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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

It's not that hard to build curbside chargers. You don't need high current chargers when most parking spots have a charger. A kilowatt or two will be plenty. Cars spend 23h a day parked. EVs use 15-25kWh/100km. Most people drive less than 50km a day. Sprinkle some fast charging along highways for longer road trips and charging is no longer an issue.

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As someone that works on software that includes functions to try to figure out where you can place electric car chargers - it absolutely is very hard. The grid just isn't ready for it.

It can be done, but will require massive investment in infrastructure.

There are also problems such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve and other things that can be mitigated with ADR to an extent, but it's absolutely not easy

It is a lot easier than the alternatives: unmitigated climate change or building the infrastructure for e-fuels.

Of course, unmitigated climate change will be catastrophic. No argument there.

I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles.

If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and forget about it in the atmosphere. Basically, extracting easy to use energy that was captured over a long period.

But we now have the tech to extend that to a closed loop system - capture enough energy from solar to recycle the burned fuel back into burnable fuel.

This will also mitigate all the co2 created when producing electric cars btw.

Electric vehicles solve several problems at once though. They don't emit any of the other unpleasant gases, particularly NO2. And they massively reduce other particulates (no clutch, regenerative brakes).

Plus, having that much battery capacity plugged into the grid should be exploitable to help manage the vagaries of solar and wind power.

This is hilariously impractical. Have you seen curbside chargers? There's some up the road from me and by no means does it look simple to install them, not to mention that you'd have to do it along _every_ single residential street _everywhere_ and we don't have the electrical capacity to do it anyway!

If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd think that'd be in place by now given the time frames?

I think it's hand-wavey to say 'oh you can just charge at low current'. And if you've ever seen a petrol station near a motorway here you'll realise the idea of parking your car for x * 10 mins to charge would simply not work, there'd be multiple mile tailbacks.

Overall the govt treats this issue like it's a smaller problem than it really is.

You don't see streets filled with chargers because almost nobody has an EV yet. Just like you didn't see many gas stations providing unleaded fuel two years before catalytic converters became mandatory.

It's funny because I actually remember the unleaded/leaded transition and petrol stations were stocking it very early on. The equivalent simile here would be if unleaded was going to be made mandatory in a year and basically 3 petrol stations in the UK stocked it.

The govt are going to make these cars mandatory soon. London is the ideal place to do this due to infra + rich people with EVs (more than you might think, far from 'almost nobody'), yet I don't see any street that has charges along it.

My point is that it's not easy. Having to upgrade the grid and dig up tons of roads is simply not easy no matter how much people want it to be.

That wasn't the case in Germany. Unleaded fuel actually was available only in a handful of gas stations until shortly before the transition.

There are several thousand in london already, embedded in lampposts so you might have missed them.

Here's one within 100 meters of my very run of the mill flat https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4689844,-0.1013741,3a,30.1y,...

You might be ignoring some big issues, such as grid availability on highways, and the capacity of the grid in those areas.

Not having a private drive is mostly an issue in London, where curbside chargers are already being built all over the city.

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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