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Comment by 1053r | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, the power requirements for a supercharging station and a gas station are wildly different. The supercharging station might be putting out 75KW per car, and have a dozen cars charging at any particular point. A whole gas station might pull less than 75Kw easily.

The requirements for the kind of grid hookup you need to handle that power are wildly different. Alternatively, you can have a lower powered grid connection, and local batteries to buffer energy and lower peak power, but that is even more expensive, and only works if your charging station has low average usage.

Once built, the supercharging station might need less maintenance, but it is WAY more expensive to set one up up front. This won't stop them from proliferating, IMO, but it's still a big barrier to entry, and a nice commercial "moat" for Tesla to offer their customers.

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We have worked with electric trains with over 1Mwatt or more per machine in places like subways. When a train slows down and stops, an enormous amount of electricity is recovered for another train to accelerate at the same time.

Also the requirements of aluminum factories in electricity are mind blowing.

What I mean is: We already have those electrical installations running, way bigger installations than 10 supercharging stations grouped together, for industry and transport.

I see EVs as an enormous opportunity for those technologies to become cheaper as they become mass produced. But the technology is well proven and works.

It will also accelerate the development of things like superconductors or extreme voltage continuous current for electric transportation.

The problem isn't a lack of technology, but cost. You have to get your electric utility to make substantial improvements to their delivery infrastructure. This generally involves digging up the street and laying cables, not just flicking a switch. It gets more expensive depending on how far your proposed charging station is from the nearest high voltage distribution point.

It does not take a lot of buildings to get into the 1MW range.

A 20 story apartment complex with say 400 apartments needs ~1MW. Power companies are used to rolling out these kinds of connections and large ones do it on a weekly if not daily basis.

Exactly. “More power” is a solution with commercial products available. Even a common DC fast charger is 440v, which is about the same voltage they hook up to commercial buildings.

We just need enough EVs on the road so that it becomes economical.

So all the parking lots at the train stations in my densely populated country that has proper (mostly electric) public transport system could be easily retrofitted with superchargers. That’s an interesting thought.

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