Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

I'm not familiar with EV charging prices, but this does seem a bit expensive. 2.5 SEK per minute is 0.23€ / 0.26USD. Is that for high speed DC charging?

Anyway, to me the focus on high speed charging seems to be completely the wrong way to go about charging infrastructure. Our cars sit idle 95% of the day. Aside from long trips, why should we try to charge them in as little time as possible?

Almost all the new charging stations they install around here offer high speed charging. They are extremely expensive to set up, because providing 50kW DC charging requires big expensive electronics. This leads to the problem that only very few charging stations are installed, and the charging stations have to charge by the minute to make sure that people only park there as short as possible.

What if instead the city provided 5kW AC outlets next to every parking spot? Those would be much cheaper to install, the electronics needed for billing would be extremely cheap (an NFC reader, a microcontroller, and a relay won't cost much), and charging speed is not an issue for people who live or work there. You would just leave your car plugged in while you're at the office, or overnight. If you could top up 30kWh while you work that would be plenty for most people.

Presumably, people will eventually have both high and low speed charging station options with faster charging being more expensive.

However, at a fast food restaurant you want to get significant range in 10-30 minutes which a 5kW charging station is not going to provide. I don’t know how fast these are going to be, but adding ~150miles in 15 minutes would these actually useful on long trips.

> Aside from long trips, why should we try to charge them in as little time as possible? ... What if instead the city provided 5kW AC outlets next to every parking spot? Those would be much cheaper to install, the electronics needed for billing would be extremely cheap[.]

It's a lot easier to install a few high speed chargers than many thousands lower speed chargers.

Probably correct, however from a user perspective it’s much more convenient to charge when parked overnight or at work. Installing an ordinary AC charger is quite cheap, and the goal should be to have lots of these, to make EVs more practical then fossil fuel cars.

EV charging hardware is very expensive at the moment.

A 100 Amp relay good for 10kW is < $2, yet the cheapest similar EV charging system is easily $1000.

I imagine a future where the people who make streetlights just integrate a couple of sockets in the bottom of every streetlamp. Total human time to fit one to an existing streetlamp should be only 15 minutes or so, so they can be rolled out en-mass.

I think it's inevitable that this will happen.

It sounds like there should be a startup out there that sells small weatherproof boxes with an outlet and a relay and a microcontroller inside, that makes it trivial to sell electricity to everyone who uses an app. There's really no reason such a box needs to cost $1000.

> A 100 Amp relay good for 10kW is < $2, yet the cheapest similar EV charging system is easily $1000.

The grid operates at 10kV. Most electric cars accept voltages less than one tenth of that. The cost is creating a large transformers.

That said, large transformers like these are pretty standard in sub-stations, it's still not clear to me why our existing infrastructure can't support super charging everywhere.

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