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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

I feel like writers of such a study have spent exactly 0 days in rural America (which is a very, very large portion of America.)

How much does it cost to replace the gasoline infrastructure with charging in North Dakota?

How many people living in rural America, driving gasoline trucks and using them on the job are going to "suddenly stop driving them", pay to get rid of them, and switch to an all-electric truck? And who is covering the costs of blanketing those rural areas with charging stations that are fast enough to remove the pain of waiting to charge a truck that needs enough power to haul a fifth wheel?

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"NoDak" is a bad example - that state is fairly well off and organized. Years ago they got it their head that having 100% cell coverage was a good idea so they did it. New federal recommendations for shoulder width so they went and redid their roads. The /tiny/ ILEC that serves my family farm years ago ripped out all of their copper and only runs fiber.

If someone got it in their head that non-gas cars were what they should be doing in North Dakota, it would happen.

I think poorer states with more conflicted interest would have a harder time.

(Sorry for the OT NoDak rant)

Thanks for clarifying! I thought about population density, but of course there are lots of other variables!

Doesn't NoDak, a state with a relatively small population, get a large percentage of its cash from oil revenues?

To a point, but a lot of it goes in the future fund. North Dakota is still a farming state and #1 honey producer of the USA. Oil will probably last quite a while given the costs keep dropping as the technology progresses, but the state is mindful of a bust since its happened before.

Are you saying that NoDak has generally available fiber internet at reasonable prices?

Yep. Rural electrics, local telephone companies, and some cable companies have fiber. It probably is a function of most places now having multiple providers.

[edit: examples] https://www.bektel.com/products-amp-services/bekfiber/ https://www.gondtc.com/internet_services.html

ignore the 90's style websites

In the rural parts of the state, yes. That ends up being roughly 60% of the state[0]. In terms of pricing, my family who's nearest neighbors are over a mile away pay less each month than I do for more bandwidth than I get, and I live in a major tech hub.

There's a bit of encouragement from the state government and the rural providers also get free money that everyone else in these United [sic] States pays on their telecommunications bills. However it is still a good example of what can be accomplished in consumer Internet if not for the mega-corporations we have doing it today. If a small provider who's customers are frequently over a mile apart can do fiber to the home, why can't we have the same in metros?

The one disadvantage is the transit providers they plug into aren't the best - IIRC I was going through cogent in MSP to get to most popular cloud providers. Their network is worth looking at though[1][2]

0: http://www.csgmidwest.org/policyresearch/0616-fiber-optic-No...

1: http://dakotacarrier.com/services/overview/ 2: http://broadband.nd.gov/nd-broadband-map

The general dynamic of North Dakota has always been a bit of an amazement to me. Its like "nope, not gonna do it" to "let's get on with it, oops done" happens like a flip of the switch. I think folks give too little credit to a farm state's love of "better". Its a weird, stubborn, leap-style advance on getting stuff done.

Are you accounting for the possibility that rural America is not big and rich enough to uphold the world's gasoline infrastructure all by itself? Cheap gasoline, as an industry relies on the economies of scale to a large extent.

That is what this article is talking about.

If the demand drops, the price goes up, leading to a further drop in demand, which drives up the prices, which...

At some point, it becomes more costly to continue supporting gas.

> If the demand drops, the price goes up, leading to a further drop in demand, which drives up the prices, which...

And yet markets converge on price equilibria all the time without descending into runaway chaos.

Not when a new technology is already there to eat its lunch.

>If the demand drops, the price goes up, leading to a further drop in demand, which drives up the prices

This is nonsense. A drop in demand reduces prices. Yes, there are economies of scale in oil production/refinement, but they are dwarfed by the marginal cost of extracting the last barrel, which is what drives the global price of oil.

This is a typical refrain, but doesn't account for second-order effects.

At first, the price will drop. But the ongoing supply will pile up and need to be stored somewhere. Storing stuff is generally more expensive than not producing it. So production downsizes, and the little amount of product that ends up being produced costs more per unit than the larger-scale production process, and so prices go up.

Also, prices will go up at the end of this transition due to scarcity and an ability to weasel money out of people who will pay more to hold on to what they're used to.

Small planes use 100LL which is expensive but fairly widely available, despite being a very small market. It seems reasonable to expect rural use of gasoline to be bigger than that?

Nice clickbait though. I remember seeing those headlines about flying cars - "In 2020 most cars will be flying!" a decade or so ago. Such a writers are detached from reality, or their reality is based on their very closed and hermetical environment.

They've been saying that about flying cars since the 1950's!

Yes, perhaps such writers are not so detached from reality - their reality being the pressure to grab eyeballs.

I remember the predictions from long ago that clothing would get smaller and smaller until it would be a mixture of body paint and a few scraps.

