Ha! We’e already got those here in Minnesota. Theyre used during our winter, for engine tank heaters.
A place to plug in your engine block heater is different than a place to plug in your Tesla (or Volt or whatever other totally electric cars are on the market). Here’s an electric car plug.
You plug your engine block heater into a standard 120v plug. All the business has to do is have an electrician bring some outlets out to those spots or if they have outlets in the garage, reserve those for people that need to keep their engine blocks warm.
Conversely, if you want to set up charging stations at work an electrician needs to bring 220 volts (and as much as 50 amps (which may require upgrading the service if it’s a small business)) out to those spots AND buying a charging station which run at least $500.
It should probably also be mentioned that many business may already have 120 running around in their parking garage, but might not have 220v and 50 amps.
You can get 120v chargers that plug into a standard outlet, but they take something like 20h to charge a car. Probably not worth it for a parking lot at work.
IOW, it’s like saying, ‘having a gas station at work would be nice, but we don’t need one, our heat is fuel oil, I can just use that’. Two totally different things.
The only thing I can see is that if you bought your own 120v charger and plugged it into the wall (assuming the outlet is rated for the correct amount of amps, I’m sure it’s more than 15). But, personally, I wouldn’t want my $500 charger just sitting on the parking garage floor all day, unless I could at least find some way to lock it up.
Joey P: That’s all good info and I agree. Adding on …
A business doesn’t need to bring 220v and 50A out to its parking area. It needs to bring 220V and 50A *per parking space *out to its parking area. Or for the slow-charge case, 120V and 15A *per parking space *. Plus spend $500 (plus installation costs) *per parking space * for charging stations.
This is where the whole thing gets interesting. An office building may have 500 parking spaces. As long as only 2 people drive electrics, installing enough charging stations is easy. Once it’s 400 electrics there’s going to be a problem providing that much power.
One of the arguments in favor of plug-in electrics is the idea of recharging them at night using off-peak power. Unless we get range up to a couple hundred miles, most folks will want to plug in at work to be fully charged for the drive home. The result will be half the total charging takes place mid-day during peak times, and half in the early evening, also a semi-peak time.
I’m looking forward to widespread electric cars. But IMO there are going to be some real issues with charging that aren’t really being discussed accurately now.
e.g. I live in a condo building. We have a couple hundred units. And a couple hundred parking spaces. To wire the entire parking area for charging would almost double the total power feed into the building. You’re not going to do that quickly or cheaply. And the utility will have a problem when a whole bunch of buildings in one area suddenly demand a doubling of their feed. Gonna be interesting to watch.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought about that…few things to add to it:
1)I’ve only casually looked at EV chargers (since I don’t have an EV). Are there 120V chargers that run on 15a? If there are, those are probably the ones that take 20h. Again, It’s probably not even worth it for those people to charge up at work unless they’re running on empty.
2)Regarding 50ams per. If we look at a small business, or even just a small parking garage, adding 2 or more 50 amps breakers could actually mean bringing in another service drop from the utility. That can mean anything from your utility coming out, handing you a wire and saying ‘here ya go’, to them tearing up your parking lot because it needs to go underground. In either case, if you need to add more than one, you’ll probably have to put them on their own sub-panel which is going to add a lot more cost and make this a not-do-it-your-self project for even the best handy man. WAG, at least $1000 plus the cost of the charging stations plus the cost of bringing the power from the pole.
Of course, if this is a garage that holds 1000 cars or a huge business, there’s going to be plenty of power available already, it’s just a matter of bringing it to the right place and the maintenance* people may well be qualified to do it.
*Maintenance, not housekeeping or janitorial, are the people that keep things running (sometimes called plant operations) not the people that clean things, my ex-FIL was chief of maintenance at a large hospital and was also a master electrician.
This is exactly the sort of wrong thinking lots of people seem to be doing. There is *not *“plenty of power available”. If the building has 10,000A worth of service measured at 220V, it’s because it consumes that much already. Not because it consumes 10% of that and the rest is spare capacity.
A typical office building figures a couple KW per occupant. That’s for power to their desk, plus their pro rata share of lighting, HVAC, elevators, data infrastructure, etc.
