Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

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I think there is a sweet spot for city size and how many people are using EVs for apartment EV users now. Your city needs to be large enough to draw investment for this infrastructure, but it can't be so large that each and every charger in town has someone already parked there, which is what seemingly happens when I see the few dozen chargers installed around my neighborhood.

You also don't want most people to be driving EVs, because then it quickly becomes a situation like bikes are with last mile transport: if everyone used them, they wouldn't work so well, but so long as only a few people are using them it works great for you. If everyone brought a bike on the train we'd have to redesign trains to be far longer and lengthen underground stations to match; right now its fine because its only maybe 2-3 people per train car with a bike in my experience, but if that changes the fixes are expensive.

Likewise with EV chargers, if we see mass adoption, we'd have to foot the bill to turn every basically zero cost spit of pavement people park on into dedicated charging infrastructure. I'm assuming a municipal charger will have to be substantially more rugged and able to handle more abuse than your average home charger installation. Estimates on the internet vary for what a l2 charger costs, lets say its $10000 for one fit for a public parking spot. That would put the cost to convert the 6 million parking spots in Los Angeles at $60 billion. Sure that's probably not sound math, but it doesn't seem cheap, especially factoring in ongoing maintenance and replacement.

A decent L2 charger should be installable at scale for ~$1K per unit IMHO. I'm basing this on the fact that a singular L2 home charger can be installed for about that. Figure the industrial variant costs a little more, but you get savings from the mass scale of deployment. They probably cost more now, but competition will bring it down as we scale.

Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because many will be able to charge at home or use fast-chargers in emergencies. You don't have to be near-full at all times. You could deploy them at only 1/N spots, say something closer to 1/4 of all the spots, if even that (apartments might need 1/1, but streets and business parking lots/garages would need far less. You don't need them in any short-term street parking areas, as L2 is mostly-useless unless the car is sitting in place for hours).

You also don't necessarily need to have the raw power to run them all simultaneously: you can have local groups powershare (e.g. deploy 8 chargers with a feed-in that supports 4, and the chargers can coordinate to drop their charge rate as more people plug in).

If those wild assumptions are true ($1k, 1/4 of parking spots), LA's bill drops to $1.5B, which seems much more reasonable. The capacity will build up organically over time as EV adoption grows, starting with corporate and apartment parking lots.

I think in this hypothetical all-EV future, there would be other compensating changes to the city as well. Like, all gas stations would go poof, and their tanks, and the fuel delivery trucks, and most of the refineries, and all of the associated impacts on peoples' health from both the fueling and the car exhausts, etc. There's a lot of potential upside to offset any reasonable electrification costs.

I'd be curious to see where the money ends up coming from long term. Hopefully it doesn't mean shifting money that could have gone towards mass transit into subsidizing private ownership of single occupant vehicles.

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