I live in a high rise building that obviously doesn’t have EV chargers for each parking space. I know that there are wireless chargers for cell phones; why not make a wireless charger that you can charge inside your apartment overnight and put it in your car when you want to drive? It shouldn’t be too heavy and should be able to use household current.
I’m confused. Are you suggesting that you somehow bring the car battery into your apartment? Or that a wireless charger is something that can be ‘charged up’?
There are people working on wireless charging for cars, but wireless charging works through induction, so the car has to be right where the charger is anyway. All you are saving is the need to plug a cable into the car.
Also, wireless charging isn’t very efficient. Doesn’t matter much when you are charging a phone maybe, but you can lose as much as 50% of the energy with imductive charging. That’s a lot of wasted energy when you are charging an 87 kWh battery.
Yes, I was hoping that you could treat the battery like a suitcase and bring it into your unit and charge it on household current. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to think of something else.
The battery is too heavy. You won’t want to do that, so no one is going to try to design it that way.
A typical EV battery is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 lbs. A Tesla model 3 battery is 1200 lbs.
Whoopsie!
Here is a fellow who has been following the progress of wireless charging for EVs. There are some companies that claim to have solved the efficiency problem.
The hope is you will be able to just drive your EV over an in induction plate and it will just charge for maximum convenience.
When people first started driving ICE vehicles, getting this strange stuff “gasoline” was an adventure as well. Hardware stores had kerosene in plenty but if your day trip was longer than your gas tank’s range, you had to plan things ahead.
There are some electric bicycles/scooters/motorcycles that work this way. I think that’s much more convenient than finding a bike rack near an outlet.
Yep, my hopes for inner-city riding are a bike or moped (like the Sondors Metacycle) with a removable battery that could be lugged into the apartment. I’d be cool with 50lbs or so, but it’d likely be smaller to appeal to more people. Another benefit is it would make the bike less appealing to steal.
Testimony : This Saturday night, I went to my sister’s place on l’Île des Soeurs. This is a mostly-upscale suburb with lots of townhouses, low-rise and high-rise condos, mostly from the 1980s. There are many plug-in cars of various makes (both PHEV and BEV), I can see several Level 2 charging units in individual driveways, and I guess some people just charge at Level 1 (120V). I don’t know about the installations in the parking garages of the condo units.
As for public charging stations, on this part of the island, there is a station (2 spots) on Berlioz, another one (1 spot) at a nearby community center, and 2 spots in the parking lot of a IGA supermarket. All of this is Level 2. The application on my phone allowed me to know that there was only one spot left, at the supermarket. Once I had plugged in my Volt (for 4 hours), all the public charging sports on this part of the island we taken up… for hours. At one point one of the spots on Berlioz was showing as free, and 30 minutes later someone else was plugged into it.
Perhaps, but in Edmonton if they did not have plug-ins for care heaters then the parking spots would be fully occupied during the winter months.
Unless you’re in the habit of:
- driving home after a long weekend trip and needing to head out on another trip right away,
- entertaining EV-owning guests that live several hours away and need to charge at your house while they are there for a short-ish visit.
- own two EVs and occasionally need to take both cars out simultaneously on long weekend trips
40-80A is likely overkill. Anything that can fully recharge the car overnight (i.e, 240V / 20A) should be plenty for most household’s EV use.
The vehicle I have been considering is the Ford F-150 Lightning. The long range version of that has roughly a 150 kWh battery - about double your average electric car, because it’s a heavy, draggy truck with all-terrain tires.
A level 1, a 1.4 kW charging capacity is typical. At that rate, it would take roughly 100 hours to charge the truck. It would take 10 hours to charge 30 miles of range.
Level 2, 40A charges at roughly 7 kWh. Still 20 hours to charge the truck. Cut that in half, and you’re looking at 40 hours to a full charge. Or put another way, if you drive more than about 60 miles per day, your charger could not keep up and you’d run the truck to empty.
And of course with a load balancer you are not guaranteed to get anywhere near 20A. It could be that the typical ‘headroom’ we have on our 100A service is more like 10 A - we will have to measure.
