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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

I am looking at apartments to buy here in Sydney and not a single one has available power sockets in the car parking garage. Likewise at work. Which obviously makes charging impossible. The problem here is the chicken/egg situation. Building owners aren't going to install per bay power without cars. And people aren't going to buy cars they can't charge.

As land becomes more and more expensive housing density is increasing worldwide. This means fewer houses will have dedicated garages/driveways and apartments are going to become more popular. This increases the chances that your car will not be within distance of a power socket.

Hydrogen doesn't have this problem. It works exactly like petrol does today. It doesn't require much education or really any change in user behaviour. It is simply another nozzle at the gas station just like when LPG/Natural Gas was introduced.

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Australia seems a bit ambivalent about meeting its international obligations around carbon, but in several other countries they're solving this relatively simple issue with incentives, subsidies and planning regulations. It's really not hard at all.

No matter how much money you throw at the problem, you won't be able to solve it entirely in cities. European cities aren't really built with cars in mind and most buildings don't come with garages. So all the cars currently parking in streets, can't be charged at all.

In order for electric cars to become a good alternative, they need to be chargeable in <5min at least.

Why can't you put chargers on the street?

We do put chargers on the street. There are a couple outside pubs i drink at.

I'm not sure what would happen if you had a whole residential street wanting on-street chargers, though. At that point, we might need some new planning rules. Doesn't seem an insuperable problem, though.

They take up a lot of space on a sidewalk. If all cars were electric, charging them on my street would require putting up a charger roughly every 5m on both sides of the street to charge all cars typically parking here.

The same would have to happen for almost all residential streets in Berlin. Even ignoring the fact that there simply isn't enough space for chargers everywhere, it's also not practical financially.

Chargers aren't that big. They'd take up about as much space as a parking meter. Lots of places have one parking meter per parking space.

True. Although it would take a LOT of infrastructure work and expense to run power to such a large and dense network of chargers. And realistically, we'd need to meter and charge money for that power, too, so, we also need very smart charging stations. So basically a monumental infrastructure investment.

It's a big investment but it's also long term. It's basically a couple of thousand dollars for each new EV sold. It's not something you have to do all at once.

Not to mention that Mitsubishi and others are working on good solutions for inductive chargers that could be mounted into the street, making the parking spot itself the charger, at which point nearly every parking spot in a city has the space to be electric (it just needs the infrastructure investment).

No cabledrum robots on the streets that roll out to meet your car halfway..

In the UK you can get a government grant for 75% of the install cost of a domestic charge point; there are also a growing number of public chargepoints (1400 now, increasing to 6000 in a couple of years), and workplace garages often have them; urban gas stations are mostly closing for commercial reasons (redevelopment).

I spent years living in London and I had to find parking on the street often not near my car. Are we really expecting every house to have a power cable running from their house down the street ? Because it sounds dangerous, impractical and hardly an elegant solution for the next generation of automobile power technology.

And again my workplace in London was a big car garage. I don't see how that magically ends up with per bay power with the current chicken/egg situation.

It is now common in London to see electric only parking spaces, with a power bay, on most central London streets and these are increasing in number in the 'burbs too.

You will get a ticket if you put a liquid-fuelled vehicle in those spaces.

These tend to be filled with Nissan Leaf and cars of that kind, I've yet to see a Tesla in one (do all Tesla owners charge at home?).

The Nissan Leaf takes 8 hours to recharge.

I just don't understand how electric cars scale out to all consumers given the housing situation. There would need to be an electric charging unit on every parking spot. Is this logistically practical ?

Remember, whatever the charging time at a residential socket is in the US, the charging time at a European socket will be half of that. (If the socket is properly used)

(US uses 110V residential, 220V industrial; Europe uses 220V/230V/240V residential, 400V industrial; Additionally usually british and German wall sockets, at least, offer up to 16 or 24A, which, again, is more than US sockets. If the socket delivers more power, you can charge faster)

US residences have 240VAC available, and standard outlets provide half of that, 120VAC, all single-phase. US electric ovens, dryers, water heaters, conventional split AC, etc run on 240V. It's fairly trivial to install a 6.6kW "charger" in most US residences. (It's not in a detached garage if fed by only a single 120VAC line.)