Have you seen the Black Tape Project?

> I remember seeing those headlines about flying cars - "In > 2020 most cars will be flying!" a decade or so ago.

Can you provide some links? Because I can't remember any such headlines. (Pretty much all the articles I remember about flying cars had the tone that "it's much more complicated than science fiction movies make us believe".)

Ugh, tried to found some, but Google is not helping. Those were paper based papers about science and gizmos. I think I have seen some in old Playboy magazine once as well. We are talking here about 10+ years ago, so web was not everywhere yet.

Generally speaking you're spot on and I think the 'report' is unrealistic. The one wild card I could see accelerating EV in the heartland is wind power.

If you look at wind speed maps of America (http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_maps.asp ) there is huge generating capacity going right through the Dakota's. With the decline in manufacturing jobs, politicians there may soon see investing in wind energy jobs as the future.

That doesn't solve the problem of making an electric truck that meets the needs of rural America, but it does put a lot of cheap energy in their backyard waiting to charge giant truck batteries.

The big issue for a lot of people in my area is power. You get an impressive yield of it out of EVs and the cost savings is a no brainer, but the battery life gets absolutely destroyed when you work the motors the way you work a gas engine when doing things like pulling equipment or snow/earth moving.

Agree; the "charging problem" is a huge obstacle for the electric vehicle industry.

We're going from a world where vehicles need to "recharge" (refuel) once every week or so for about a minute and a half to a world where they will need to recharge nearly every day for several hours.

Nevermind what happens to the electric grid when all this energy that was formerly being moved in tanker trucks in the form of gasoline now has to be moved over the grid and down to consumer homes.

I'm all for electric vehicles, but they have enough problems that any switch will be long and slow because we as a society will have to change the way we build and live in cities to deal with those problems (just as we did when gasoline vehicles replaced horses, so there's precedent).

As long as the work truck daily cycle can be done in 1 charge then there isn't a problem at all. Top it off every night.

For long trips, ie 18 wheelers, yeah it is kind of a no go without quick-swap batteries.

Which isn't that huge of an obstacle imho.

But, all that said, no of course fossil fuel cars aren't going away in 8 years

This is something I think a lot of people fail to understand. For daily use, EV charging is a convenience, not an inconvenience. It only takes me five seconds to plug in my car in the evening. It may take several hours to charge, but that happens while I'm eating dinner or sleeping or whatever.

When you drive more than the car's range in a single day, then it flips, of course. For me, and I think for most people, this is rare enough that it's still a net win.

It also flips if you can't plug in at home. For a lot of people that's easy, but for many it's tough. Thankfully installing a charger is pretty easy, so it comes down to convincing the powers that be to do it, or at least allow it, which gets easier all the time.

Agree with the conclusion. Eight years?! The average car on American roads today is 11.5 years old. Average. Cars just don't get cycled out that quickly.

> It also flips if you can't plug in at home. For a lot of people that's easy, but for many it's tough.

You mean like if you live in an apartment, and you get one covered parking space (if you're lucky)? And if you're married (or have a roommate), and you both have cars, well, your apartment complex might put in chargers for the covered parking, but they probably aren't putting chargers on the uncovered parking, so only one of you can charge per night.

Why the emphasis on covered spaces? The difficulty and expense is the same whether it's covered or not.

My perception is that the apartments consider the non-covered parking to be for visitors. It therefore seems to me less likely that they will install chargers for those spaces. (There is also perhaps the issue of the electrical chargers being out in the rain, but that wasn't part of my reasoning.)

Disclaimer: I don't own any apartments, and I'm only guessing about how apartment owners think.

The current grid is in most cases perfectly capable to deliver the required energy to charge cars if we all were to switch to EV's.

The maximum output of the grid has seldomly been a problem, it scaling the production of electricity up/down to match the demand which is difficult.

Some argue that adding thousands of EV's to the grid (each with 60-100kWh capacity) will actually help 'balance' the grid demand and make it more efficient.

If nothing were to change, then sure. But what about wireless charging at stop lights? Or the batter tech on HN last week that has longer range and only takes 5min to fully charge?

I'm all for it (EV replacement), but that's an overly pretentious claim.

How much does it cost to replace the gasoline infrastructure with charging in [rural USA]?

If wind and solar keep improving, eventually they'll have such a price advantage over fossil fuel that everyone in rural areas will just convert their gas engines to liquid anhydrous ammonia. Many rural areas already have distribution infrastructure in place, and with cheap enough power it can be made from water and air with fairly minimal manufacturing facilities.

"How much does it cost to replace the gasoline infrastructure with charging in North Dakota?"

Virtually every home in ND is already equipped with infrastructure that allows electric cars to charge.

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