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Comment by Helmut10001 | Hacker News Reader

In Europe it is the same situation. I think they want to prohibit combustion engines for new trucks by 2030, meaning that all new trucks will need to be EV. To charge a single EV truck in 1.5 hours on the Autobahn (this is the common break time for truck drivers), you'll need 80kW EV loading (that's 80000 Watts for a single truck). Imagine there're 20 trucks charging at 80kW on a single autobahn rest area. I don't know who came up with this time schedule, the grid cannot support this and I think it is quite challenging to scale it enough till 2030.

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> Imagine there're 20 trucks charging at 80kW

That slow? This is a half of a single average wind turbine.

Tesla already has supercharger sites with over 50 dispensers capable of 250kW. In the UK gridserve has built a charging site with a 10MW solar array, battery storage, and 350kW chargers. Fastned has many 10 x 300kW charging sites in west Europe.

They will prohibit sale of ICE new trucks.

However ICE trucks and cars will continue running for years to come maybe only prohibited in city centers which is fine.

Still the Russia vs Ukraine situation show how europe is vulnerable and dependent of gas from Russia and Africa. This will only give more leverage to external forces to influence european politics.

Just as with passenger cars, ICE trucks will become uneconomic, due to fuel and maintenance costs, before they run out of fossil fuel. The transition will be much faster than you might think. It will be well underway in ten years from now.

I somewhat agree but it will all depends on the capacity of the grid.

This year is the very first one when people were asked in some parts of europe to reduce their consumption and prepare for potential outages during winter. Depending on the geopolitics, things could improve or worsen. A nuclear plant do not get build in 6 months.

A standard European 400 kV power line can transmit more than 1 GW over hundreds of kilometers. Upgrading the grid will not be cheap, but the required technology has been well established for over a century.

Well you kinda can't have 400kV in a highway.

Why would you? The lines go next to the highways, where they have always been.

Many 400kV lines run alongside highways.

Or you could put up wires on highways which means trucks can charge as they drive along. Germany, Sweden, the UK have been doing trials on this

https://www.carscoops.com/2021/07/uk-approves-e-highway-sche...

"An academic study suggested the e-highway system covering all but the most remote parts of the UK could be completed by 2030 at a cost of £19 billion (£26.4 bn),"

In context that's about the same cost as Crossrail.

Interesting, if that becomes a thing then a lot of trucks could arguably do with a lot less batteries and thus waste less power lugging them around. Sounds like a win-win.

Apparently Siemens is already onto 175 kW chargers, "Great for fast charging locations and applications along highway corridors.":

https://new.siemens.com/us/en/products/energy/topics/transpo...

Probably they want to halve the times in your example to 3/4th hour.

They may be able to have 10 charging stations instead of 20, but the overall grid consumption will remain the same 1600-2000 kW is a lot of power and the need for dedicated power lines won't change.

~250-350kW 800v chargers are the current top-dog DCFC charger systems in the EU, US, and elsewhere and they're increasingly common.

Pairing stations with "local" battery buffer is a thing, as it reduces the need for local infrastructure upgrades and the systems can also help pay for themselves by acting as part of a 'virtual power plant'.

The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...

The issue is, presently, the overwhelming majority of our energy use I'd supplied by coal, oil, and natural gas.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix

The problem is those who think building more wind and solar in the next few years is going to reverse this.

That's not the issue though. Even a 100% coal powered grid supplying electric vehicles is a significant improvement over gas powered cars and trucks.

Right.

The issue I was getting at is that we need to build a shitload more electricity generation.

Whichever way you prefer, it's going to take longer than a couple decades.

The EU needs to do that anyway given … Russia. Two birds with one stone

>The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...

Well, HN is not a specialised high power electricity engineers forum, though the original article is (IMHO) a little scare-mongering it seems like delivering a correct message, (in a nutshell) a lot of work for new lines and substations will be needed to be able to charge cars and commercial electric vehicles.

If really-really the transition will happen in the 2030's for passenger cars and in the 2040-2050's for trucks, it's not a bad idea to start working on these grid extensions.

The article/study talked about the battery thing and said it was an impractical solution for the projected scale (peak demand times + for all trucks traveling down highways * 71 charging stations) and this will have to require direct involvement with grid infrastructure.