US industrial is variously 208VAC, 240VAC, 277VAC, and 480VAC; some are single phase; some are three phase.

If you're discussing only the "walk up and plug into an existing outlet" situation, EU charging will be faster. Not so for permanently installed chargers.

As for the very last point, the supply equipment negotiates with the car to advertise how much supply it has. Unless you can tell it to charge at 24A, it doesn't "know" and the charge will be at the slower rate. Same in the US. If I plug my trickle charger into a typical 15A plug, it charges at around 12A. If I plug the equipment into a 20A plug, it still charges at the same rate, because the equipment doesn't know that a higher amperage is available.

German residencies have 240VAC as standard, and 400VAC available. Normal stoves usually end up using around 18kW here.

For permanently installed chargers, this will be a lot more power.

Learned something today; thanks!

Note that the J1772 charging standard won't supply 400VAC-3phase, but IEC 62196[1] will allow that super-fast AC charging.

1-https://xkcd.com/927/

And European homes have 400V available (230V is the single phase). When my parents had their old three phase 400V oven replaced they had to have am electrician in to redo the outlet since the new one was only single phase 230V.

My Nissan LEAF takes a hair over 4 hours to charge from basically flat to full using the commonly available 6.6kW EVSEs.

6.6kW adds about 25 miles of range per hour of charging.

It's only the slow trickle charger that takes a long time (in fact can be over 24 hours).

Why is it difficult to have one electrical outlet per parking spot? How many outlets do you already have in your house, for example?

It would make life interesting for multistorey car parks. It's not uncommon to have 500+ spaces. If each one of those has something between 3-50kW charge capacity, and many are being used at once, that's going to require some serious infrastructure upgrading (maxes out at ~25MW if I didn't flub the numbers). A wild ass guess would put them in the maybe-hundreds of kW for lighting, ventilation, automation, so that's a pretty big step.

Then again, they'd be in a pretty good position to monitor spaces used and already have a billing system for parking time, adding cost of power would be quite straightforward.

And it's going to be a long time before 100% electric occupancy is a real problem.

It's sort of a microcosm of the problem of upgrading the grid to handle the additional load from charging EVs. Like the grid, I think it will happen so gradually that it will barely be noticeable, and the upgrades will just be a part of regular electrical work.

Note that you'd only need to size for average use, not peak use. With a bit of cleverness (and expense) you could set a power limit for the whole garage and distribute it between the charging cars, rather than letting everyone charge full blast. Most people will drive under 50 miles per day on average and will charge overnight, so you really only need to deliver about 1.5kW per car. (50 miles at 300Wh/mile is 15kWh, assume "overnight" is ten hours of charging.) You'd want to be able to provide more for those who need it, but that's probably a reasonable number for an average.

I have 10kW charging at home for my Model S and it's major overkill for local driving. Most public chargers are about 6kW, which would still be plenty for daily charging.

Tesla already has a lot of technology in their Super Charger stations to control the total charge rate. E.g. if you park right next to another car both will charge slower, because there is a limit in power per 2 adjacent parking spots. The same goes for the total over all spots, if they are all in use, the cars will charge slower.

So having 500 spots in a garage means you'll need to have some technology that is aware of which car is in need of charging and when the owner is expected to return. You can then set dynamic pricing to motivate car owners to charge at the moment you have enough capacity and encourage them not to all request full charge-rate at busy moments in the garage.

Just in case some Tesla owner discovers this fact here, a seriously tiny nitpick: supercharger pairs aren't necessarily directly adjacent. Your best bet is to look at the label. 1A is paired with 1B, 2A with 2B, etc.

In any case, allocating power between cars is relatively easy. The cars themselves can be told how much they're allowed to draw, and this can be changed on the fly, so you don't need any fancy power electronics, just enough smarts to monitor usage and tell cars how much they can take based on that.

Not all Tesla owners charge at home, but almost all do.

It's pretty inconvenient to own an EV that you can't charge at home. It's doable in some cases, but it's far better to have home charging.

I'm pretty sure that 90+% of EV owners of all stripes charge at home, whether Tesla, LEAF, or other. If you see them charging in public, it's usually either to get a bit of extra range because they're planning to drive beyond what a single charge can give them, or they're just taking advantage of the availability of changing even though they don't need it. Mostly the latter.

