Electric vehicles, emergencies, and evacuations

In My Humble Opinion
81

Back at you. Those superchargers have 3 key flaws.

  1. They involve a big chunk of expensive equipment per car. The chargers themselves are a large cabinet full of electronics. You would obviously need a dedicated substation to have a lot of them in one station.

  2. They damage the battery in the car. This might be reduced with better battery designs, but it is partly just inherent to the chemistry.

  3. Supercharging wastes a significant amount of people’s time.

So it makes sense for the long term supercharger price, once companies stop subsidizing them, to be more per kWh than the cost of plugging in at home.

So most people will plug in at home. That’s how most charging will be accomplished. That’s how it is now.

If you could fill up at $1.50 a gallon at home, instead of the $2.50 a gallon it costs now, and all you had to do was plug something in when you park, you’d do it, right?

This is why there will never be enough supercharger stations. Basically just enough to meet the demands of people traveling. Not enough to handle an evacuation.

Note I am assuming a long term, free market equilibrium. Technically, the government of Florida could just pay for 100,000 extra superchargers, at 20 grand each, along the spine of Florida. 2 billion dollars is no big deal, right?

82

I disagree.

installing a gas station in your house is a waste of money. spreading that out over thousands of cars isn’t. EV’s would be everywhere if they had fast charge batteries. Stop thinking in terms of 1917 technology. The same reason electric cars faded away then is the reason they’re not popular now. People want on demand fuel and that’s what WILL occur with EV’s.

83

You’re both sorta right.

Door #1: If we can recharge a car for a couple hundred miles range in 5 minutes we’d end up using almost entirely the equivalent of gas stations: commercial infrastructure at the roadside, not at home.

Door #2: If we can recharge a car for a couple hundred miles range only over a couple of hours we’d end up using almost entirely charging facilities at home or work, not at the roadside*.

Right now the tech supports the former option only barely, a little bit, if you squint real hard. The latter is well in hand tech-wise even if deployment is yet small.

The umpteen billion (literally) dollar question is how much Door #1 is breathless future-fanboyism and how much it’s physically possible but not yet engineerable reality.

I’m not directly competent to say, but my impression from admittedly light reading is it’s more fanboyish than we all wish it was.

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  • Ignoring fleets of shared autonomous vehicles, and even then the cars would go to what they think of as ‘home’ to recharge. Even though that would not be the homes of their passengers.
84

LSLGuy, there’s a missing piece.

I’m a breathless futurist in some ways, you know that. With liquid cooling of the batteries, more refined battery designs, cheaper batteries, and some refinement, 5 minute recharges are possible. And the enormous mountain of equipment (you are talking about a machine the size of a van outside the car, per car) could be shrunk some, and made cheaper.

Not to mention battery swaps are 5 minute deals.

Anyways, charging from home :

costs : you have to plug in. Though robotic charging arms are possible, or the car can just chime if it detects it is near a charger you didn’t connect and you are walking away.

Savings : you pay the base rate of electricity, and save having to go to the recharge station

Charging from the recharge station :

costs : no matter how much you advance the tech to make the chargers cheaper, they aren’t free, the land isn’t free, any attendants aren’t free, security isn’t free, the power substation supplying it isn’t free, any batteries that act as a buffer aren’t free. It will cost, and the premium will be significantly more than just plugging in at the house. Basically every EV sold can charge off 240 volts at a reasonable rate, and 240 volt, high amperage receptacles are in most households for the clothes dryer. Some folks even have that dryer in the garage, so it costs them basically nothing to charge their EV from that receptacle.

Savings : you don’t have to be at home. It’s far faster, saving you time if you can’t afford to wait 8 hours at home for a recharge.

If we all had gasoline pipelines supplying our houses, we wouldn’t have very many gas stations.

85

Your points are well-made.

Except you skipped this counter-point: total up the number of parking spaces in homes, apartments, and garages currently occupied by ICE vehicles in your city / county / major urban area. Total up the number of gasoline pumps in filling stations in the same region(s). Figure the quotient.

Yes, either gasoline stations or EV charging stations will need to make a profit after paying for facilities, land, labor, and the energy they buy then resell. Plus everything else it takes to run a business.

Yes, low-speed home chargers will cost less apiece than high speed filling station chargers.

But will they be cheaper enough to fully offset that quotient? Which I ballpark at 500 to 1 in my mostly suburban town of 50K residents. Don’t forget to include the full incremental electrical infrastructure needed for each all the way back to the powerplants. Pulling a fresh high power drop to a filling station may well be cheaper than pulling an extra 240V/50A or whatever to every single house in a tract.

I don’t know the answer. But accurate predictions require including all the factors, not just most of them. I’m not saying I’ve gotten them all either. There are almost certainly more.

