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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time believing electric semis are cheaper because of range limits.

Also this may not be true for the US now but in parts of Europe the charging cost for driving an EV has at times already surpassed the gas cost for regular cars. And that was despite the war also leading to increased oil prices in Europe at the same time, thanks to the EU's climate policy and certain countries shutting down coal and gas power plants without even having enough alternate capacity yet. Germany was the king of that, they're shutting down nuclear, coal and gas power plants at the same time :)

If you think that sounds idiotic, that's politics for you. I wouldn't count on this never happening in the US, a lot of people support "climate action" without caring about the details or understanding anything about any of this on a technical level.

The rapid charging cost, on occasion, in the countries with the highest dependence on natural gas for electricity.

That's not relevant for current commercial delivery use cases.

True. But keep in mind the price of electricity has gone up for everyone in all of Europe, not just at charging stations. For private car owners with no place to charge at home the effect is most drastically visible, as the example shows. But of course when the prices go up it also affects every businesses bottom line.

Btw in many countries there are discounted rates for large electricity purchasers, like corporations. They pay less the more they use. So companies do have an incentive to go electric. There's just a lot more nuance. The charging times the other user mentioned are one thing. Parts of North America also get pretty cold in winter which drastically reduces the range of EVs. That's something many people who've never driven an EV don't know about for example. Will be interesting to see real world results. From the electric bus projects I've seen in some cities, they're far from as cheap in real life as cities thought they would be when they were presented the numbers on paper.

I'm on a market rate plan (price changes hourly).

Today I'm paying all of 3c/kWh for electricity. Can't get much cheaper than that.

Also the EV+range thing is mostly negated by pre-heating the car while it's plugged in at home, warm battery = more range. Just like we need to do with ICE cars to make the engines even start in the winter.

Wow, that's cheap! Is that in the US?

As for winter, what you say may be good for people with a house and garage who are driving to work and back (but then range should not be an issue anyway). It doesn't work when you street park and it also doesn't really work when you're driving long distances or with a car that's mostly outside, like a delivery van.

The amount of energy needed to "fast charge" must be immense.

...why is it so much more than the energy required to charge slowly? The battery might get a little warmer while charging, so that's some more waste heat, but the battery gains the same amount of stored energy either way.

You need bigger transmission lines to fast charge. That's expensive. You need to charge enough at the site to justify the line costs.

Alternatively, use cheap local storage to "build up" energy for a fast charge.

It takes $100 of batteries to store 15 cents of electricity. What kind of cheap storage are you envisioning?

You could look into cheaper batteries, as there is no need to use the latest and greatest technology. Supercapacitors might also be an option.

It's all an economic sum, really: when do the higher connection fees and increased demand pricing outweigh battery cost? We are already seeing grid-scale battery storage being used in practice, applying that to a more local use case might not be that unrealistic.

Besides, if the alternative is no charging station, you can probably charge significantly higher fees.

A battery is a box of minerals. It can never cost less than the commodity value of those minerals.

More battery = more minerals. Iron law of batteries.

There is no cheap way to store large amounts of electricity.

EVs are great when in used in the right applications, but trying to make them work for everyone and everything is just going to tarnish the platform.

The grid is unreliable and has problems serving base load in rural areas where charging would be needed

The grid can never support a 100% EV demand. Nationwide, every single transmission line, transformer, and substation would need to be scaled up.

It is a pipe dream to do it in 30 years. I don't even know what to call it doing so in seven. Dementia is probably the most appropriate word given who is pushing it.

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