(Just in case it comes across wrong, that isn't meant to be disparaging. I plug in when there's a free charger even if I don't need it. If it's offered, I figure I might as well take advantage. I do leave my phone number on the dashboard in case someone comes along who actually needs it to get home.)

Will a solar panel on top of the care help? Could someone do the math?

However, hydrogen fuel cell cars have another number of problems: http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell-car...

The limitations of hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles are grossly underestimated by many (layfolk) who espouse the technology.

Storing hydrogen is difficult, it will leak out of steel and embrittle the steel.

The biggest drawback, as it stands today, and quoted from the article you linked is this:

"You won't even go 100 miles on current tech hydrogen tanks that are still safe to carry around in a car."

However, some of the drawbacks could very well be the reasons hydrogen wins out. Again, quoted from the article you linked:

"Even though a HFC-powered car is essentially an electric car, you get none of the benefits like filling it up with your own power source, using it as a smart grid buffer, regenerating energy during braking, etc."

Those look like good ways to maintain the something similar to the present distribution change.

It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds. People will argue over which is the better technology, but that isn't necessarily going to be the deciding factor.

I don't get the "smart grid" buffer argument why would anyonce cycle their car battery (and hence reducing its lifespan) for little to no financial gain

You don't need to cycle to help the grid, just temporarily stopping charging for short periods and/or delaying overnight charging to off-peak times helps enormously.

And you don't do it for free, the org operating the charger can get electricity cheaper if it agrees to modulate load to match demand.

> little to no financial gain

Electricity here in Ontario costs twice as much during the day as it does at night (US$0.12 vs US$0.06 per kwh). If you cycle most of a Tesla battery every day that's ~$120 a month in electricity savings. Not sure if that offsets the battery lifespan costs, but it's not nothing.

Hydrogen is not simply a drop-in for petrol, like LPG/Natural gas. It is considerably more challenging to store and pump, and its infrastructure is orders of magnitude harder to install than electric charging points.

Couldn't orders of magnitude more people use a single piece of infrastructure? I think their point was you could live and work anywhere then go to the one station in the vicinity for a couple minutes once or twice a week to top up.

But as a customer I don't know or care how the hydrogen gets there.

I just know that I will drive to the same gas station, use the same hardware to put it into my car, wait the same amount of time and pay for it exactly the same way I do today. Only it will be clean. And I won't involving changing my life to fit my car.

I honestly don't mean to sound antagonistic, but literally every single point you make is wrong.

> use the same hardware to put it into my car

It is not the same hardware: hydrogen pumps are far more complicated, difficult, and expensive than gasoline pumps. (http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11493/why-fuel-cell-car...).

> wait the same amount of time

Hydrogen cars will always have very poor range compared to hydrocarbon-fueled cars. So for the range that you get, you will spend much more time pumping. See the blog-post series above for more on that.

> and pay for it exactly the same way I do today

Because the infrastructure is many times more expensive than petroleum infrastructure -- and this is not just a matter of relative economies of scale, but a fundamental attribute of hydrogen -- you will need to pay much more to recoup those capital costs. Again, read the blog post series above (I'll stop repeating this, but it holds true for every point).

> Only it will be clean.

Only at your tailpipe, which is a false form of cleanliness. Systemically, Hydrogen is dirty. Hydrogen production is spectacularly inefficient. The only remotely efficient way of producing it is to extract it from hydrocarbons -- in which case it would actually be cleaner to generate work by burning the hydrocarbons directly. Truly "clean" methods of hydrogen production (electrolysis of H2O) require copious amounts of electricity, which must come from somewhere, and again would be better used directly, via a battery-electric vehicle. Basically, any energy source which produces hydrogen could be used to directly power a vehicle, and would be 5x-10x cleaner by doing so.

> And I won't involving changing my life to fit my car.

You have already changed your life to fit your car -- by driving to gas stations! Home-charging is a feature, not a bug.

Besides, if you really want to drive to a remote location to get a complete top-up of your range -- that's what battery-swap is for. Battery-swap stations are far cheaper to build than hydrogen filling stations, and can give you more range, more quickly, than hydrogen pumping. And they are truly clean, not imaginarily clean.