86

I’m in the process of researching an EV as my next vehicle (Probably a used Tesla S or new 3). In order to install a Tesla power wall charger into my garage I need an 240V/ 80 Amp service. Since my house(and I’d imagine most other single dwellings) only has a 100 Amp service I would have to run a “second line” to the house. A quick call to my service provider gave me a estimate of $3000 CAD. Then, I have to have an electrician either sign off on the work I would do to install a pony panel and charger in the garage or spend another, roughly $1000-$1500 to have the work done. Additionally, I still have to buy the car and since I live in Alberta, I get no tax incentives at all. If I were in Ontario, I’d get up to a $14000 rebate on the vehicle and $1000 for the charger.
So I’m in an extra $5000 all in on top of the car. The point is, most people are going to be reticent, or unable, to drop that much extra for the sake of an EV. I know the incentives in the US are different, but I suspect that a blend of filling stations and home chargers is going to be the norm. Tesla has said as much, that the Supercharger network is more about distance travel than day to day commuting.
Personally, I think gas stations are the perfect place for EV charging stations.
1)They already have power
2) They are distributed in such a way that you can go about 3 hrs between them without issue (180 miles/300 km?) and most people should be stopping well before that during distance travel to take a break.
3) It’s easy revenue since the cost of installing the chargers can also be amortized by the longer time you have customers buying stuff at your station.

87

Can you please write this in more rigid math? I don’t know what quotient by what you mean. The only cost savings you have alluded to is that if you assume that everyone plugs in their cars during a period when the electric grid is heavily loaded, and you assume the cars won’t be smart enough to hold back on full speed charging in those scenarios, yeah, you’re toast. There would be a brownout. There has to be communications between electric car chargers and the power company, and a bit of a predictive algorithm, so it needs to guess from the time of day and state of vehicle charge how urgent it is to charge your vehicle, and then draw an amount of current the grid says it can supply.

Or variable time of day pricing, works even better. You’d set your home charger to “cheapest time in the next 12 hour period” or something when you plug in. It would ask the grid, get a predicted rate schedule, and wait until the hour(s) when power is the cheapest. When power is cheap, the grid is lightly loaded, and nobody browns out.

Pretty much every residential house today can handle 40-50 amps for an EV charger, since, like I said, everybody has A/C and electric clothes dryer plugs. Most residential service is around 100-150 amps total.

88

The high speed chargers at “gas” stations will be more expensive than home chargers. But the number of home chargers needed will be vastly more than the number of “gas” station chargers. it’s not obvious to me that the total installed equipment cost of "gas’ stations will be greater than the total installed cost of home chargers as you say it will.

89

Oh. Sorry, didn’t realize you didn’t know this.

The home chargers are free, for all practical purposes. Both EVs sold (Bolt, Tesla) have medium sized internal battery chargers that come with the car. The real charger is in the car, the thing you plug in is really just a dumb wire, even though some of them have displays. It’s in an armored box under the rear seat in a Tesla, can link you a video where someone takes one apart if you are curious.

There is a cord that comes with the car that has a 240v/40 amp plug on the end. You stick one end in the car, and the other in the wall.

If you don’t have a spot on the wall because your clothes dryer is installed in another room, you have to run a new wire, 6-8 gauge conductors, to the plug from the main panel and get a new breaker installed. The cost of the materials is between $100 and $300, depending on distance. Labor is going to make it $500-$1000 or so for some people.

And if that’s too steep, you can just run an extension cord to any old wall outlet, you just won’t regain more than 3-5 miles of range per hour of charging.

See here for some details : https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation

90

Not when you figure in the cost of installing a decent home charger. Power stations will also have bulk purchase power.

I think what people should realize is that modern electric cars will see radical advancements as car makers throw their full weight behind them. Porsche has developed an 800 watt charging system that will deliver 80% in 15 minutes. We’re getting closer to a 5 minute charge and that’s without a radical change in battery design. This isn’t even the early years of mainstream production runs from the majority of car manufacturers.

I’m going to make a prediction that people will look back at battery technology in the same light as cell phone technology. As the need arises the technology will accelerate to meet it out of pure economic force.

91

The two are in no way mutually exclusive.

For most owners road trips over 200 miles are the least frequent use of their vehicles. Yes, if the only family car is (or both/all are) pure EV then rapid charge capacity (mainly at interstate rest stops) will be required for significant out of town travel. But the biggest use of all family vehicles is the day in day out twenty to fortyish a day commuting and doing errands, followed by a few days within a hundred. Plugging in at night, really whenever pulling in the driveway/garage/dedicated parking spot even with the simple and included 110 charger, and avoiding the time of the trips to the gas (or public rapid charge) station, is a huge part of the appeal. A rapid charge could be half the time of a gas fill up and it still imposes more on my time than does plugging in in my driveway and going in the house.

