrote:
| If people are walking or taking public transit anyway,
| you don't have a vehicle problem in the first place.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Oh, we most certainly do. Look at how much energy in the
| form of gas/diesel is used in Europe - it's definitely
| not insignificant. The average household has almost 2
| cars, many have 3 - and they use them, just not to get to
| work.
|
| IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make
| this a much harder problem here than in the US.
| brazzy wrote:
| > Well, that's US. I am in much more densely populated
| Central Europe - several orders of magnitude compared to
| California.
|
| The average population density of California is 250 per
| square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than
| one order of magnitude in difference.
|
| > For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes
| walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve
| anything about car charging.
|
| If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge
| at home during the day, so it's already solved.
|
| > And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays
| of this size.
|
| There most certainly is. People overestimate the required
| space to a ridiculous degree.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| I don't live in Germany. Germany is a large state with a
| lot of empty space. I live in a much smaller, much more
| densely populated state.
|
| Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should
| compare the average of a city like Berlin, Cologne or
| Amsterdam, not the average of an entire large state like
| Germany.
|
| _The city where I live has nearly 3 million residents on
| just 50km2_ , and it's not even the most dense city
| around. Compare that to San Francisco (second most dense
| US city) - which has 815k residents on 120km2.
|
| People here live in very dense cities with
| agricultural/natural space in between, you don't have
| that in US cities which are mostly long stretches of
| single-family households. We don't have single-family
| households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-
| rich and the few people living in the villages around the
| cities.
|
| > If people are not driving to work, their cars can
| charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
|
| That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue
| is - the grid isn't able to provide that much power and
| especially not during peak hours, not to mention the
| missing power generation capacity. The grid is already
| nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity
| upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.
| ductsurprise wrote:
| "For most people here, workplace is 15 minutes
| walk/public transit away,..."
|
| Curiously, how many cars need charging(at night even) in
| this area? Maybe I missed the intent behind your comment.
|
| But it doesn't sound like there is much daily driving.
|
| Perhaps "...hands wet on the wheel..." like in the Golden
| Earring song often? )))
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| People don't use the car to go to work, but they use it a
| lot after they come home. Families with children use
| their cars a lot. Even with good public transport,
| handling affairs of a family of 5 takes a lot of time on
| the bus - so people use the car to go shopping, drive the
| kids to their after-school sports/clubs, visit
| grandparents etc.
|
| Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the
| parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still
| lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost
| daily.
|
| There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but
| there's _much more_ vehicles per square kilometer.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Except between 2021 and 2022 california lost 3GW of
| generation capacity. They're building new plants at the
| same time they're taking other ones offline and the totals
| aren't increasing.
|
| This is probably why California continues to warn that
| rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that
| specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again
| this year.
|
| Total system capacity is not improving at a rate
| commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
| mulmen wrote:
| How much capacity are they building and how much more do
| they plan to take offline? Why should we assume linear
| trends in a revolutionary time?
| akira2501 wrote:
| The trend was a net increase in capacity from 2011 to
| 2017. From 2017 until today the trend has been a net
| decrease in capacity. There were 206GW available in 2017,
| there were 194GW available in 2022. Which is a 6% loss
| overall.
|
| Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on
| bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're
| headed towards an uncomfortable corner.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| You're going to replace every transmission line, every
| transformer, and retrofit every substation in the United States
| in 7 years? Ok...
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > it reads like a reason why we can't or shouldn't decarbonize
|
| Only if you give in to the strawman that it's either fossil
| fuel or EV, when in fact our top priority should be retiring
| most private cars anyway.
|
| Independently from the engine type, developing our
| infrastucture and cities around car usage is unsustainable.
| alex_lav wrote:
| Yeah I was going to respond "Well it better get ready I guess",
| as I agree, this content reads like disparagement instead of
| encouragement
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| As someone who works in the industry, the projects to increase
| grid capacity are dependent on investment mostly from the
| government or from large customers of which there are few. It's
| not like executives at every public utility are excited to sink
| themselves further into debt, assuming they can get access to
| all the capital, and betting it all on a completely unrelated
| industry and an unsure customer base.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Are people aware that there's an entire industry with 100s of
| billions in capital already working on these problems?
|
| I'm confused, what problem do you think they are fixing ?
| Because they cannot fix an inherently practical problem.
|
| In most countries on this planet, you have three "problems"
| when it comes to EV demand, and none of them can be fixed by
| "100s of billions in capital" by private industry.
|
| Thee are : 1) There is (usually) only one
| national grid 2) There are only a finite number of
| power stations 3) Most people live in cities and in
| apartments / dense-housing
|
| This leads to two (because there's nothing you can do about
| point 3) super-hard, super-expensive "problems" that need
| fixing for all these EVs: 1) Expanding the
| grid is effectively a non-starter, the cost would be measured
| in trillions, not billions. 2) Building new power
| stations takes decades, not years. And right now there are not
| enough of them. 3) As I said, there's nothing you can
| do about point (3), i.e. it's simply not remotely viable that
| everybody can magically have solar panels and battery storage
| at home. Most people don't have the space. And expecting
| everyone to retro-fit is, realistically, a non-starter.
|
| Now, on the subject of power stations, you will probably come
| back and say "but, but .... renewables".
|
| Well, yes, renewables are cool and quick(er) to build than
| power stations, but they are not the panacea.
|
| Grid-level bulk solar is cool, but all those panels take vast
| amounts of space that most countries don't have to spare. Solar
| is also cool, until it gets dark at night.
|
| Grid-level wind is cool, but then on hot summer days there's
| not much wind. So you end up relying back on the old-school
| power generation (nuclear, coal, gas etc.).
|
| Hydro is cool, but for obvious reasons not available
| everywhere. And nobody's going to be rushing out building large
| numbers of new dams any time soon.
|
| Bulk-storage in batteries at grid level is not feasible to deal
| with all millions of EVs coming on stream. You would need
| millions of batteries, which as we know, batteries don't last
| forever....
|
| So ultimately whether you love em or hate em, you still need
| old-school power generation.
|
| Which brings us neatly back to my point (2) ... Building new
| power stations takes decades, not years. And right now there
| are not enough of them.
|
| Hence 2030 is a pipe dream.
| skybrian wrote:
| You don't necessarily need "most people" to have a big and
| growing business, though. Getting electric cars into the
| garages of people in suburban and rural areas is still a
| pretty big market, and in these places there is often room to
| install solar panels. That will reduce load on the grid,
| which can be used for other purposes, including electric car
| charging in cities.
|
| Also, maybe we shouldn't expect one kind of transportation to
| dominate like happened for cars? There can be different
| solutions for different use cases. Driverless taxis, electric
| bikes, and public transportation all work sometimes, and they
| can be usefully combined.
| rawfan wrote:
| Exactly. I work for a larger company that builds and maintains
| the electrical grid in many European countries. I won't say
| there are no challenges, but I can assure you that we are
| confident that we can build the solution(s) to sustain no only
| EVs but everything else that's gonna rely on the grid. One of
| the biggest show stoppers is actually current regulation. And
| even here, at least my employer is building and investing in
| solutions as if the required market regulation changes were
| already in place.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I work for a larger company that builds and maintains the
| electrical grid in many European countries._
|
| Also European here. The problem for EV charging is gonna be
| the last mile, not the grid. Upgrading the grid is the
| easiest part. The charging points are the painful part to fix
| that nobody seems to have an answer to or want to talk about
| in the first place.
|
| In my city, most of the residential streets where people live
| (in flats) are full of parked cars on both sides of the
| street. How will all those cars charge once they switch to
| EV? Will the already narrow sidewalks be full of charging
| stations next to each parking spot, and will pedestrians
| constantly be tripping over the charging cables? How will
| this work?
|
| Currently all EV owners here are well off people who own
| their houses in the suburbs or in rural areas, and can
| install their own chargers at home for their EVs, but how
| will the people living in flats who have to park on the
| street charge their cars? Effectively those who aren't well
| off to own their own houses are penalized by the lack of EV
| charging infrastructure where they live.