> A growing number of EV-charging sites are adding batteries that can store up grid power at times when chargers are sitting idle and provide it when charging loads exceed available grid capacity, he noted. But that’s far from “the most optimized solution,” he said, particularly as loads grow to multi-megawatt scale.

> ~250-350kW 800v chargers are the current top-dog DCFC charger systems in the EU, US, and elsewhere and they're increasingly common.

Yes, but those are mostly for 'residential' / non-commercial applications. For more commercial / industrial application a new system is being developed:

> The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) is a charging connector under development for large battery electric vehicles. The connector will be rated for charging at a maximum rate of 3.75 megawatts (3,000 amps at 1,250 volts direct current (DC)).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System

> Apparently Siemens is already onto 175 kW chargers

350 kW chargers are widely used. As one example, Ionity's chargers are 350 kW: https://ionity.eu/en/weareonit

Repsol installed 400 kW chargers a few years ago: https://insideevs.com/news/375020/repsol-most-powerful-charg...

Kempower is working on new model chargers which support 400 kW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD_cvlitcIo

Alpitronic has a 400 kW charger coming out soon: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6931968...

The Megawatt Charging System is the next step up for heavy vehicles: https://www.charin.global/technology/mcs/

MCS sites will start deploying soon: https://insideevs.com/news/617089/charin-megawatt-charging-s...

In the meantime you can charge your trucks and buses on existing 350 kW chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UAttTG03WA

> Imagine there're 20 trucks charging at 80kW on a single autobahn rest area.

Why would they need to stop to charge? Charge them on the go. See the Tom Scott video "The highway where trucks work like electric trains":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg

And if they do want/have to stop, imagine charging at a rate of up to 3750 kW:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System

Why do we need trucks, in this case? All the rubber contaminating the environment when what you describe is the Electric Train that existed for 60+ years.

> All the rubber contaminating the environment when what you describe is the Electric Train that existed for 60+ years.

A freight train won't be able to deliver something to my house. Nor would it likely be able to transport livestock or grains from a farm to a processing plant.

There are medium- and short-distance trips where a truck makes more sense, and they may have to drive on a highway in that case.

And as someone who lives in Canada, where there are large distances between major metro areas, electrifying all those rail kilometres may not be practical, so even trains may have to stay on fossil fuels in certain situations.

> Nor would it likely be able to transport livestock or grains from a farm to a processing plant.

In Europe in the 1920s, every bigger plant had direct train access, it is possible and would make a lot more sense than stuffing precious lithium in millions of trucks that will still pollute the environment. For edge cases (delivery of the last mile), there are a lot of smaller solutions available than 20t+ trucks.

At the moment they have squidgy things in the cab that need the stops anyway; unlikly to be the case in 2030 admittedly.

It costs nothing to make a rule that your successor has to deal with.

> I don't know who came up with this time schedule, the grid cannot support this

Definitely the grid cannot support it today, which is why we need goals and a timeline to push ourselves rather than wait, if moving to EVs is our future. Maybe the schedule was known to be aggressive and the point of the schedule is to start now and aim high with the infrastructure, to create electricity supply simultaneously with demand, rather than wait for demand to exceed supply and then be stuck waiting for infrastructure? Either way, even if the timeline is a little too fast, and it takes another 5 or 10 years to get there, it can serve a useful purpose as a goal that aligns everyone and a catalyst that leads to action now, no? What if we’ll be late anyway, will it just take even longer if we don’t set aggressive goals? And hey, maybe we can surprise ourselves. History has many examples of how fast we can move as soon as we all agree on the goal and try hard.

The increase in load will be gradual and the charging & transmission capacity will not need to be built overnight "in 2030". It's just normal power engineering with demand trend known well in advance.

I think a target more like 2050 would actually be feasible but the likely motivating factors at play here are a combination of climate doomerism and degrowth ideology. The mistake is thinking that they don’t want people to suffer.

Trains can be constantly connected directly to the grid. We should do more of those instead of electric lorries.

2040 for trucks, 2030 for cars.

Nuclear power plant in a box. They’re already being commercialized.

And Tesla semi is around 1MWH

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