The USA installed Cable TV, why would charging cables be harder?
The USA spends $500Billion on cars and $400 Billion on gasoline every year. A onetime $trillon upgrade isn't an outsize amount.
The USA spends $500Billion on cars and $400 Billion on gasoline every year. A onetime $trillon upgrade isn't an outsize amount.
Because a TV coax cable is 1cm slim and can be installed very easily. Run it over the air on poles, dig it into a small trench, run it via the sewers. Whatever fits best.
A 10 kV or, worse, a 1 kA-capable 3x230V line, not so much. The 10kV (or more) line has special requirements in terms of distance to other cables, a 3x230V line at that capability is pure hell due to its sheer thickness and mass.
Also the charger station will require a transformer... which aren't tiny, and transforming 250kW produces significant heat loss. So either find some free place in earth where you can bury it, or deal with adjacent house owners to install the transformer in their basement.
> The USA spends $500Billion on cars and $400 Billion on gasoline every year. A onetime $trillon upgrade isn't an outsize amount.
Problem is, the car/gasoline spend is done by individuals on small-ish scales. A multi-trillion investment must be fronted by the state - the utility companies don't have nearly enough cash to finance this. But, as noted, the US can't get enough funds to replace Flint's potable water infrastructure or Puerto Rico's broken grid...
FWIW all of the chargers I've seen didn't require new transformers or lines. Heck they put in 20 spots in Centralia without even digging up the road.
EV charging infrastructure isn’t yet well suited to medium to long road trips, so some people discard the whole idea because they’re upset by suggesting a different distribution of friction in their lives.
Whether the actual friction is big enough to matter is hard to say. I drive outside a 100 mile radius about twice a year, and I don’t mind renting cars when I do, so it doesn’t seem especially onerous to me, but don’t underestimate people’s love for their particular car/dislike of rental cars.
Heck, when I bought my current house I didn't need to do anything since the previous owner already had a NEMA 14-50 outlet for their welder.
Los Angeles and parts of the Bay Area have had nearly annual brownouts for the last 20 years just from air conditioners during heat waves. How in the world do you expect that aging power grid (in the fifth/sixth largest economy no less...) to handle a clothes dryers in every house running 4+ hours a day?
With off-peak rates and people having different schedules(I'm home at 4pm for instance) I don't see why everyone would be hammering the grid at 5pm.
Of course as has been pointed out repeatedly a smart charger can manage exactly when the battery starts to charge. However it isn't quite that simple: many of those people will go out again for their bowling league or whatever, and need enough charge in their car.
Fortunately those "clothes dryers" are already connected to the internet, and have sophisticated power electronics hooked to the grid that can detect voltage sag and phase lag. Connected to a central server, each car (or stationary battery, for that matter) becomes BOTH a sensor that can monitor grid health AND a remote-control load that can be dialed up and down (so long as the car gets a full charge before 7am, or whenever the user chooses).
The internet allows entire neighborhoods of EVs to be controlled at once, so that the substation is at 100% power and no more, and so the distribution/transmission lines are at 100% power and no more.
Is that a hard control problem? Sure. BUT it's easier than overbuilding the electric grid by 2-3x (which is, after all, the largest machine ever built[1]). And given the very large opportunity cost, there's a lot of incentive to solve it.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/th...
Let me guess you're countryside? Friend of mine has a relatively new house in Munich, biggest thing he has is a 3x16A CEE outlet.
I'd happily use public transportation instead if I could but the closest one to me(12 miles away) was the one that derailed yesterday.
1) with $2k you can barely have the trench from your house to the core cable in the street digged. Better calculate 10k.
2) Why the fuck should I pay my employer to put in a charger in the garage? This will, alone for the electric work, add another 1-2k on the bill.
“The grid to your home can’t even provide enough power to charge your car” becomes a decent reason not to move there.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Eagle+Mountain,+UT/@40.335...
I'm almost sure the county I live in now doesn't have cable TV anywhere. It costs a lot to roll out a network of anything. I'd guess a power network costs more than cable or fiber.