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Comment by chapill | Hacker News Reader

Not if those cars are going to be largely powered by home solar.

A lot of the charging will happen at homes at night, so until energy storage doesn’t add 200% to the cost to take a solar install to solar + storage, the utilities are still going to be the power providers.

There are also going to be (hopefully) some low cost utility scale storage options that, along with the 50% cost advantage of utility solar over rooftop, could be combined with the existing distribution infrastructure to provide low-cost and low-carbon energy for transportation.

It's a reasonable idea if car batteries become easily swappable.

Not likely any time soon. There's absolutely no way humans are going to pull >1000 lbs worth of batteries out of the car every day, and put the same >1000 lbs worth of batteries into it. With a unit of work of 50 lbs (reasonable for fit people), and a minute to pull out each pack, stow it away, take fresh pack and put it back in, it would take half an hour of hard physical work every day. No way regular people are going to do that.

You don't put gas in your tank with a laddle, why wouldn't you use a machine to swap batteries?

Ofcourse this would be automated, you don't see a person hauling jerrycans to fill up his car in gasstations do you?

I definitely carry jerry cans when I want to fill up my vehicles at home, which is the context we are in — we were talking about home rooftop solar installation, and how it can or cannot be used to charge cars overnight.

Swapping does solve the charging time problem. There was a pretty big effort to build out a swapping network, but it ran in to business issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

Most electric cars won't need to be charged from empty to full everyday.. If someone drives just few miles a day, they will be able to either do trickle charging with solar panels, or do full charge on weekends where the car is mostly sitting idle. And if you're traveling on weekends, you will use superchargers, which might be powered by solar.

Ya, I wouldnt worry about that for a long time.

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