|
| Ideally, we'd get rid of private cars in the city completely
| and replace them with better public transport and cycling
| infrastructure, but looking at the real life facts, there's
| no political will to push car owners out of car ownership,
| and car owners are by far a majority of the voting
| population, even among the low earners. And upgrading the
| public transport and making it run frequent enough to make
| people give up cars ownership voluntarily would most likely
| make tickets too expensive for car owners to justify. And
| public transports is already subsidized.
|
| Edit 1: Also, regarding the last mile charging infrastructure
| stations, another one of their weaknesses compared to filling
| up with gas at a gas station, is that they suck, the billing
| & payment systems sucks, the UX sucks and they often have
| faults or are broken, making them unusable or seeing people
| struggle to get them to work. MKBHD did a video on this
| proving this point and is definitely worth a watch:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA2qJKU8t2k
|
| Edit 2: Another issue with EV adoption is the EV range and
| charging durations. Many Europeans hop into their cars in the
| summer and drive their family to the south of Europe hundreds
| or thousands of km. The range of a cheap EV still is subpar
| compared to a cheap ICE and so is the charging duration VS
| the refueling duration, making long holiday trips by EV a
| nightmare compared to a ICE car. We'd need a lot more
| charging points around these routes to cover summer or winter
| holiday trafic, and by a lot more, I mean a lot a lot more.
| Even some gas stations can have 15-20 minute queues for a 3
| minute tank refuel at peak holiday season in summer or winter
| near popular routes like Austria, Italy or Croatia, so
| imagine what EV charging queues would look like when a charge
| easily needs 30 minutes instead of 3.
| alain94040 wrote:
| There are 3 places where people can charge their car: at
| home, at work, and at the store. If you can't charge at
| home because you park on the street, that still leaves two
| opportunities to charge.
|
| Another way to think about it is where does your car spend
| its time, 24 hours a day? Is there any time where you car
| is somewhere for an hour or more, sitting idle? That's
| where chargers should be.
| cjrp wrote:
| The variance in pricing needs to be tackled though. At
| home, on an EV-optimised electricity tariff, you can pay
| PS0.10/kWh whereas at my local supermarket it's about
| PS0.45/kWh. You're penalised for not having access to a
| charger in your flat. Compared to petrol, where it costs
| what it costs (ish).
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Will the already narrow sidewalks be full of charging
| stations next to each parking spot, and will pedestrians
| constantly be tripping over the charging cables? How will
| this work?
|
| In my neighbourhood (London) there are now some charging
| ports coming out of lamp posts, and some coming out of the
| floor. There is a short cable required to connect the car
| to the charging port, but it's not too bad a trip hazard as
| it's only between the car and pavement.
|
| EDIT: looks like this https://imgur.com/a/H9aqMCo
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> charging ports coming out of lamp posts_
|
| Lamp posts don't really exist in my city. All city street
| lights are hung from overhead cables wired between the
| residential buildings on the sides of the
| street/sidewalk.
|
| Like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0814083,15.442
| 3363,3a,75y,24...
| nicoburns wrote:
| I don't have pictures, but there are also some charging
| port embedded directly into the sidewalk around here.
| alfor wrote:
| - in the streets: lamp post or dedicated post
|
| - at work (need parking anyway)
|
| - charge station with fast charge (not that different than
| gas stations, but slower)
| juujian wrote:
| I won't hold my breath for that turn of events. Grid companies
| are not exactly known for proactively investing into
| infrastructure.
| vkou wrote:
| Grid companies are some of the most competent corporations
| I've interacted with. The power is mostly on, I don't need to
| play stupid telephone customer support games with them, and
| they keep things running.
|
| Maybe PG&E, or whatever they have in Texas sucks, but as a
| general rule of thumb, I wouldn't assume that grid operators
| are stupid.
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah exactly, it's not like the world was ready with gas
| stations for 300M gas cars when that happened, either.
| shipscode wrote:
| I doubt that the world was actively preventing consumer
| vehicles from driving on existing infrastructure. It seems
| like the same people who are forcing the change over to
| electric vehicles are also actively working to reduce the
| presence of vehicles on the roads.. I don't believe they are
| operating in good faith.
| callalex wrote:
| How are these two things related?
| mbgerring wrote:
| Utterly precedented.
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/Shoot-the-tires-
| Th...
| mbgerring wrote:
| Right? Imagine, having the full benefit of hindsight, and
| _still_ responding to such a massive opportunity by grumping
| that there's no way it could ever work!
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Gas distribution is a very different problem from
| electricity distribution, though. Gas was initially sold at
| pharmacies and it worked just fine before specialized shops
| cropped up. You can't have that with electrical grid.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Why does it have to be a grid? There are plenty of
| electronic devices that don't get power from the grid,
| some at dwelling scale. What prevents power from being
| delivered by truck, just like fuel is today? (Density is
| definitely an issue, but technology evolves)
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| Haven't really considered that. I guess the problem is
| conversion loss. If we're making some sort of fuel at
| power generation points, why not use that fuel in cars
| instead of doing another conversion back to electricity?
| We could make hydrogen or even synthetic gas/diesel and
| just keep the cars we already have.
| mbgerring wrote:
| I am literally building an electric jerry can in my
| workshop _right now_ so that you can carry around car
| recharges in your trunk. There are solutions to all of
| these problems and the technology is getting better all
| the time. All you have to do is stop looking for reasons
| why it can never work, and start looking for ways to make
| it work.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| I'm not sure how that helps if the grid is already nearly
| overloaded and we need gas/coal to cover peak demand. The
| problem is not the charger and its small battery, the
| problem is generating clean power and transmitting it.
| jonhohle wrote:
| He's solving the transmission problem. A portable battery
| does not need to be charged from the grid.
|
| Edit to add: I have about 1.2kW of storage that can be
| charged by solar in a few hours that takes up about the
| space of a 5 gallon NATO jerry can. It can be charged
| thousands of time for the initial price paid. That's with
| 2020 tech. Certainly density and efficiency will improve
| as market pressures increase.
| throwaway50606 wrote:
| How do you charge that small battery? Going to the
| powerplant with it doesn't seem like a good answer.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I don't know if you saw my edit, but in my case, it's
| charged by either a portable solar panel or (optimally)
| home solar panels.
|
| In the not so distant past there were plans for
| neighborhood scale nuclear reactors. That would go a long
| way towards distribution, redundancy, and scale issues.
| smileysteve wrote:
| 1/3 of the US gasoline pipeline was held hostage or had a
| massive leak in 2021, shuts down for hurricanes, and had an
| explosion in 2016.
|
| But every individual household can't high speed charge on
| their residential service 250 miles every day while their air
| conditioning is running. (/s)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware.
| ..
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/161498/huntersville-north-
| ca...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Colonial_Pipeline_leak
| sokoloff wrote:
| > everybody can't high speed charge on their residential
| service 250 miles every day
|
| Fortunately, most people drive substantially less than 91K
| miles per year, so everyone charging 250 miles every day is
| not anywhere close to the actual requirement.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Added the /s for clarity;
|
| The gasoline delivery pipeline is a risk to national
| security and the health of citizens; it has experienced a
| number of issues over the last 10 years.
|
| 95% of fear-mongers are concerned about the 5% use case,
| while ignoring that humans sleep, eat, or need to stretch
| legs in less miles.
| bjustin wrote:
| Why would everyone high speed charge? You can get 250 miles
| in Model 3 at 12 hours of 6.6kW (~22 mi/hour). Even only
| eight hours would get 170 miles. Eight hours of charging
| per night is doable for most people, I imagine.
| smileysteve wrote:
| This is what I am pointing out about the article,
| industry, and fear mongering on this subject.
|
| the p50 for daily commute distance in America is ~41
| miles; if cars only had a 200 mile range. they'd still
| last ~4+ days; and that's not accounting for the
| possibility of "topping" off at commercial electric
| properties (places or employment/entertainment,
| transportation hub, gas stations installing chargers)
| ip26 wrote:
| Air conditioning peak load is 2-7pm, 5.5kW. EV peak load is
| like 7pm-1am, 6-12kW (and can be dialed back).
|
| Frankly they are complimentary. If you have the service to
| run AC, you already have the service for an EV.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Exactly. And modern thermostats and modern electric cars
| can work around each other, around grid usage dynamics
| while also extending the average driver's battery life
| because 8 hours of sleep doesn't require full speed
| charging.