It isn’t the end of the world Worst case is that a load balanced charger works fine for typical daily use, and when we use the vehicle more extensively we’ll have to just stop at a public level 3 charger once in a while to top up. But I’d rather not have to deal with that, or deal with it as little as possible.
In a similar vein, when I had a CNG vehicle, I had a compressor at home that took six to eight hours to fill a nearly empty tank. I would plug it in every two days, even with a 40-mile round trip commute.
Public stations, OTOH, I could fill almost as fast as with gasoline,* with the slight disadvantage that it couldn’t put quite as much in. The rapid heating of the suddenly compressed gas would have to dissipate to get as much as the slow fill. It amounted to perhaps an 6% difference in range.
*It would go through some sort of cyclic process where a solenoid valve would open and a measured amount (?) would hiss in for a few moments gradually stopping, then after a pause apply another charge until the max PSI was reached and a light would flash to tell you to disconnect. I would guess it was about 25% longer than a gasoline pump but then, I wouldn’t have to walk into the store for some jerky and a soda.
My Model 3 has a 75kWh battery (I’ve seen numbers that say 82). But - mostly, I’ve driven maybe 100km to 150km that day. At 26A/240V (amps lowered to avoid tripping the main breaker) charging from 1AM to 7AM, that’s 6hr x 32km/hr = 180km. If it’s not air conditioning season, I could get away with 40A, 57km/hr. My wall charger has an internal switch that goes up to (I think) 100A, but I have it plugged in to a NEMA 14-50 plug and circuit breaker of 50A so the switch is set to 40A.
First, not sure what Ford says, but Tesla recommends not habitually charging to 100% - they suggest 80% to 90% max unless you have a big road trip planned. (I do 80%) They also recommend avoiding habitually draining below 10%. So really, a “full” charge unless it’s a road trip would be 70% of 80kWh or 56kWh - at 8kW/hr, that’s 7 hours. For Ford, perhaps 40A and charge from 11PM to 8AM to cover typical driving.
So unless you are planning to commute to the max of the battery every day, odds are charging from midnight to 8AM will replenish what you’ve used. If it doesn’t then likely after a second night you’ll be “full” unless you have 2 days of heavy driving. If you do - that’s why there are L3 chargers for those occasional days. if you do this too often - then maybe electric trucks aren’t ready for you yet.
How often do you fill up the gas tank your current truck on consecutive days, if you start with a full tank the first day? How often do you do this where filling the tank half full the next morning simply will not last you the day?
Well, I was talking about being restricted to 20A or less. Your point about not depleting to 0% or charging to 100% is well taken. So the charging to 80% from 10% would be 105 kWh. At a 6 kW charge rate, that’s about 17 hours.
Right now, with both of us working at home, we’d be fine. But when we were oth going to the office, the commute for me was about 20 miles each way. Occasionally I’d have to go out to the airport after work, which was a 60 mile round trip. So I could drive as much as 200 miles in a day, but more commonly it was more like 40 miles. It’s do-able with a 20A charger, but I would have liked more.
Also note that in Canada range will be cut severely in winter - as much as 65% on really cold days. And thr charge times are longer as some energy has to go into heating the battery. That’s why I consider a 300-mile range to be the bare minimum here.
One complication I haven’t mentioned is that one reason I am interested in the Lightning is that I believe electric power in Canada is going to become unreliable as we foolishly attempt to move to wind and solar (nothing against wind and solar, other than that it’s an unbelievably bad choice for Alberta).
The Ford pro charger can switch the house power over to the truck battery if the power goes out. The truck battery can also be used for nighttime power if you have a solar installation, so you don’t have to give your power away during the day. In this case, having a gigantic truck battery is an advantage. The Lightning battery can power the essentials in a home for days.
So there’s a scenario where the power could go out for hours, depleting the truck battery, and when it comes back the recharge time will be very long.