But 220V at 50A = 11KW. In other words, if everybody charges their car, 80% of the total consumption is going to the cars and only 20% to running the business. Or said another way, to permit everybody to charge their car the building needs 5x the electricity it used to use. As does the building next door, and next door to that, … and all the way across every city in the country.
To be sure, there is scope for smarts in this. If each car needs just 1 hour at 50A to refill, there’s no reason they all have to charge from 8:30 to 9:30 am right after all the drivers arrive and plug in. If each charging station is computerized and the building’s infrastructure is also smart, it can command that about 1/8th = 12% of the cars charge each hour and the others wait their turn.
Doing something like this would mean the building only needs about 2x the power feed it did before the charging system was installed. That’s still a big effort, especially multiplied by a whole downtown’s worth of buildings.
You can also sure see how each worker will want his/her car charged first: What if I have to rush home to a sick kid, or make a sales call or …??? I need to be charged first. Lots of reasons, both sound and selfish, for nobody wanting to be the person charging from 4pm to 5pm.
An interesting project.
I’d be willing to bet that any building that has 10,000 amps worth of service can drop in 2 50amp breakers without having to have the service utility come in and drop in another line (and probably have two cars charging at the same time).
The same probably can’t be said for a small business that just has 200amp service.
Why do you need a range of “a couple hundred miles” to avoid plugging in at work? My 2012 Mitsubishi iMiev has a stated range of just 62 miles (but in reality it can be anywhere from 38 miles to 92 miles, depending on driving conditions). That should be plenty to get you to work and back unless your commute is way longer than the average (or if you forgot to plug it in the previous night). Most days, our EV gets driven about 8 miles to work, 10 miles running errands, and 8 miles back. There’s no need to plug it in at work and we still have half a charge remaining when we get home. A 62 mile range is more than enough for us, 99% of the time.
Plugging in at a charging station only applies when we go out of town. In the last six months, we’ve done that 3 times.
I’ve read that 90% of Americans drive less than 40 miles each day and I’ll bet than 98% drive less than 100 miles each day. Those 2% who drive farther are the ones who probably shouldn’t buy an EV. A company with 410 employees driving 400 EVs and 10 ICEs really only needs 20 chargers in the parking lot for those few EV drivers who drove a long distance today or maybe forgot to plug in at home last night. There is no way you’d need 400 chargers for 400 EVs.
Let’s put it another way. When I drive my EV to the grocery store (which has an EV charger in the parking lot), I very rarely plug in to the charging station. I just park in an ordinary space while I shop because I know I have plenty of charge left in my battery to get me home just a few miles away. The EVs you see plugged in at the grocery store are probably from out of town, and they’re a small fraction of all the EVs that come to that parking lot each day.
Getting back to the topic at hand: if you’re going to build a charging station and collect more money from the drivers than just the cost of the electricity (with the expectation of recouping your investment), you need to consider the fact that, on any given day, the majority of the EVs who come to your parking lot won’t actually plug in to your charger because they’d rather wait until they get home so they can charge for less money. If your grocery store has 8,000 customers per day and 2% of them are driving EVs, that’s 160 EVs, so you might think “woohoo I’m gonna have 160 people using my charging stations so we better build 12 of them!” but honestly only a handful of those 160 will bother to plug in so you really only need one charging station, maybe two if you want redundancy.
You’re not listening :).
The building with 10,000 amps of service needs to charge 1000 cars in its 1000 car garage. Not 2 cars. Charging two cars in 1000 might be fine in 2015. But it won’t be if electric cars are ever to be anything other than a silly curiosity on a par with, say, Ferraris.
Everything you say makes sense. For rational decision-makers. Which most drivers are not.
Perhaps my perception is colored by my situation. I drive 47 miles one way to work. At 80 mph on the freeway with the AC on full blast most of the year, day or night. And the headlights on all the time. I do this at odd hours of the day where running out on the way home would be very awkward.
I rarely let my cars get below about 150 miles to empty because at any time I may get tapped to make a drive about that long with little time to spare. Certainly I always need to be able to make the surprise 90 mile round trip to work no-notice.
