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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Electricity is everywhere. Deployment of charging infrastructure is going to be trivial, especially in parking lots with existing light poles.

That's not to say there won't be growing pains, but we will deploy. Over the course of 2015 I went from always being able to find a charger to not being able to ever find one, and then since 2017 I haven't had a single problem because more chargers were added. For a couple years, I lived in an apartment where the landlord was a dock and wouldn't let me install a charger at the car port, and I had to charge at public chargers. It worked out, even though it wasn't ideal. And when the laws finally reign in the rapacious landlords, we will have plenty of charging at apartments too.

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> It worked out, even though it wasn't ideal. And when the laws finally reign in the rapacious landlords, we will have plenty of charging at apartments too.

That's cool if you live in apartment buildings with designated parking.

I don't. I live in a place with only street parking (don't give me the "charge at work" thing - street parking there too). As evident by how many cars are on the street at any given time, you can bet that that population is very sizeable.

Chargers can be installed on the street, much like parking meters.

> Chargers can be installed on the street, much like parking meters.

Yes, because they're going to install chargers where parking meters never existed. As if.

They're installed for entirely different reasons, so I'm not sure why you'd use the nonexistence of one to argue they wouldn't install the other.

> They're installed for entirely different reasons, so I'm not sure why you'd use the nonexistence of one to argue they wouldn't install the other.

Do you expect chargers to be all over the sidewalks in residential neighborhoods? That's where a lot of people park and I don't see it happening. It'd be such an eyesore.

In dense areas where people have to park on the street? Yeah, it would make sense. And compared to the huge cars all over, I expect it'll look fine.

Just curious - where would chargers go on a street like this where I live? https://goo.gl/maps/SUkDqmrUrDnVWVuXA

I don't see it happening. The sidewalks are too narrow. It would require a massive investment.

There are driveways everywhere there. People will put them accessible to the driveways, from the garage. In normal parts of the world, people would actually be parking inside of their garages rather than using them as storage space or living space, as happens in the Bay Area.

But as somebody who also lives in a Bay Area suburban hell that is trying desperately to pretend it can get by with bad planning of suburban sprawl, this are is not a problem at all. People in my neighborhood work around that just fine! I see many electric cars on my street, mostly charging close to the house. Some people run wires to the sidewalk for curbside charging, but not many.

The harder areas are places like SF where there's even more limited driveway access. That's where streetlights come in.

If your neighborhood isn't dense enough to have streetlight, no problem.

Edit: one key piece to charging from a garage 220V outlet is that you don't need to charge every single day. Charging every other day or every four days is just fine. So if you have 4 single people living in a 4 bedroom house, each with cars, that's just enough to get by in one charger.

Okay, those particular sidewalks would be a problem... in your shot jam-packed full of garages? Even if your particular situation is only street parking, that doesn't look like the norm. So that's fine. If most but not all places can have a charger, and not every person needs a home charger, then it just becomes one factor out of many for choosing a place to live.

> It would require a massive investment.

Compared to the cost of all the cars people buy every decade it's not terribly much.

It would go in the street, right at the power pole.

It really isn't trivial and having light does not mean you can support EV charging. You are going to want a ~1MW supply to a parking lot with even 30 or so chargers.

That's not a trivial thing to suddenly install. Often will require significant new ducting and cabling to be ran from far away.

Even before EV rollout getting a 1MW supply can take years from the power company.

You also have another problem that cities do not have enough transmission capacity from the main grid to them to handle 2xing power supply.

It's definitely doable but really is going to be similar to building today's power grid out all over again. Everything needs doubled.

As long as everyone in the city isn't charging at peak time, the capacity issue can be handled. The grid is sized for peak loads - that moment between 5 and 7 when everyone in the city gets home, turns the heating on and starts cooking.

That means rolling out demand response charging - not technically hard, but absolutely necessary before electric cars are too ubiquitous. We'll probably also find that in normal use most cars don't drive much on a given day, so they're not needing to draw full power all night to charge.

The charging infrastructure for those without a driveway is still a big question (one to which the answer isn't lampposts - there's at least a 7:1 ratio of cars to lampposts where I live).

I'm not sure about that. People expect electricity to just work. People also are likely to plug their cars in at peak time after they get home from work and may want them somewhat charged before going out again in the evening.

I think demand response can help, but there is the fundamental issue that transportation uses as much as all electrical consumption currently, so there will be twice as much kWh needed.

That 7:1 ratio looks actually a lot worse in power terms. A streetlight consumes maybe 100W, 7 EVs could soak up 350kW for a period of time.

This is made much worse in N America with 110V everywhere.

You’re assuming your light pole cables were designed for 100-1000kw loads, not for 50w LED’s. But I generally agree.

Typically light poles are designed for pre-LED lighting, which consume 0.25kW-1kW, not 50W. And the design would usually accommodate a bit more than that.

Overnight light pole charging won't be delivering 100kW fast charging to a car, it will be for longer term parking, like overnight.

Averaging 12 hours at 1kW delivers enough charge to cover the average distance driven in the US. Non-average driving days will require using a fast charger or work place charging or charging at any number of other places.

Charging will be as ubiquitous as the rest of our car infrastructure. Personally, I'd rather we get rid of so much car infrastructure and devote it to transit and parks and bikes and walking, but I'm far outside the Overton window when it comes to that. However, being outside the Overton window also lets me see how we spare no expense when it comes to creating car infrastructure, and how charging infrastructure is a tiny tiny fraction of the massive amount of spend on the rest of car infrastructure.

Here's an example of the light pole chargers that are being installed in residential areas in London:

https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/b2b-local-authorities/

They deliver 5.5 kW, which is fine for overnight charging.

They are also installing a few 43kw charging points for faster top-ups.

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