| olyjohn wrote:
| It wasn't a problem because if you went on a longer trip
| where there was no gas, you just took more gas with you. Lack
| of gas stations wasn't even an issue for gas cars. People
| didn't just jump in their cars and go on a totally unplanned
| drive like we can do now.
| worrycue wrote:
| No one pushed a deadline for transition from horses to ICE
| car though. It just happened over time at its own pace.
| People bought cars when they could afford it and there was
| infrastructure to support them.
| jmspring wrote:
| California, a state with many EVs, can't keep its power grid
| going during high winds, heat waves, etc. PG&E and other power
| companies are a long way from fixing this issue.
| leetcrew wrote:
| it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the
| solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies
| (generation) will actually be ready by that date.
|
| but besides that, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best
| solution to begin with. EVs solve only one of several major
| issues with ICE vehicles. they still shed tire/brake particles,
| take up tons of space, encourage sprawling development, and are
| just as hazardous to pedestrians.
|
| I can't help but think this massive investment of time and
| resources might be better spent on public transit that is
| actually pleasant to use. pax will typically optimize for
| travel time over all else. if the fastest option is public
| transit more often than not, personal vehicles will become a
| niche that doesn't matter much from an emissions perspective.
|
| btw, I am an auto enthusiast. I love driving and I love cars.
| but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at all.
| imo we would all be better off if cars were enjoyed
| intentionally by a small minority of enthusiasts. why spend so
| much to fix something most people don't like to begin with?
| iinnPP wrote:
| I was downvoted into oblivion for suggesting part of the EV
| solution will be to force people out of driving and into
| using a Waymo-like service.
|
| Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use
| public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at
| awkwardly for it.
|
| I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light
| doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow
| basic rules of the road.
|
| I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to
| kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge
| their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and
| witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red
| light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver
| making a left hand turn during an advance.
|
| Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by
| moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.
| dghughes wrote:
| Have you even been to the countryside? People live there.
| iinnPP wrote:
| Of course. I couldn't do what I do there and would never
| suggest anyone choosing that life should change. I value
| personal freedom immensely.
|
| There are definitely things that could be done in that
| situation to limit the need for driving. I have no real
| way to know if the people living outside of cities do
| such.
| least wrote:
| > Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't
| use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at
| awkwardly for it.
|
| Being able to walk everywhere you need to go is a massive
| luxury. Especially without any public transportation?
| Sounds really nice.
|
| It's just not feasible for most people and it won't be any
| time soon.
| iinnPP wrote:
| What is stopping them exactly?
|
| I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of
| 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have
| lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west,
| southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been
| able to walk everywhere my entire life.
|
| I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of
| my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to
| the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have
| met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the
| grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce
| every few days.
|
| People are just lazy.
| aiilns wrote:
| Let me get this straight. You're asking what's stopping
| people from walking everywhere?
|
| And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing
| someone may work 15km away from home you write a
| senseless comment about people driving to the grocery
| store and concluding that what's stopping people from
| walking everywhere is that they're lazy.
|
| OK.
| iinnPP wrote:
| Not everywhere. That is a very deliberate decision on my
| part. I have picked jobs which support it, moved where I
| rent based on it, and made it important. Not for the
| environment either, but for me.
|
| If you want to work 15km from your home and can't
| bike/public transport to work and don't have the ~2 hours
| to walk (which I am not suggesting would be common) then
| you could do whatever makes sense to you. I have been
| finding work from home positions since 2015 without
| issue.
|
| The comment about the grocery store is different than
| what you think. The problem is that people complain about
| carbon while doing nothing to solve it. In my scenario it
| is a 15min walk to the store. I carry two reusable bags
| and sometimes a backpack for bulkier items. The area is
| on the outskirts and the sidewalk is limited to one side
| of the road. Having walked to the grocery store some 500
| times in the last ~2 years, I have met an astonishingly
| low amount of people doing the same. My neighborhood has
| two public schools and a highschool, to give you an idea
| of size.
|
| These same people drive to the centralized park and
| convenience stores. It is a nice area with 80% NDP
| voters.
|
| I collect groceries for 4 people and make all my meals
| from ~scratch (very limited canned food). We don't use
| the cities garbage services, everything is recyclable or
| compostable.
|
| I'm not really suggesting anyone should walk everywhere,
| just that driving everywhere isnt helping the problem
| they claim to care about.
| least wrote:
| > People are just lazy.
|
| Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that
| take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many
| people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about
| buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering
| most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for
| driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.
|
| No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the
| time or money to live that lifestyle.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > What about buying clothing or other necessities? If
| you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not
| reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else
| to drive for you.
|
| not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering
| them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile
| logistics can get.
|
| ubereats/GrubHub is a notable exception, since people
| expect much stronger latency guarantees for this use
| case.
| least wrote:
| > not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering
| them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile
| logistics can get.
|
| It's definitely more efficient than driving yourself, but
| it's also hiring out your driving to someone else, which
| counts against someone being able to "walk everywhere"
| because it requires you to assume that the person can
| make up any shortcomings in their location with mail
| order. Point is, you can't realistically walk everywhere
| in most places.
| iinnPP wrote:
| I work full time. I make all my food from scratch(when
| tomatoes are off season I do use canned tomatoes and
| tomato paste but not something such as tomato sauce) I
| have one child, an elderly dependent, and a wife. My wife
| also works full time.
|
| We do not order delivery.
|
| I do not commute currently, but I have walked for
| 75minutes one way(2.5hours total for 12.5hours a week)
| for about a year at a previous position with a poor bike
| route.
|
| We do order stuff from Amazon. Which covers things that
| are hard to find close by.
|
| There's no way that everyone is lazy in my area. They
| could definitely stop 3minute drives to the park though.
| vidarh wrote:
| > What is stopping them exactly?
|
| Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a
| drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because
| I like to walk and have always lived places with good
| public transit.
|
| So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area,
| I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it
| often worked.
|
| But I also frequently found direct routes to places I
| needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive
| detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park,
| I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route
| along El Camino Real _would 've_ been short enough to
| walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have
| no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully
| insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I
| did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be
| better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with
| the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.
|
| Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at
| that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written
| off as too inconvenient for me.
|
| As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to
| figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I
| _lived_ in the area, I 'd probably quickly have given up
| and resorted to learning to drive.
|
| And frankly, that's one of the _more_ pedestrian friendly
| areas I 've visited in the US outside the highest density
| urban cores.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > What is stopping them exactly?
|
| Not every city is laid out according to sound urban
| planning principles, or they have been remodeled and
| reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many
| American cities, for example, are organized around the
| assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment
| of other modes of transportation.
|
| That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people
| to live far from places of work, food markets, stores,
| schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to
| build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar
| developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact
| cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary
| to drive everywhere.
|
| > People are just lazy.
|
| Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If
| you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good
| chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first,
| but our current practices are financially unsustainable.
| Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they
| can be straightened out.)
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Not every city is laid out according to sound urban
| planning principles_ [...]
|
| Well... they were laid out according to the "sound" urban
| planning principles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their
| soundness is currently being re-evaluated since the
| previously-unknown/ignored externalities are now being
| taken into account.
| iinnPP wrote:
| You're right. 100%.
|
| There are areas that promote walking and other forms of
| transit and there are those that don't.
|
| I am in a city that contains a voter base that is 80%(NDP
| - A Canadian political party that is left of the Trudeau
| Liberals). We have bike paths all over and many areas of
| the city can be reached through a gorgeous city wide bike
| path paved throughout gorgeous scenery. Together with
| dedicated bike lanes with spacers from traffic. Those
| paths are used mostly for excerise and the paths on the
| road are used by an alarmingly small sum of people.
|
| Its definitely laziness for some people but not all.
|
| I also read every privacy policy for services I use. I'm
| weird. I'm also lazy.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Not every city is laid out according to sound urban
| planning principles, or they have been remodeled and
| reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many
| American cities, for example, are organized around the
| assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment
| of other modes of transportation.
|
| In addition, plenty of climates in the US don't allow for
| walking, no matter how the city is laid out. You aren't
| walking anywhere remotely distant in Las Vegas or Phoenix
| or other parts of the Southwest in the summer, when
| temperatures routinely soar over 110 degrees (with
| blazing sun), unless you want someone to find your
| shriveled husk of a corpse on the side of the road.