Perhaps paradoxically the only time I’m OK with letting the fuel get low is when I’m on an all-day drive on the interstate and can count on fueling stations every 20-30 miles. Multiple stops that day are inevitable because of how far I’m going.
From years of living in the suburbs of large cities while working a goodly distance away, this is pretty much the only experience I or any co-workers I’ve ever known have had. And AFAIK, suburbanites with long commutes are by far the norm in the country.
I’d be very cautious about statistics like “90% of Americans drive less than 40 miles per day”. There’s a huge difference between taking total annual mileage divided by 365 and computing “on those days you drive at all, how far do you drive?” And without knowing anything more, I’d assume the number quoted came from the naïve calculation.
Many days I drive zero. Many other days I drive 5-10, just doing errands. But many other days I drive 50 or 100. And I and others like me need a vehicle which can do those 100 mile days.
I’m no Luddite. I really want an electric car. And I want them to be a mainstream product, not a niche. To me the utility of a 60-mile car is damn near zero. The utility of a 200 mile car, even with slow recharge, is huge.
YMMV.
Late addition to the above. The utility of a 60 mile car is very small if it’s my only car. A 100 mile car is still small utility if it’s my only car. At 200 it starts to be tolerable as an only car.
I see a 60-mile car about like I see a motor scooter. I might own one for fun. But it needs to cost like a toy to buy and insure, not like a real car. For $2K, sure. For $40K, forget it.
I was still talking about being able to charge 2 or 3 cars, not hundreds.
How that will play out, I have no idea. My guess would be, if it caught on, there’d be government subsidies that wouldn’t be needed for gasoline anymore, maybe?
Also, as more and more people buy EVs, the batteries will work better and last longer. My current smart phone can go 48 hours without being charged (and with being used regularly). My first one smart phone (and my first dumb cell phone for that matter), barely made it from 8am to midnight without needing to be charged at some point during the day. It wasn’t that long ago when most people had a second battery for their cell phone, now many cell phones don’t even have a user replaceable battery.
Give EVs a few years or a decade for the battery life to at least double and I’ll bet people won’t be nearly as concerned about charging at work. Right now, that’s just to help get this off the ground.
Of course, it’ll always be helpful. Going back to the cell phone thing, even though cell phones should make it all day, there’s always people charging them up in the middle of the day because they use them too much or didn’t charge them up at night or believe that it should always be plugged in (or wrecked their battery by doing that).
So maybe big employers putting one or two or three charging stations is all the motivation people need to get an EV and it’s just those few people at each location that will help push the technology forward enough to drop the price and make for better batteries that charge faster and go further and we won’t actually need one station for each car since those one or two are all that are really needed (maybe a few more, but not one for each person).
Does that make sense, I know it was sort of a ramble.
Driving 47 miles each way puts you around the 96th percentile, according to the US Census Bureau. I’m glad you realize that your experience is not typical of the average person.
Pushing a car down the highway takes something like ten to twenty THOUSAND watts of power. Your average headlamp uses around fifty watts each, a hundred for the pair. That’s like half a percent of the power being sucked up by the motor and has a negligible effect on EV range. Running the heater is a different story. That might actually consume a thousand watts, reducing your range by 5-10%.
The way the Census Bureau asked the question was along the lines of “Did you commute to work last week? If yes, how many miles was it from home to work?” Out of 71,203,000 commuters, just 2,242,000 of them said they commuted more than 50 miles (one way). That’s about 3%. The mean distance of all the commuters was 18.8 miles. Given the long-tail nature of this bell curve, I’d say it’s a safe bet that the median is less than the mean.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/Paper-Poster_Megacommuting%20in%20the%20US.pdf
I totally understand your line of thought here. But most people aren’t in your situation. Most people commute between ten and twenty miles each way.
But I also get the idea of wanting to be prepared. However, there is such a thing as being over prepared.
Agreed. I feel a lot better about owning an EV knowing that the charging stations are out there if I ever need them. But 98% of the time, I don’t need them. I charge at home, over night.
Totally ninjaed by sbunny8’s superior post. Just a point to add, from a Washington Post article commenting on that census report.
