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Comment by goatcode | Hacker News Reader

Challenges as I understand them:

1. Rare minerals and their amounts needed to support wide-scale adoption of EVs

2. Similarly, massively increased electricity needs to maintain EVs' usability.

I wonder whether they're going to lay out a bulletproof plan to have these, and any other, fundamental issues 100% solved before enacting changes that absolutely require them to be solved.

FTA:

"Whether the state’s goals can be reached, he added, depends on many factors, including “inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage.”"

"...Yet California doesn’t want to wait."

So that tells me "probably not." Therefore, the eventual legislation will focus on reducing (or, for average people, potentially eliminating altogether) personal vehicle availability, I'd imagine.

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Challenges, yes; insuperable obstacles, no.

1. Electromagnets are well understood and can replace the permanent magnets in motors. Iron and phosphorus are common; lithium iron phosphate chemistries can replace the nickel-cobalt chemistries currently used, more cheaply and more robustly.

2. PV panels now have a capital cost of about $1 per watt and imminent technologies will drive that close to single-digit cents per watt, with corresponding declines in labor requirements and deployment timetables of days rather than weeks. Stationary storage costs are also plummeting.

So we should experience deflation in EV prices and running costs rather than inflation. Roads, on the other hand...

3. The big challenge is deploying chargers in sufficient numbers. If it takes 90 seconds to charge a car with gasoline and an hour to charge an EV, we need 40 times as many chargers as there are gas pumps, modulo any charging done at home and population growth/changes in vehicle usage.

Meeting this last challenge would seem to require sweeping aside NIMBY objections to on-street charging. The implications of neutering NIMBY veto power could be far-reaching.

It's not helpful to view EV charging as a 1:1 equivalent to pumping gas. EVs need different types of chargers depending on circumstances. For road trips people need 300kW DC fast chargers, and these are major infrastructure. OTOH for daily top-ups of commuter cars it's sufficient to have an 11kW AC charger at home or at work. Electrically these chargers are pretty basic, and no more difficult to install than an electric stove or a dryer. Definitely easier to roll out than gas pumps. They're already mandatory for new houses and garages in many countries.

In terms of time for charging, it's better to compare to the time cars spend is parked, because EVs are designed to be left charging unattended.

Agreed. I didn't specify fast chargers, just that they will need to be close to ubiquitous.

It's still an infrastructure installation and maintenance challenge--it's a lot of wire!--and it's still likely to be fought by (possibly astroturf, funded by oil companies) NIMBYs.

Indeed not insurmountable, but a plan is necessary. From the article, it doesn't seem that California are taking it too seriously, though.

3. Not enough copper

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/14/copper-is-key-to-electric-ve...

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