| Similarly, you aren't walking anywhere in huge portions
| of the North/central/northeastern parts of the US in the
| winter, when temperatures plummet below zero and
| blizzards and ice storms occur frequently. Even in areas
| where the weather and the city layout is amenable to
| walking, there are tens of millions of elderly, disabled
| and/or morbidly obese Americans that lack the capacity to
| walk any significant distance at all.
| mlyle wrote:
| This doesn't change the amount of generation you need to go
| N miles. Indeed, rideshare might increase distances
| overall.
|
| Rideshare has some benefits in reducing some of the capital
| investment and some in allowing some charging
| infrastructure to be centralized (reducing distribution
| system). It might also be able to squeeze a little bit of
| mid-day charging in. But it doesn't really change most of
| the picture for the grid.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Rideshare is also one of a portfolio of things that make
| it easier to have walkable, bike friendly cities while
| still being able to hire cars (of an appropriate size)
| when necessary.
|
| So commute every workday by bike/bus/train but use a car
| share to get to somewhere out of town once a month.
| vidarh wrote:
| What I'd like to see would be transit networks
| aggressively build out "virtual" and "semi-virtual"
| routes with capped waiting times. E.g. put a "call"
| button at bus stops, run anywhere from no to frequent
| scheduled full bus routes on a stretch, and (EDIT:
| automatically, on demand) charter ride-share services as
| needed to fulfill wait time guarantees. Increase the use
| of actual buses as usage increases.
|
| A whole lot of transit is a chicken and egg problem where
| people buy cars because the transit options aren't good
| enough, and so have incentives to use it, and so rider
| numbers remain too low to justify increasing them and/or
| it deters people who strongly prefers to use public
| transit from even moving there.
|
| You need to treat it as a public good not just for those
| who use it, but for those who might want to use it and
| even those who don't but end up benefiting from less
| congestion and the environmental benefits, and be willing
| to subsidise it more aggressively, and rideshare options,
| with or without self driving, could help drive down the
| cost of operating many "bus routes" that'd be
| particularly expensive to operate with mostly empty full
| scale buses.
| matt3D wrote:
| They have a concept similar to what you described in
| South America. In Peru you can jump in private vehicles
| that run particular named (sometimes even numbered)
| routes.
|
| The car and minibuses simply go when they are full or
| once they have waited a fixed amount of time and they
| have at least on passenger. It works pretty well and a
| company called CityMapper tried to do something similar
| in London. They looked at the transport data and found
| routes that people wanted to take, but we're underserved
| by public transport (eg. Shoreditch to Islington on a
| Friday night). They would then hire privately operated
| black taxis to run the route for a fixed fare with a
| fixed waiting time, and they took the risk on empty
| seats.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/citymapper-ties-with-
| gett-...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yes, transport nerds talk about why you need public
| transport that runs at night and weekends so that people
| can rely on it, but increasingly technology opens up
| options like you suggest.
|
| Rural areas have been early adopters of this kind of on
| demand public transport due to low density but it can be
| applied further.
| iinnPP wrote:
| I think there is a clearly positive impact in having what
| I imagine would be 70% less vehicles on the road.
| Including the added benefit of the elimination of
| driveway requirements and huge parking areas allowing for
| more dense development and thus shorter overall drive
| distance.
|
| It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
|
| Getting people to walk would be the biggest impact.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I think there is a clearly positive impact in having
| what I imagine would be 70% less vehicles on the road.
|
| Already acknowledged, but it doesn't improve the picture
| for the grid.
|
| > huge parking areas allowing for more dense development
| and thus shorter overall drive distance.
|
| Ceteris paribus. If we move to EV rideshare, eventually
| houses might become closer together. But that will be a
| much slower effect and you'd have to deal with energy
| usage based on current building distances.
|
| > It also allows for a distribution in peak charging
| time.
|
| Already mentioned.
| mulmen wrote:
| Maybe people are staring at you awkwardly because you're
| picking fights, and not because you're walking.
| mbgerring wrote:
| The massive investment in time in resources is mostly private
| capital, on the assumption that that capital will see a
| return, which is unlikely to ever happen with public transit.
|
| I agree with you, and I also know we are running out of time
| to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. I'm
| resigned at this point to doing whatever is likeliest to get
| the job done in time. And either way, the busses, trains and
| ferries all need to be electrified too, and any grid
| improvements, advancements in battery tech etc. will also
| help those efforts.
| phkahler wrote:
| Public transit only works when the stops are all in high
| density areas. Most the the US is not suitable for it. We
| might improve it in areas where it makes sense though.
| vidarh wrote:
| Plenty of stations I travelled between as a child (in
| Norway) were pretty much a bit of pavement next to the
| track, and no station building. Sometimes minutes from the
| nearest house.
|
| Public transit can relieve / reduce the need for car
| traffic a whole lot of places too low density to completely
| remove the need for cars.
| shagie wrote:
| Norway is 148 mi^2 and Montana is 147 mi^2 (and for a
| comparison on the other extreme Japan is 145 mi^2)
|
| Norway has an overall population density of 38/mi^2
| (15/km^2) and a map with that distribution - https://comm
| ons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_population_de...
|
| Montana has a population density of 6.86/mi^2 (2.65/km^2)
| - and an interactive map of it:
| https://statisticalatlas.com/state/Montana/Population
|
| Japan has a population density of 900/mi^2 or 326/km^2
|
| There are large portions of the US that are larger than
| European countries and have _very_ low population
| densities in comparison.
| vidarh wrote:
| Now check the population distribution of US states and
| even the lowest density US states have most of their
| population in areas with far higher population density
| than places in Norway served by trains.
|
| Yes, it's not a solution for everywhere. It's not a
| solution for everywhere in Norway either. But the point
| was not that. The point was that contrary to the comment
| I replied to, it is perfectly viable to serve areas that
| are quite low density. When you consider the low density
| areas in Norway that _are_ served by trains, the
| proportion of the US population that lives in lower
| density regions is tiny.
| shric wrote:
| Your areas are off by a factor of 1,000.
| oblio wrote:
| Montana has 500k people or so.
|
| Start solving this for the places with 10+ million people
| and change rural areas last, if needed (most likely you
| won't need to change anything).
| esalman wrote:
| Exactly, and you don't need to invest tons of $$ on EVs to
| solve that. ICE vehicles should be acceptable in rural
| areas. In fact, you'll probably have hard time convincing
| rural folks to switch to EVs.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > In fact, you'll probably have hard time convincing
| rural folks to switch to EVs.
|
| I don't think it'd be as hard as you suggest. Even grid
| power (let alone off-grid power) is far more accessible
| to even the ruralest of ruralites than a gas station.
| Another decades' worth of improvements on vehicle
| range/horsepower/affordability and off-grid power
| generation/storage/affordability would be more than
| enough to convince folks that EVs are a sufficiently-
| practical choice.
| xvedejas wrote:
| I used to think this, but you'd be amazed how many small
| towns in Europe have train stations. The eastern third of
| the US is high enough density for this, we've just chosen
| to put our money into interstates and the like instead.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Trains take you from one place where you don't want to be
| to another place where you don't want to be. They are not
| a substitute for privately-owned transportation, except
| perhaps in dystopian fiction.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| They work wonderfully in extremely dense places like
| London and Tokyo, but they're awful absolutely everywhere
| else. Definitely nothing in America that compares to
| foreign trains yet, it would take us 50 years to come
| close to catching up.
| crote wrote:
| And that's why you are supposed to _design_ your
| environment. One railway station is in the suburbs, the
| other is in a high-density office park. Problem solved!
| danenania wrote:
| Trains connecting town centers obviously can't solve
| everyone's transportation needs, but they can help to
| enable a car-free or reduced-car lifestyle for those who
| want that and are willing to design their lives around
| it.
|
| Even if that's only, say, 10% of the population in less
| dense areas, it could still make a significant impact on
| traffic and emissions as well giving an economic boost to
| downtown areas, since there's now a reason for people to
| live near them.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think the long-term solution to transit problems is
| intermodal passenger pods that can shuffle between self-
| driving cars, trains, aircraft, watercraft, and elevators.