A solution that works for even half the population is a huge deal. Transportation planners, on any side of the issue, and including vehicle manufacturers in that set, tend to draw up plans that serve large minorities because that is all that is practically feasible. A multitude of plans are needed to get that figure to approach 100%, and if they are honest they’ll admit they never achieve that. There was a special bus service locally that was cut back to dealing with people within an x-mile radius. The complaints were loud, but it turned out that the number of people affected was less than 20. The costs for servicing that last 20 - any last 20, anywhere - are simply prohibitive.
The ideal is to make EVs the primary car, not a secondary one. That calls for a multiplicity of changes, to the car - better batteries, quicker charging, lower costs - and to the society - more charging stations - happening in tandem.
sbunny8: Thanks for taking the time and effort to educate me rather than simply disagree. I knew my experience was towards the edge of the bell curve, but not nearly to the degree that census document reports it being.
Thank you.
A few days ago I mentioned to someone that I had seen three Tesla’s in one day. They replied with something like ‘well, it’s really nice out today’. I tried to explain to them that you take your Boxter or your Corvette out on a nice day but if you buy an $85,000 Tesla, it’s your daily driver. You bought it to save on gas (or save the environment, whatever floats your boat) and storing it in the garage just to take it out on nice days is a colossal waste, even if you paid for it in cash, upfront.
I can’t get that out of your cite. Perhaps I am just not able to read it well. My problem is that of all the folks I know who commute, none that I know drive less than 20 miles each way. Perhaps it is just that I don’t know the right people. As I read the reference you cited, the 18.8 miles comes from Appendix Table 1. The authors point out that the census study they base their analysis on does not ask for the distance of each commute, just the time. For their study of mega commuters they calculate the distance as the straight line distance from the centroid of the census track of the respondent to the centroid of the central census tract of the core do the city. For long distance commuting this gives a reasonable approximation of the actual commuting distance. The method of calculating the 18.8 miles is given in the working papers of the study, which I couldn’t find. Are there any other studies you know of that report the average or better yet the median commuting distance?
The other thing to consider is, how many families in the US have multiple cars anyway? It seems to be the norm, at least among the middle class, and they already use different cars for different purposes. If you already have a small car for commuting to work and a big minivan for taking all the kids places, what’s the harm in making the commuting car a short-range electric? On the occasion that you need to make a 500 mile trip, you take the gas-burning minivan, which you still have anyway.
With most of the people I know, I’m not 100% sure what their jobs are at all, let alone how far they commute. So, just restricting the conversation to people I know whose commute I actually do know, here’s my little sample.
2 are self-employed and don’t commute at all.
1 commutes less than a mile, usually by bicycle but sometimes by car.
2 commute more than 1 mile and less than 2 miles, usually by bicycle or by walking but sometimes by car.
1 commutes about 4 miles each way, always by bicycle.
1 used to commute 5 miles each way, always by car (but now is retired).
1 commutes about 8 miles each way, always by car.
1 commutes 40 miles each way, always by car.
If we don’t count the self-employed people, the median of my little sample is 4 miles each way.
Here’s another one. http://www.statisticbrain.com/commute-statistics/ They say they got their data from the US DOT but I haven’t been able to trace back their source. FWIW, they say US commutes are…
1-5 miles, 29%
6-10 miles, 22%
11-15 miles, 17%
16-20 miles, 10%
21-25 miles, 7%
26-30 miles, 5%
31-35 miles, 3%
35+ miles, 8%
This suggests that the median would be right around 10 miles each way, which fits well with the idea that the mean is 18.8 because you’d expect the median to be less than the mean. It appears I misspoke when I said “most people commute between ten and twenty miles each way.” I should have said “most people commute less than twenty miles each way.”
Yes and, if these statistics are accurate, an EV with a range of 62 miles (like my Mitsubishi iMiev) would be more than double what’s needed by the bottom 66% of commuters, more than enough to get to work and back without having to plug in while you’re at work, and still have half a charge left when you get home. An EV with a range of 75 miles (like the Nissan Leaf) would meet the needs of 92% of commuters, but the top 12% of them might need to plug in at work.
Unless you live in LA, you should ask again.