You are missing the point. Look at it from the consumer's perspective. It will be identical to how they fill up their car today. Nothing new to learn. No change in behaviour. No finding new stations out of the way. No proprietary battery swaps that exist only at specific stations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7xCbmkWKkw

Did you even read what I wrote, or follow the sources? Hydrogen pumping is absolutely not identical to how people fill up their cars today. And you can't simply retrofit a standard gas station to pump hydrogen: you need to build an entirely new facility. Just like a battery-swap station, except much more expensive (and therefore rarer and further out of the way).

If you could simply replace gasoline with hydrogen, then your arguments might have some merit (although it still wouldn't be "clean" by any real measure). But you can't, and therefore your arguments don't.

It's identical in that you pull up to a pump, insert a credit card, connect a hose to your car, and in about 5 minutes you are on your way.

All your other complaints are irrelevant to the consumer.

Why would you want to go to a gas station?

Batteries improve ~15% per year ($$$ / kWh stored). It appears to be some sort of moore's law for batteries. It also means we'll see way better batteries in 10 years (4x better regarding $$$/kWh).

Now with way more range and non-stop travel (2-4x) the bottleneck will be how long you're willing to sit in your car without a major break (sleeping).

Such a future would be very similar to charging your phone at night. Most people can get away with just charging at night. Even if they travel. I expect the car battery capacity to grow beyond the point where intraday charging is relevant at all.

And once we've reached that future going to a gas station will seem like a strange thing of the past. Yep, it might be 10-20 years from now. But we'll hopefully all watch this happen.

Also, gas stations make almost 0 profit with selling gas even today (at least here in Germany), so they’ll probably end up as midnight stores with obscene prices.

The same trend holds in America as well. The low margins on gas has lead to gas pumps becoming a loss leader to encourage people to go to nearby convenience stores and now increasingly entire supermarkets and superstores. The pumps that are surviving aren't really "gas stations" in the classic Americana sense and I don't think people realize that.

It will not take much additional friction in practical usage to remove the hydrogen car from the equation. Just as steam cars were similarly discarded from the mainst[r]eam.

We didn't run out of whale oil, coal, or wood. We haven't run out of oil, but as cheap solar infiltrates as solar generation drops in price, it will make much more sense to run personal transportation on clean and simple electricity.

We didn't run out of whale oil? Weren't the relevant whales nearly hunted to extinction?

Then how come we haven't seen a single "gas station with a hydrogen noozle" so far, but only specialized and very expensive "hydrogen stations"?

If anything it's the electricity infrastructure that already exists, and you only need chargers installed, which are far cheaper than hydrogen stations - which is why we're already seeing thousands of EV chargers across the US and only a handful of hydrogen stations.

If you were to take every single car on the road today and replace it with an electric car overnight there would be massive, massive blackouts, everywhere.

Cars use a whole lot of energy, gasoline stores a whole lot of energy. I doubt there are many places around the world where electric power distribution systems are equipped to serve vehicles, on top of cooling, heating, refrigeration, electronics, etc.

> If you were to take every single car on the road today and replace it with an electric car overnight there would be massive, massive blackouts, everywhere.

Half-credit. The DOE has shown that 77% of light vehicles could move over to overnight electric charging without adding any additional grid capacity.

If we need more capacity, we add additional renewables to the grid.

> If you were to take every single car on the road today and replace it with an electric car overnight there would be massive, massive blackouts, everywhere.

Not quite true. It's estimated[0] that up to 75% of light-duty vehicles (the kind regular people drive) could be converted to electric without requiring major grid upgrades. The one major assumption is that most people would be charging their vehicles at off-peak hours (overnight) which is already the case[1].

[0] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518066/could-electric-c...

[1] http://www.powermag.com/impact-of-electric-vehicle-charging-...

But the conversion doesn't happen overnight. EV adoption will happen slowly over the course of decades. That's plenty of time for the grid to be upgraded in a slow, incremental fashion.

The same could be said of the hydrogen infrastructure, except that hydrogen faces a massive chicken-and-egg problem. There are a grand total of twelve hydrogen fueling stations in the US at the moment. These stations cost a ton of money to build. Who will build them if there are almost no hydrogen cars on the road? Who will buy hydrogen cars if there are almost no filling stations?