| Containerization for people, basically. You'd hop in your pod
| which is basically another room in your apartment when not in
| use, and then the building would shuffle you down the
| elevator to the subway. Once you're outside of city limits,
| it'd transfer you to a self-driving car to take you to a hike
| in the mountains. Or it could send you to the airport,
| security scan you on the way, and your pod would fit straight
| onto the aircraft without any need to get out, go through
| security, wait at the terminal, or interact with other
| passengers. Or it might transfer you to commute rail to get
| to the general vicinity of your workplace, and then a self-
| driving scooter for the last mile to work.
|
| EVs are a useful step in that direction though. Something
| like the Rivian skateboard platform lends itself very well to
| containerized passenger transport, since the passenger body
| can just be loaded straight onto the chassis. Plus this model
| generally has shorter, fewer, and more predictable vehicle
| miles, which makes EV charging easier.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| What is this actually solving other than adding tons of
| mechanical failure points? Why not just use a door? People
| already don't move around enough.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Transit time, particularly in the transfer points between
| types of transportation. Imagine leaving for the airport
| 30 minutes before take-off time rather than 2 hours, and
| not needing to spend half an hour de-planing and
| collecting your baggage. Many short-haul commuter flights
| (eg. ~1H from SFO to Reno or LAX to Vegas) become viable,
| and HSR is much more practical if you don't need to worry
| about connections or last-mile transportation.
|
| You could commute Merced -> Google in about 50 minutes
| with this system, less than the shuttle to SF currently
| takes. It'd be 2 stops on CA HSR (Merced -> Gilroy ->
| SJC, 30 minutes), then 1 stop on a Caltrain baby bullet
| (SJC -> MTV, 15 minutes), then a self-driving car for the
| 2 miles from MTV Caltrain to Google (5 minutes). Best of
| all, you wouldn't need to interrupt what you're doing -
| you could take a nap, or code, or read a book, or watch a
| TV show and not need to put it away every time you switch
| transportation modes. Think of what that'd do to housing
| prices, if the commutable distance from the Bay Area
| extended out to the Central Valley.
|
| Also, computer-controlling all the individual vehicles
| allows the possibility of moving transfers. Imagine if
| HSR didn't need to come to a stop for passengers to
| embark and disembark. The self-driving car could instead
| accelerate up to ~100mph and the train would decelerate
| to that, and then pods would move over as their chassis
| lined up. One of the biggest issues with rail
| transportation is that you lose much of the travel time
| to stops, acceleration, and deceleration; get rid of that
| your trains can go much faster.
|
| There's a lot of benefit to using self-driving
| cars/scooters only for the last-mile and using bulk
| transport like trains or planes for the majority of the
| trip, too. It's fewer vehicle miles overall and a shorter
| trip radius for the EV, which cuts down on overall energy
| use and makes recharging simpler.
| crote wrote:
| All of this has been done in the past.
|
| Having to be at the airport 2 hours in advance is solely
| due to the security theater we all participate in. Back
| in the 90s you could indeed show up 15-30mins before
| takeoff. Magic pods aren't going to solve it: you'll just
| sit for two hours in your pod instead.
|
| Trains in Britain used to detach some cars while driving
| at high speed, so-called "slip coaches". Turns out it is
| needlessly complicated while providing negligible real
| benefit. High-speed rail already operated in a hub-and-
| spoke structure, and one 5-minute stop every hour 100
| miles or so is barely noticeable.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| ... but what's the actual value here?
|
| OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system
| that adds a ton of mechanical failure points--so buddy
| can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a
| TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here? If
| they feel they need to nap in public then maybe their
| work-life balance is problematic.
|
| Who's going to pay for this system? If they pass the
| costs onto the consumer, the average schmoe isn't going
| to be able to afford to travel with what maintaining a
| system of this complexity would cost.
|
| What about fail states? What happens when a pod transfer
| issue means the whole train is brought to a halt? What
| happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in front of the
| car running alongside the train?
|
| Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to
| be in the office, let alone all the time. The solutions
| are travelling less, not increasing the complexity of the
| transport infrastructure and consuming more juice just
| because someone doesn't want to stop what they're doing
| for a minute or two.
|
| People say WFH is apparently bad for productivity--so
| what's coding from a train? Productivity is measured in
| value generated and quality of that output, not time
| invested.
|
| As for cars and trains matching speeds to facilitate
| transfer of a pod, what's that going to do to the price
| of real estate so transport can do that all over the
| place?
|
| The office is dead. Long live the office.
| nostrademons wrote:
| > OK, create an incredibly complex transportation system
| that adds a ton of mechanical failure points--so buddy
| can read his book uninterrupted, take a nap, or watch a
| TV show? And what's the net gain for humanity here?
|
| Yes, that's precisely the point - to get back the hours
| spent commuting so you don't have to think about them and
| can do other more productive or enjoyable things with
| that time. If you spend 8 hours working at $50/hour and
| then 2 hours commuting, that's $100/day or roughly
| $2000/month in saved time. Most people would consider
| that worthwhile.
|
| > If they feel they need to nap in public then maybe
| their work-life balance is problematic.
|
| No shit, but cutting time wasted in commuting is
| generally an easier sell than cutting time spend actually
| working or engaged in leisure activities.
|
| > What about fail states? What happens when a pod
| transfer issue means the whole train is brought to a
| halt? What happens if there's an unexpected obstacle in
| front of the car running alongside the train?
|
| The same way we've made air travel so safe that you don't
| need to think about it, despite the tens of thousands of
| parts in a modern jetliner. Engineer the hell out of it,
| and build in multiple redundancies and failsafes.
|
| > Quite honestly, most people probably don't even need to
| be in the office, let alone all the time.
|
| If remote work actually worked, we should do that
| instead.
|
| Not everyone is a software engineer or knowledge worker,
| and it's likely that the fraction of people who are is
| going to go down in the future.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > but it seems to me that most people don't enjoy driving at
| all.
|
| While many people don't enjoy _driving_ , many people _do_
| prefer cars as a mode of transit. Don 't assume that people
| "don't like cars", whether or not they like _driving_ as an
| activity. People overwhelmingly prefer cars.
|
| > if the fastest option is public transit more often than not
|
| That's a _very_ high bar to reach. And you also have to take
| into account the hassle of transit not actually getting you
| where you want to be. It 's one thing to have a transit
| system that can get you between cities or to a large general
| area; it's another to have a transit system that can get you
| from an arbitrary door to an arbitrary door, which a car
| _can_ do.
| nicoburns wrote:
| People do often prefer driving. However, people tend to not
| like the effects that _other people driving_ has on their
| life. Public transport starts to look a lot better when you
| take that into account too.
| [deleted]
| brianwawok wrote:
| If you don't live in a mega city it doesn't matter
| though. I live in a metro area of ~250k people. No
| traffic is so bad a 2 lane road doesn't still move. So
| drive away my neighbors! Preferable in an EV powered by
| green energy.
| oblio wrote:
| A city of 250k people could have awesome public transit
| if it wanted to.
| benjiweber wrote:
| I mean in London the fastest option is public transit more
| often than not, and you get pretty close to door to door.
| nine_k wrote:
| Same in Manhattan! Now we only need to make most of the
| US as dense as London at least. I don't think it's
| realistic. (Also, have you tried to afford a place to
| live in London, to say nothing of Manhattan?)
|
| People "prefer cars" because people prefer detached
| houses and low-density living. Not all of them, but
| plenty enough. For them, an EV is the only electric
| option.
|
| In cities, of course, public transit should predominate,
| and should be developed and improved, while car presence
| should become lower and lower.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Public transportation in London is awesome and everyone
| from the richest to poorest rides it together. The couple
| of times I rode in Manhattan really put me off of it.
| Dirty, overcrowded, pervasive smell of urine, and mostly
| just lower class people.
| majormajor wrote:
| Last time I was in Manhattan was 6 years ago, but at the
| time an Uber was as-good-or-better than the train for a
| lot of within-Manhattan trips. I splurged on a bunch of
| Ubers since it let me see a lot more of the city at
| ground level, which was fun, and then quickly noticed
| that when you factored transfers and walking to/from
| stations, it was no inconvenience either.
