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Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

This assumes you only charge at home because you can, and only work first shift. A lot of people may wind up charging at work because that's the only place that could really make charging points accessible with no worries. At least 5% of people work third or swingshifts too, so thats a load that has to be compensated for.

You also need to worry about fleet vehicles charging, and other uses. So the off-peak capacity isn't always possible.

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The average commute in the U.S. is 32 miles a day, pre pandemic. Which means that the load is distributed not only in 24 hours, but every 72 hours for even lower capacity batteries like the leaf.

This is where the stats people taking over is bad for society.

Yea that's their commute - what about soccer practice, the gym, the store, visiting grandma, etc. It's unrealistic to say "welp 32 a day we're good."

> This assumes you only charge at home because you can, and only work first shift.

No it doesn’t?

Most charging can be done at night when power is both cheap and plentiful. The fact that only 5% of people work third shift is testament to this!

No one is pretending that ALL charging is at off-peak hours. But the fact is that not only can most charging be off-peak much of it will be. This is excellent news you should be happy about!

Unless work or whatever has battery storage, which they might well if they already installed a line of charging points.

Not sure work would go that far, to be honest. I figure just the increased load and charging ports would be all you could expect them to do.

Depends how many wires they have but it's quite possible that "add a battery pack that charges when electricity is cheap" is cheaper than "pay for everyone to charge at peak rates".

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