EV charging infrastructure is relatively cheap. That means it doesn't face the same chicken-and-egg problem. A person whose daily driving fits entirely within their EV's range doesn't need any charging stations except the one at his house, which can typically be installed for $0-2,000. (The $0 is for if a suitable outlet is already available and you just use the mobile charger that comes with the car.) And since the stations are relatively cheap, that means that businesses can install a few to attract EV owners without making it a major investment. Because of this, there are already over 10,000 public charging stations in the US, with more showing up all the time.

Each additional station stresses the grid a little bit more. But it also contributes money to maintaining and upgrading the grid. As long as stupid political forces don't prevent utilities from gradually upgrading over time, there will be no problem there.

Electric cars primarily "fill in the bathtub". If you look at a chart of energy demand over 24 hours the off-peak (cheaper) hours are often referred to as the "bathtub" because that's what the chart resembles. To deal with the bathtub electric companies have to turn on/off electric generation systems appropriately. Most of those generation systems (hydro and even coal, as two examples) are more efficient if they run continuously rather than start/stop. So electric companies want to fill in the bathtub, and are already willing and eager to fill in the bathtub.

This is also where you get into discussions about the "smart grid". The thing to note is that the grid in most countries is already "smart" on the production/generation side: it has to be to deal with changes in demand over time, particularly given something like the bathtub that happens every single day. The goal of the "smart grid" is to make consumption smarter by signaling better when demand might change (my owner just got home from work for the day, your house says, so please get ready for higher power needs this evening) and electric cars are a vanguard for the "smart grid" precisely because they are programmable consumption devices with useful consumption patterns that can be smartly adjusted. An electric car (or its charger, same difference) can ask the grid for energy and adjust its energy input to the grids needs (and vice versa), charging on a slow trickle during high demands and a full blast to help fill in the bathtub. Cars use a whole lot of energy, but primarily in short bursts (trips to/from a destination) and ultimately spend a lot more time parked. With a little bit of information from the user, or a bit of inference from pattern matching, a car can predict about how long it will be parked and about how much charge it will need for the next trip (which is not always 100%; if you drive to lunch from work you probably are only planning to go a short distance because you have to return to work just after lunch). The energy grid loves this because it can better predict demand over time and better adjust consumption to meet generation and vice versa.

(This is all even before you get the "smart grid" facets that electric cars are giant parked batteries and that a truly "smart grid" could borrow energy from an electric car to meet high demand and then repay that energy (with "interest") as demand shrinks back down. It's this part that gets a bunch of interest when people talk about the "smart grid", but that's actually a less practically useful part of it than just consumption demand knowledge and preparation/time-shifting. The "battery loans" would more likely be useful and actionable merely at the scale of between your personal car and home than at the level of the grid.)

Right now I know of only one charging point in the Lansing area and that's at Kellogg Center on the Michigan State University campus though there could be one or two more I don't know about.

Tesla only has one charger and that is in SW Michigan near Chicago though they recently announced one more in the Ann Arbor-Detroit area.

According to plugshare.com there are several dozen charging locations in Lansing.

One just went live in Grand Rapids.

In reality, it would be a waste of money to install charging point infrastructure in each place as the demand is so low. Most people would prefer better appliances than a charging point. It wouldn't be that difficult to fit the charging point yourself if you purchase an apartment.

Isn't Australia still coal-powered? With coal-burning power, EVs aren't cleaner than gas vehicles.

You are largely correct, but rooftop solar is fairly popular in Australia, and EV owners are much more likely than average to also buy rooftop solar. This is for economic reasons as much as ideological ones - solar pays for itself a lot faster if you're using that much more electricity - so there's a potnetial for a virtuous cycle that goes beyond whatever the current power generation mix happens to be.

> With coal-burning power, EVs aren't cleaner than gas vehicles.

Incorrect. Even if you run a car off coal, its cleaner than gasoline. That coal fired plant has better emissions controls, and is more efficient than the powerplant in your vehicle. And the grid will continue to become "cleaner"; a gas-powered vehicle will never reduce its emissions over the life of the vehicle.

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/nova-scotia/electric-cars-ar...

Emission controls yes, but CO2 release cannot be captured and you can't beat entropy - energy is wasted on conversion from chemical=>electric=>mechanical rather than just going directly chemical=>mechanical.

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