|
| Obviously it wouldn't scale that well for _everybody_ but
| I wouldn 't be surprised to see, if self driving cars
| master Manhattan, some more well-off people who aren't
| currently at "private driver" level of rich to move to
| self-driving cabs or such to avoid crowding and go point-
| to-point.
|
| The _big_ advantage of the trains was in leaving
| Manhattan and going to Long Island, though, compared to
| the car-bottleneck-hell of the bridges and tunnels.
| leetcrew wrote:
| we don't need to make most of the US as dense as London.
| we need to make the parts of the US _where most people
| live_ dense enough to support public transit _for most
| trips_.
|
| it's fine if people use ICE vehicles now and then to
| visit family, go to a specialty store, etc. it's the
| daily and weekly trips that need to be fixed.
|
| and the breakeven point does not need to be quite so
| dense as London. for example, the DC area has a lot of
| sprawly (at least by east coast standards) suburbs. the
| DC metro has some room for improvement, but it is still
| much better than a car for getting into and out of the
| city during peak hours. though I'll admit I sometimes
| splurge for an Uber. cars are much more competitive when
| you don't need to park them.
| barrkel wrote:
| The fastest option in London is somewhere between a
| motorbike and a bicycle (if you ignore traffic lights).
| It is not public transit.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| >whether or not they like driving as an activity. People
| overwhelmingly prefer cars.
|
| You're basically rejecting the premise as your
| counterargument. Yes, in the currently built world where
| public transit is generally worse, people would rather take
| a car. What about the scenario where public transit is
| actually decent? You don't really address this, you just
| state a bunch of gripes with transit-as-is not transit-as-
| conjectured.
|
| >And you also have to take into account the hassle of
| transit not actually getting you where you want to be. It's
| one thing to have a transit system that can get you between
| cities or to a large general area; it's another to have a
| transit system that can get you from an arbitrary door to
| an arbitrary door, which a car can do.
|
| Pretty much every major Metro in the world does exactly
| that. NY, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, HK. When trains
| run at 5 min frequencies or better, and the network is at
| least federated between hubs, you get effectively arbitrary
| point to point transport which is always there when you
| need it, you don't need to find or pay for parking, it will
| never be broken into or have unexpected maintenance costs,
| and you can focus on anything you want because you don't
| have to pay attention to the road. Factoring in the cost of
| a new car over how many years you will own it, as well as
| insurance and other expenses, you're paying more per day
| than you would on the train before you even left the
| driveway! The rationale of car ownership stops making sense
| in cities like these, and consequently, people aren't
| preferring cars.
|
| The commonality of commuting by car in North America
| doesn't arise out of natural preferences, its a built
| preference. Built by a system that reinforces itself.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Pretty much every major Metro in the world does exactly
| that. NY, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, HK.
|
| I've been to Paris and London and used their Metros and
| had no car. They're nice, but there's still a lot of
| walking between where you are and the metro station. If
| you're on the system late at night, there's a lot of
| waiting. If you're on the system during rush hour,
| there's a lot of people in a tiny space. If you can use
| it on the shoulders of peak, it's wonderful. Then again,
| roads are pretty good on the shoulders of peak too
| (parking in a busy area is almost never great, but
| there's an easy solution: avoid dense cities, which I'd
| prefer anyway, dense cities have a lot of people, and I
| don't like people in groups)
|
| You may not have to pay money for unexpected maintenance,
| but you may be stuck somewhere when a train breaks down
| or has a collision; hopefully at a station and not on the
| particular train. Yeah, this happens with personal
| vehicles, but when my car won't start, it doesn't have a
| big impact on taxi capacity; when the train is stuck,
| everybody wants a taxi and it's hard to get one.
|
| The big problem is there's no sense of agency. I can
| maintain my car, but I can't maintain the metro. I can
| fuel my car, but I can't prevent metro workers from
| striking. I can pretend I'll avoid collisions when
| driving, but I can't drive the train (and the train can't
| stop in time if anything unexpected is on the tracks).
|
| Americans like a sense of agency, even if it means a
| worse result. Give me liberty or give me death and all
| that.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the
| solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies
| (generation) will actually be ready by that date.
|
| Isn't that what it means to set a goal to complete some task?
| Of course it means that you also aspire to accomplish all the
| dependencies by that date.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _it does seem to me that we have decided on a date for the
| solution (EVs) without high confidence that the dependencies
| (generation) will actually be ready by that date._
|
| "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other
| things, not because they are easy, but because they are
| hard...":
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
|
| Perhaps we should consider being more aspirational than
| practical.
|
| > _but besides that, I 'm not convinced that EVs are the best
| solution to begin with._
|
| I'm all for putting more effort into moving towards less car-
| centric and more human-centric developments, but until
| there's (more) progress on that front, we need to make
| parallel progress on reducing carbon in our current system:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
| leetcrew wrote:
| I think using a rare moment of broad public alignment to
| change our transit paradigm is a lot more aspirational than
| issuing patches to a fundamentally broken system.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I suspect that broad public alignment would be far less
| broad and far less aligned the moment one suggests
| actually changing said transit paradigm to any
| significant degree.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| EVs are actually phasing out both brake particle emmissions
| and brake fluid, by returning to "drum brakes" when regen
| isn't enough.
|
| https://www.continental.com/en/press/studies-
| publications/te...
|
| > The drum brake offers even further attractions, the
| environmental particulate emissions are vastly reduced when
| compared to the traditional disc brake system technology,
| that will bring upcoming decisive decisions to comply with
| increasingly stricter environmental requirements. While
| combustion engines have had to comply with increasingly
| stringent emission limits in recent years, the focus has now
| widened to include foundation brakes. The fine brake dust
| generated from the brake system can have far-reaching adverse
| effects on human health, depending on the size of the
| particles emitted. Experts expect stricter legal requirements
| from the EU Commission by 2025 at the latest. Drum brake
| technology takes advantage of the enclosed housing system,
| allowing the brake dust particulates to be accumulated within
| the enclosed system that can be collected and disposed in a
| controlled manner that protects the environment.
| lnsru wrote:
| These things rust as hell in their enclosures. Volkswagen
| group EVs with rear drums are catastrophic development.
| Take press releases and advertisement with a grain of salt
| next time.
| chinabot wrote:
| running a 40 year old car (ev conversion) with drum
| brakes just fine. its a solved problem.
| leoedin wrote:
| Until perhaps 10 years ago, drum brakes were standard as
| the rear brakes of almost every car. They lasted pretty
| much the lifetime of the car.
| deckard1 wrote:
| 10 years ago? As in 2013? Did you mean 40 years ago?
| Almost every car? On a scale of 1 to 10 billion, how high
| are you right now?
| namdnay wrote:
| Rear drum brakes are still standarx for entry level cars
| in Europe. Dacia Sandero, Renault Clio, Peugeot 208 - the
| base models all have rear drums
| lnsru wrote:
| Yes. My cheap motorcycle had drum brakes and was fine for
| many many kilometers. The problem with electric vehicles
| is that they brake with motors and not with brakes.
| Brakes gather dust and silently corrode. Apparently
| latest vehicles periodically activate brakes without
| driver's intervention to prevent corrosion and uneven
| wear.
| jjav wrote:
| > Until perhaps 10 years ago, drum brakes were standard
| as the rear brakes of almost every car.
|
| You need to go back more than that. In the 80s nearly
| every car had rear drum brakes, that phased out in the
| early 90s or so. Only the very cheapest cars had drums
| past that timeframe.
|
| > They lasted pretty much the lifetime of the car.
|
| Having owned a few drum braked cars (including all four
| wheel drums), not really. You still need to change them
| as they wear out, it's just a lot more work than disk
| brake pads which can be swapped out in a few minutes.
|
| The rear brakes do a lot less work than the fronts,
| particularly on smaller lightweight cars (the kind that
| still had rear drums in the 90s) so in that sense yes,
| those rear drums lasted a good while (but certainly not
| the life of the car).
|
| If you put front drum brakes on a fast & heavy car,
| you'll be wearing them out pretty quick.
| namdnay wrote:
| Maybe that's specific to big US cars? Drum brakes are
| still completely standard on entry level european and
| Asian models. Rear discs only come into play when you're
| going above 100hp and/or 1300kg
| amluto wrote:
| Cute.