But agreed that we are in a phase of radical advancements. Ironically that may slow down progress on the infrastructure front because it is hard to predict what infrastructure will be the right investment during a phase of both rapidly and radically changing technologies and of changing consumer use patterns.

92

I don’t disagree with what you said except I think the early years of mass produced EV’s will see more use at charging stations due to the cost of home stations. “home” is not necessarily a house with a garage.

93

But they don’t cost much. Literally the only cost is the cost of a new outlet and new wire run. In some scenarios, that outlet has to go to a detached garage, so that means burying a new section of conduit as well. Still chump change.

The actual problem is when someone else, who does not benefit from the EV, owns the property where the receptacle needs to go. If they don’t give permission for an electrician to come out and install it, you’re SOL. It needs the government to step in and basically force property owners to allow installation. (same as right now, where property owners have to let you install a satellite dish).

A bigger problem is in LSLguy’s case. He lives physically far from his parking spot, and so there’s no practical way for an electrician to run a cable from his apartment to the parking space so that his power meter registers the charge.

The actual charger, which is reasonably high speed, is built in the car. Only reason you have to run a new wire and install a new outlet is to get enough juice to the car for a reasonable charging speed. You regain about 25-45 miles of range per hour with Tesla, depending on how beefy a cable you use. Even if you drove 200 miles, that’s 8 hours max to get all the range back.

The Tesla “advanced charger” is a box with a thick wire coming out of it. It just has a terminal block inside so you can deliver more power than a NEMA-50 receptacle can supply. It’s expensive but only because Tesla is basically Apple, it won’t be expensive when electric cars are mass market.

Some of the advanced chargers talk to each other, which you’ll need once 2 electric car families become common. Electrical service many not be able to handle two cars charging at 40 amps each (some houses have only 100 amp service), so the advanced chargers would let each other know when 2 cars are charging, and tell each car to limit it to 20 amps.

94

I don’t think people will be satisfied with overnight charging. That only works if they make it through the day on one charge. I think the desire is to have on-demand power 24/7. That means a significant source of power. That means a charging station capable of a 5 minute charge.

I don’t think that will happen on a 40amp circuit but I’m not betting any money on it.

95

Then there’s a Tesla variant with dual internal chargers. Costs a little more. It can charge at 70 amps. 8 hours of charging is 320 additional miles.

Nobody is saying there wouldn’t be quick-charge stations, but 99% or more of the charging will be people plugging in at home or into a plug at their parking place.

96

Not “necessarily” but the single family house (driveway at least assumed) is the case for a solid majority of Americans: in 2010 at least over 60% of Americans lived in single family detached units and only 17.3 percent were in buildings with five or more apartments. That’s a large market for the early years of growth.

Most can easily make it through the typical day with one charge.

For the Bolt as an example even the 110 charge option gives 4 miles per hour. Come home at 7 pm and leave at 6 am and that’s 44 miles, enough for most commuters’ typical needs. Most will (and currently do) opt for the more standard Level 2/J1772 240-Volt/32-Amp Charging Unit, which will replenish that typical 40 to 50 mile day in 2 hours, 100 miles of range in 4 1/2 hours and the whole battery, that’s about 238 miles in a short overnight of 9 1/2 hours. Most days for most drivers are going to be less than that.

97

You’re Barking. 4 miles per hr charging is completely unacceptable to most people who use a car. It makes them a prisoner in their own home.

98

Not sure how many miles a day you think most motorists drive but the average is, according AAA, in fact only 29.2.

Starting off most days topped off with your vehicle at its maximum range would be acceptable to most, both young pups and old dogs alike.

An overnight 110V charge replenishing 44 would in fact allow most users to make it through most days and then some, starting most days with a battery topped off to whatever it gets topped off at, be it 238, or whatever. And again, most EV owners do splurge on the 240V unit, even though most of them really don’t need it.

99

You’re thinking either/or. If you had an EV, and you didn’t want to spend $1-2k, tops, hooking up the proper 240v connection to charge that EV at a decent clip, you could just use the extension cord to the garage outlet solution.

For most people, this would suffice, and they could just supercharge when they need to.

100

I seriously disagree with you on a number of things. “Just getting by” is not an acceptable condition people want in their car. Crap happens. Getting stuck in traffic in the heat or cold means having enough energy to get through it and then be able to reroute around it.

And as far as what most EV owners do now that represents a wealthy demographic who have garages and the money to upgrade. Think in terms of the full spectrum of future drivers. When batteries meet consumer expectations EV’s will be the major form of personal transport in a very short period of time. That means people on a budget. That means people without a garage.