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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree, I was interested in the article about how poorly planned EV city owned equipment was a huge strain on the power grid that city planners didn't seem to understand how to do right. I look forward to what I expect to be the near future where cities start sharing best practices on this and collectively we do this right.

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Depends on the location. In cities that have trams, metro and electric trains, the infrastructure shouldn't be that far out.

Taxis, city buses, UPS trucks, etc, all tend to be busy during the day. They get charged overnight, when grid demand is lower, and take advantage of low off-peak electricity prices.

The idea that these things place a “huge strain on the grid” as the poster above suggests just sounds like more made up FUD.

No, the poster above is right. There was an article about this a month ago or so. Anyways, the TLDR is that vehicles need to charge more often than just nightly and not just at the main depot. Transit agencies need to build heavy duty fast charging infrastructure scattered across many locations in the city. This has been so far a large upfront cost which holds transit EV expansion at bay.

If their vehicles need to charge more often than just overnight, then they need to consider whether they are buying the right vehicles for the job.

The examples I mentioned are from London, which has a growing fleet of hundreds of heavy electric vehicles (city buses, UPS trucks, etc). All of these charge exclusively overnight.

Why move a heavier battery pack around if you can have a charging station at both ends of your route? Certainly lower weight means lower cost battery packs and overall higher efficiency since you're not dragging around spare energy for most of your day.

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