|
| How does the accumulated brake dust not affect braking
| performance? And can it tolerate getting wet inside, or is
| it somehow sealed well enough to go through puddles without
| getting wet?
|
| I suppose one could build an all-wheel-drive EV that only
| uses mechanical brakes during emergency maneuvers.
| sottol wrote:
| Drum brakes have been around for a century, afaik they're
| more robust than discs but "lower performance". These
| look like a variation on a pretty standard design at
| first scan.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Lower performance brakes is a hard trade off to make when
| EVs are also heavier than gas cars
| ch_sm wrote:
| I think the idea is that engine braking (regenerative
| braking) makes up for the difference.
| ezfe wrote:
| My PHEV weighs 30% more than the non-PHEV version, yet my
| brakes have lasted longer than anyone I read online with
| the regular version of my car.
|
| This is because of regenerative braking not using the
| brake pads, using the motor instead.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Drum brakes are one of the many things that contribute
| towards EVs becoming lighter than equivalent ICE cars
| over time, as they weigh less than disc brakes (about 25%
| lighter, 10lbs maybe, and unsprung weight too).
|
| As the link states, they also increase efficiency, and
| that allows for smaller batteries, less weight. They're
| also looking into lighter weight aluminium disc brakes
| because EVs use them less, and it prevents issues with
| low usage disc brakes rusting.
| hedora wrote:
| EV's greatly reduce brake wear. We live on a mountain, and
| typically apply the brakes for 1-2 seconds to get down with
| the EV. We ride the brakes for 1 or 5 minutes with our
| manual or automatic transmission ICE car. Put another way,
| we're pushing 50K miles on the EV's original brakes and
| replacing / servicing them isn't on our radar.
|
| However, the EV eats tires like a full-size pickup truck
| with somewhere to be.
| yardstick wrote:
| > However, the EV eats tires like a full-size pickup
| truck with somewhere to be.
|
| Out of curiosity, why is that?
|
| Edit: I Google'd:
|
| " Electric vehicles boast instant torque, meaning they
| accelerate the second you put the pedal to the metal.
| However, the high instant torque of electric vehicles can
| also increase wear and tear. In addition to good grip,
| the rubber compound used for EV tyres also needs low
| rolling resistance."
|
| And
|
| " Teslas are heavier than most other cars because of
| their battery packs, which can add hundreds of pounds to
| the vehicle's overall weight. This extra weight puts
| additional strain on the tires and leads to increased
| friction between the tires and the road surface, which
| causes them to wear out faster."
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| "Compared to a similar ICE vehicle"
|
| It maybe a false memory effect but I vague remember this
| notion about trolleybuses.
| saurik wrote:
| I am under the (maybe wrong?) impression that the former
| issue is helped a lot by telling the car to accelerate in
| Chill mode instead of Standard, which causes it to
| purposefully carefully ramp a derivative or two of
| acceleration.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| While watching this video I was thinking will this solve
| the tyre particulates problem
|
| https://youtu.be/vSNtifE0Z2Q
| viraptor wrote:
| That seems like a temporary issue. Right now we've still
| got lots of expensive/high class EVs where ludicrous mode
| is a thing people are excited about, but once there's
| real competition on the low end... "doesn't waste tyres"
| sounds like both a good selling point and simple to
| implement.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| > we're pushing 50K miles on the EV's original brakes and
| replacing / servicing them isn't on our radar
|
| 50k is nothing, ICE cars often go longer than that
| without new brake pads. Had my ICE sedan for five years
| with no sign of brake squeaks yet. Never thought about
| brakes when I lived on a huge hill either.
| CHY872 wrote:
| I think most EV drivers will tell you that they use the
| brakes very infrequently - perhaps once or twice per
| hundred miles if one is driving long distances. Certainly
| if you're careful it'd be possible to never use the
| brakes. I think that's what EV owners think of as
| different to traditional cars. Yes, brakes can last a
| long time on traditional cars, but it seems intuitively
| obvious that if you're just not using them, they'll last
| longer for the same equipment.
| Retric wrote:
| That's hogwash, swapping 100% of new cars to EV's represents
| roughly a 1% increase in electricity demand per year. We can
| quibble about how flexible the grid is, but historically
| demand has increased much faster than that in several
| periods.
|
| As a sanity check. Cars last ~25 years on average. So 100%
| new EV's represent roughly a 4% changeover per year. Average
| load per EV works out to roughly 450 watts, because they use
| a lot of power when their on but most people aren't driving
| that long per day.
|
| Actual use depends on various factors like charging
| efficiency etc but roughly 15,000 miles at 4 kWh / mile is
| only 3,750 kWh per year + charging inefficiency call it 4,000
| kWh [per EV] * 282 million [cars] * 0.04 [% new cars per
| year] = 45 TWh per year vs ~4,000 TWh of total US electricity
| demand. (Edit: fixed units.)
|
| By comparison demand increased by roughly 100TWh/year from
| 1985 to 1990. Demand only really leveled out between 2010 and
| now. https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-
| electricity-co...
| dclusin wrote:
| Do people actually replace the battery in cars once it dies
| and continue to use the car? Former Coworkers old Prius had
| the battery stolen out of it and insurance totaled the car.
| Wondering if the lifetime between ice and ev is valid.
| quonn wrote:
| Why would the battery die? This is not a smartphone. For
| LFP batteries I expect multiple decades of use, even the
| other Tesla batteries are holding up with only around
| 5-15% of capacity loss after a decade.
| elmicha wrote:
| I think you meant 4 miles/kWh (= 15.5 kWh/100km).
| Retric wrote:
| Ops yes.
| amluto wrote:
| > they still shed tire/brake particles
|
| They shed a whole lot less brake particles due to
| regenerative braking.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I can only speak for my own observations but I think it comes
| down to the fact that fewer people are trusting "the market" to
| competently predict, deliver and maintain critical fundamental
| infrastructure for human life.
|
| "The market will take care of that problem" seems to only
| benefit a small group of people and we're not seeing the
| requisite proof that any future development will do any better
| pmlnr wrote:
| ...
|
| Are you aware how shitty the grid in most residential areas
| actually is?
| cs702 wrote:
| True, the grid isn't ready for 300M EVs by 2030... but it will
| _have to be._
|
| Alas, consumers have a long history of ignoring exhortations to
| change their habits. They always do what they want, not what some
| authority tells them they ought to do. If they want giant-ass
| long-range electric trucks and SUVs, they will buy giant-ass
| long-range electric trucks/SUVs.
|
| The only viable solution is a massive wave of investment to
| improve energy generation, storage, delivery, and efficiency
| worldwide.
|
| I believe we can do it :-)
| fowtowmowcow wrote:
| Microgrids are the future.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| What's that?
| p1mrx wrote:
| A microgrid generally means having wind/solar/batteries
| near your neighborhood, with a natural gas or diesel
| generator that kicks in when the batteries die.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| That's neat
| kiba wrote:
| You don't need 300M EV if you make cars less mandatory for
| living.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's a non-answer. 2030 is less than 7 years away. You're
| not going to essentially rebuild entire cities in that time.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Consumers are _going to be told_ that they want giant-ass
| electric trucks and SUVs.
| happycube wrote:
| _sigh_ yeah - GM 's replacing the Bolt with the 2-ft larger
| Equinox for instance.
|
| I'd rather have a revised Spark EV with rear wheel drive and
| 200mi range myself.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I guess I'm much more cynical about who changes consumers
| habits. Auto companies have spent enormous sums ensuring
| political behavior is such that cities aren't as walkable as
| they could be and that people need cars in their life.
| badpun wrote:
| Did they do it in every developed country? The US doesn't
| have massively higher number of cars than other countries,
| esp. considering its relatively rural character.
| cs702 wrote:
| Auto companies didn't change consumer habits. They changed
| _physical infrastructure_ to make vehicles a necessity. And
| they did so surreptitiously through back-room political
| influence, without ever telling consumers what they ought to
| do. That 's... different.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| Eh, I don't feel like walking today, or tomorrow.
| ttiurani wrote:
| A more critical issue with just electrifying cars without also
| reducing the number of them, is that it's completely inadequate
| to meet CO2 targets. A new study in Nature Communications
| modelled this for London and found that:
|
| "[T]he current system cannot reach stringent carbon budgets
| without adopting highly aggressive and disruptive policies.
