Actually, it does. A car’s not like an A/C unit which cycles on and off, it’s going to be charging for a very long time. How long depends upon how fast you put juice into it, which is why they plug into 220V rather than 120V. Given that demand for plug-in hybrids is growing, we can only expect power demands to increase. So today it might not matter, but in the near future, it’s going to be a serious problem. Powerplants take a long time to build (mainly due to the paperwork involved, from what I understand).
As per usual, California’s merely on the cutting edge of things, other states (like Tennessee, for example) will soon be in the same situation as California.
Just my opinion, but wouldn’t this be the best way to implement such a thing? Apartment complexes could install such a gizmo with a bank of plugins for the tenants with plug-in cars. A single gizmo would serve several tenants and those tenants could split the initial cost of the gizmo.
Also, maybe a neighborhood could be wired with a gizmo and have extensions that reach the driveways or garages of each house, and keep it separate from the regular house power.
(Maybe I missed it…does this gizmo have a simple name to which it can be referred to?)
The wiring is no big problem–it’s been done before. Cable TV companies re-wired the entire country (In 1985 nobody had cable, by 1995 everybody did.) It could be done for cars, too- But it’s a chicken-and-egg problem…nobody will pay for the infrastructure before there are enough electric cars on the road, and nobody will buy an electric car if there arent enough “gizmos” to plug into.
(the cable TV companies had a similar problem for the first couple years, but they solved it very easily, because the market suddenly became huge–everybody wanted a cable hookup for $30. Not everybody wants a new car for $20,000.
They call it “Smart Grid Technology” and the problem with what you’re suggesting is that there’s going to be lots of powercords just flopping about, and it won’t take too long for some punks to decide that they’d be fun to vandalize. Not to mention there’ll be liability issues involved. Lightning hits the box and shorts out a bunch of cars, folks are going to sue the apartment complex. Then there’s the problem of how to asess costs for a centralized unit. If I don’t have a plug-in, why should I pay for the juice? Or, what do you do if you’ve got apartments assigned to certain outlets and somebody plugs into the wrong outlet? Once is an accident, of course, but if they consistently do it? And they pick the outlets assigned to folks who are frequently out of town? Do you think that most apartment landlords are going to want to deal with all the headaches involved?
As far as a neighborhood solution goes, anyone who’s ever dealt with a homeowners association will tell you that’s not doable, either. (My parents lived in one for a while, and they absolutely hated it.)
It’s not quite that simple. You’ll need to make some modifications to the household wiring, whereas with cable, they just drilled a hole in the floor and ran the wire in. Changing the household wiring puts the installers at risk if something goes wrong, and even if they do it perfectly every time, some drooling idiot will sue them anyway.