I took a road trip once at -5°C - the map shows it as 231km (144mi) total there and back. I kept the cabin heat cool, travelled 105kph the whole way, and got home with 70-km on the battery indicator. If you want to do 200 miles (300km) in sub-zero weather, you will need a charge during the day. Better be sure there is a L3 charger in the vicinity. Fortunately, both Edmonton and Calgary have CCS chargers at the Canadian Tire by the airports. (See Plugshare.com)
I disagree with your assessment of the electrical supply. (BTW, if you want reliable power for the house, consider the Tesla Powerwall instead of draining your transportation.) I think this is the fundamental flaw in any “green” plan is that to fundamentally change the electrical grid will take a lot more investment than society can afford in the short run - it just ain’t a-gonna happen. The acreage of solar cells to replace a normal natural gas power plant is too much - even without battery storage requirements. Like all previous climate accords, politicians will promise the moon as long as the deadlines are past the next election, or better yet, after they retire.
Regardless, EV’s are the future (a) because of low maintenance, and (b) power plants are less polluting than gas vehicles. I suspect the resistance to creating hydro-power dams will be less strict in the future.
Yeah. And -5C is nothing. In January here the average high is -7C, and the average nighttime low is -16C. Every morning commute is done close to the nighttime low, as in the winter the sun isn’t even up when people go to work. It’s totally common to have temperatures in the -20C to -30C range.
What I like about the Lightning is that it can function as a large Tesla powerwall, without having to pay an extra $15,000. That’s part of the value proposition of the truck. Yes, if the power goes out you are depleting truck range, but for a rare event it’s not worth a $15,000 investment in a powerwall.
Except that it is happening. We have been prematurely shutting down fossil sources of fuel on the promise of replacing them with solar and wind. There are huge solar and wind farms being built here. Alberta gets 90% of its power from fossil fuel, while down east where the decisions are being made they have lots of nuclear and hydro for baseload. Quebec wants all fossil extraction stopped. Nice for them, with 80% of their electricity coming from hydro.
So yes, I expect us to over-promise on wind and solar, and cut our fossil power before it is sane to do so. That’s what Germany did, and traded their energy security away to Russia. New York and California are shutting down their nuclear plants with no replacement. Energy politics have gone insane, and blackouts and brownouts and rationing will become more common.
You don’t want to be in a multi-day blackout in Canada in a January storm. That would become a mass casualty event. I’m trying to think of how to insure my family against that without breaking the bank.
Oh, I totally agree. I don’t want an EV for energy savings, I want one because I like efficient engineering, and it should be clear to everyone by now that electric vehicles are superior to gas vehicles in every way except fill-up time. They accelerate better, handle better, off-road better, are quieter, don’t have intrusive lumps in the cabin, can provide shore power when camping, etc.
In 20 years I predict we’ll only see fossil fuel vehicles in niche applications like long-distance trucking or certain types of commercial work. There will be at least one EV in every household that currently has a gas car. Not because of government mandates or rebates, but because it will soon be obvous to everyone that EVs are just better.
You’d think so, but as we speak BC’s biggest hydro project is being stalled by environmental activists and native bands. Trudeau has made it easy to block large industrial and energy projects, and activists and rent-seekers are taking advantage of it.
So, the electrician was here today. Ugh.
So it turns out that if you have a 100A service, have the regular suite of appliances (A/C, stove, dryer, fridge) and want to install a level 2 charger you are required by code here to get an energy miser or load limiter, plus a sub-panel.
Estimated cost for the upgrade: $5300. That does not include the price for the charger, or installation of the charger.
The other option is to upgrade the service to 200A. That has to be approved by the power company, and they tell me it’s not uncommon to be turned down flat. A lot of neighborhoods do not have the capacity. But if they will do it, it’ll likely be north of $10,000, and could be $25,000 or more. They are checking into it.
I wonder how this reality will affect EV adoption. The sales pitch is that ‘installing a charger will be around $1200.’ That’s not going to be true for most people. at least around here. With the cost of a charger and install, I’ll probably be closer to $7,000. And it will be limited to less than 20A. No 80A Ford pro charger for me unless we upgrade the service.
This does not include a transfer switch if you want to use the vehicle as emergency power for the house. That’s probably another $1000 installed.