| Electrification, including moving the phase out date forward,
| results in cumulative emissions 7 times greater than the Tyndall
| carbon budget for the "well below 2 degC and pursuing 1.5 degC"
| global temperature target. Rather, a combination of aggressive
| policies is necessary so that future emissions reach levels
| comparable to the carbon budget. Of these policies, the most
| important is reducing car travel activity. Policies that decrease
| car distance driven and car ownership by over 80% as compared to
| current levels are highly effective in edging close to the
| designated carbon budget."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37728-x
| dubcanada wrote:
| Ya we should just say
|
| 300M EVs by some point maybe in the future.
|
| That's how you make progress, hopes and maybes.
|
| The whole point of this is to force a change, otherwise it will
| end up being let's do it tomorrow, and than it's 2050 and there
| has been zero progress.
| mataug wrote:
| Can we also talk about the fact that the fastest growing EV
| market isn't for cars, its for e-bikes[1], and e-bikes are crazy
| efficient, and 20x-30x cheaper, compared to electric cars.
| Example, an e-bike with 400wh ~5 charges of a laptop battery, can
| get 30 miles of range, compared to ~250wh/mi of a car[2].
|
| Cities are slowly waking up to the fact that more people are
| biking, and more biking infrastructure leads to even more people
| biking.
|
| I'm not trying to say that the problem highlighted here isn't
| valid, I'm merely trying to highlight that the scale of the
| problem might be lower than we expect.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21016306/electric-
| bike-e... [2]: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2023/04/12/why-an-
| e-bike-inc...
| rendang wrote:
| Bikes and ebikes are great, but the ceiling on adoption is too
| low to make a dent in CO2 emissions on the scale of EVs. No
| large metro in the US has more than about 5% commuting share on
| bikes.
|
| See for example https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/best-
| cities-for-bike-co...
| bertil wrote:
| Indeed: "The grid isn't ready for 300M Electric Monster Trucks
| by 2030" but the grid will have no problem to power 300M
| electric bikes.
| peteradio wrote:
| Lol, you like riding bike in the rain? What about in the
| snow? What about when its excessively hot out? The US doesn't
| want and will not use 300m bikes. Or do we expect the US to
| come to a stop when its anything but pleasant outside?
| jseliger wrote:
| I just got one of these:
| https://magnumbikes.com/collections/commuting-
| errands/produc..., granted for under $2k due to a sale at a
| bike shop, and it's great.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| This is the way. Building out dedicated bike infrastructure in
| cities will come at a fraction of the cost of any other
| investments and provide for a transit mode that suffers from
| none of these problems.
| dicriseg wrote:
| So get it ready. It's the richest country in the world with
| profits so large it's spiking inflation. There are billionaires
| out the ass. Maybe we can find the money there.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| The US also didn't have 99 aircraft carriers in 1942. But it had
| that many in 1945. So I guess this is just a question of
| commitment, dedication, resouce allocation, and ingenuity.
| prepend wrote:
| > if adaptations aren't made before net-zero goals for EVs are
| met.
|
| Of course. Why would we not make adaptations? The job of the grid
| is to adapt to consumer needs. They aren't perfect, but it makes
| sense that they'll adapt.
|
| I wouldn't count on consumers changing unless the grid does
| something simple like set prices to incentivize charging
| patterns.
|
| I have a few electric companies near me. One just has flat rates.
| The other has nighttime rates that are much lower. I expect all
| power companies will end up like this. Or just grant low prices
| for "smart chargers" that auto charge based on when there's
| excess capacity.
|
| These types of articles seem funny to me as a form of "I haven't
| eaten in the past 8 hours, if this trend continues I will starve
| to death in two days."
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed. I have talked to multiple utility representatives from
| Florida all the way up to Illinois, and they are all aware of
| the upgrades that are going to be necessary to support full
| electrification. Not just vehicles, but everything (cooking,
| hvac, etc). ComEd in Illinois even mentions it on billboard
| advertising they have in their market ("Electrification is
| coming. We'll be ready.").
|
| https://www.icc.illinois.gov/docket/P2022-0432/documents/325...
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-comed-seeks-m...
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| If you consider what is the cost of "adapting" I bet your
| discourse would change. EVs have massive consumption, way
| bigger than lights, computers and AC/heating combined. In my
| part of the world (Eastern Europe) the usual power consumed by
| a home is 0.5 to 2kW, with short time spikes to 3-4kW. An EV
| can easily go 12KW, that requires a very expensive upgrade in
| capacity and load balancing of the grid to accept locally (in a
| city block) hundreds of cars randomly connecting with huge
| surges. You need some kind of interface and protocol to
| coordinate car charging per micro-grid.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| EVs can go to 12kw but don't need to. At that rate a Tesla
| will add over 40 range-miles per hour, which means you'd
| recharge the entire battery range in about eight hours. Some
| people do drive 300 miles per day, but on average people
| drive less than 30 miles (in the US) and maybe 40km/day in
| Europe. When you work this out into a continuous power draw
| over the course of a day, it's a few hundred watts per
| vehicle. Still requires grid upgrades and some planning to
| avoid spikes where everyone fast-charges at once, but it's
| better to consider these smaller averages than assume
| everyone is doing 12kw charging continuously.
| hencq wrote:
| Exactly. It's always weird when current infrastructure gets
| brought up as an objection against new technology (EVs, clean
| energy transition etc.). As if it's some unchangeable law of
| nature. It makes me wonder if, during the industrial
| revolution, people pointed out that trains could never take off
| because there were no railroads for them.
| peteradio wrote:
| Yea but nobody was like "we are gonna kill all these horses
| in 7 years".
| prepend wrote:
| I think people have a hard time visualizing change.
|
| It's similar to the "what's the point of oil exploration on
| today's prices since it takes 10 years to yield."
| mfer wrote:
| I think it's more complicated than it seems. For example,
|
| - electricity payments are highly regulated. I've seen places
| where the electric company wants to raise rates to cover
| investments in infra only to see the gov not allow it.
|
| - there are laws that impact how they can upgrade the
| infrastructure and limit the abilities of the electric
| companies
|
| These are legislative issues that need to be dealt with by non-
| experts. Articles like this can help with those processes
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > The other has nighttime rates that are much lower.
|
| Shouldn't it be the other way around? As I understand, the goal
| is to get vehicle owners to charge during the day, since
| (domestic) consumption at night is already high, and since
| solar only helps then.
| prepend wrote:
| Usage is high during the way due to work and industry with a
| peak around 8pm.
|
| Electricity usage midnight-5am is very low. And rates are
| lowered even further as many power plants produce at a
| uniform rate, regardless of time of day. Things like hydro,
| nuclear, tidal, and wind.
| ivalm wrote:
| Peak utilisation is ~9 pm, best to charge is probably 10 am
| to 4 pm.
|
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
| oakesm9 wrote:
| Currently in the UK energy prices are lowest at night when
| usage is lowest. Night being after most people are in bed and
| before they wake up. You're correct that when solar makes up
| a larger propotion of the energy created, it might change
| that, but that doesn't change the idea of encouaging people
| to charge when energy is most abundant/cheapest.
|
| There are already companies doing this in the UK such as
| Octopus with their Agile tarrif[0]. the unit price you pay
| changes every 30 minutes based on the wholesale price at the
| time. It's capped at 100p/kwh, which is 3x the average flat
| rate people use in the UK, but on the flip side it can go
| below 0p and at those points you actually get paid for using
| electicity. In those cases you're acting as a load balancer
| when there's just too much energy in the network. You can see
| a graph of the past prices here[1].
|
| Octopus also has a pretty good API and hooks in IFTTT so you
| can set up automations for yourself. You could set your car
| or home bettery when the price is under a certain price. This
| could also just be built into the charge in the future and
| there's no reason why it couldn't be a standard between
| energy providers too.
|
| [0] https://octopus.energy/agile/ [1]
| https://dashboards.energy-stats.uk/d/5cZqqmf4z/user-
| dashboar...
| bevenhall wrote:
| Fucktards assuming they're the only ones on the planet.
| traveler01 wrote:
| Build more nuclear plants and a better grid...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-06 23:01 UTC)