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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

In California at least, the reality is it's still a luxury for the rich, i.e. landowners, property owners.

I currently rent an apartment and a car and neither are clean energy, as much as I'd like them to be. No amount of protest will get my landlord to install solar panels on the roof, considering they won't even fix a smoke detector for 3 weeks; asking property management for an EV charging solution results in no response; EVs also haven't come out with a subscription or cost-effective long term rental model yet.

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> asking property management for an EV charging solution results in no response

California has a law requiring your landlord to allow you to install an EV charging station if you want it.

It's out of your pocket, and doesn't really seem attractive to me as a renter to "invest" in a space I'm only renting. But if you're a long term renter and really want to make the EV switch, you are allowed to do so.

https://www.kts-law.com/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-f...

Whose property is the charging station?

I always assumed if I improved my apartment my landlord has an incentive (in theory) to evict me and rent it to someone else for more.

You own it. One of the stipulations of being granted permission to install it, is that you (the tenant) are responsible for removal.

So that incentive does not exist.

What are the typical costs for installing something like that, including the tax breaks I would get? (I can't assume there's multi-kilowatt power lines near the parking lot.)

In Texas I had a 100 amp sub panel with two 50 amp 14-50 receptacles on a 60’ run for about $1000 in a suburban home. A good outdoor rated charging box would run another $500-1000 or so depending on features. If I were a landlord I would request tenants have a service run specifically for the charger so it could be billed independently.

I imagine gross prices are slightly higher in California due to permitting.

In Minnesota, I paid an electrician less than $400 to install a 40amp breaker and run 6awg wire from my basement to the garage (maybe 20ft?) into a new outlet. I purchased my own level 2 charger and mounted it myself (another $600 at the time).

30% of electricity in New York State comes from hydro/renewable, and another 30% from nuclear.

25% of all energy consumption is from nuclear/hydro/renewable, counting all forms of fossil fuel.

That said, natural gas is far and away the largest fossil fuel source of energy. There's no truth to the saying that electric cars are coal powered, around here.

Do you think that solar panels on the roof are as efficient as centralizing them?

In California, PG&E is ridiculously expensive and generally hostile toward homeowners. Heck, they even blow up city blocks and burn down cities on a regular basis.

Anything that bypasses them is probably more efficient than working with them.

You can buy electricity from a particular supplier; electricity in my apartment in Brooklyn is more than half from nuclear, about 20% hydro/solar.

Rooftop solar panels are less totally efficient, but more resilient than the centralized case. As everybody knows, efficiency × resilience ≤ 1, alas. For resilience and reliability, you have to have some slack.

Putting solar panels on the roof of an apartment building won't do much for each individual living in it. You need grid-scale solar, and that is now super cheap. In California, more than half of power generation comes from hydro, nuclear, and renewable sources and has for several years now.

In the Bay Area, with PG&E at least, you can trivially choose your mix, and designate that you want only renewables. Perhaps this is pure accounting trickery, and it's essentially just making the remaining mix dirtier, but it's at least incredibly easy.

Another alternative for apartment dwellers, though I don't know if there are many options in CA, is Community Solar, where you buy a share of a utility-sized installation.

> In the Bay Area, with PG&E at least, you can trivially choose your mix, and designate that you want only renewables.

For renters, that'll largely depend on if you get an individual PG&E bill. Large apartment buildings aren't always individually metered. Instead, you pay a calculated portion of the building's single energy bill alongside your rent. (Referred to as RUBS--ratio utility billing system--in the multifamily housing space.)

There are a few things that might have a positive effect on this:

- EV access laws for renters are slowly gaining traction.

- EV batteries are getting large enough that you can get by with fast charging once or so a week off-property. I know tesla drivers that do not charge at home.

- craigslist has a checkbox for "EV charging" when searching for apartments.

> EV access laws for renters

What are some of these laws? Does that mean I get to charge at more private chargers?

One of the big obstacles to going EV (besides the lack of cost-effective EV rental) is that all the chargers around me are private chargers whereas the gas stations are public.

One thing to note is that for many people, a standard 120 volt 15 amp outlet will be enough for day-to-day usage. In a Tesla, that gets you ~5 miles/hour of charging speed, so if you leave it alone for ~14 hours, there's 70 miles of range added.

So maybe an extension cord and a normal outlet gets you what you want.

I've heard anecdotally 1-3 mph from Tesla owners. I'm not sure if they were doing something wrong though.

i.e. not enough for an average roundtrip bay area commute.

The mph number when charging is a made-up number. I think it is a fixed number for the type of vehicle, and will not reflect anything variable like temperature or driving style/history.

The fixed number seems to depend on the car. It would be higher for a model 3 and lower for a model X.

And I'd guess that a large performance model X on wide tires in a cold climate might not get the same miles from a kilowatt as a standard model 3 with aero rims in a temperate climate.

I imagine if their engineers were any good the mph number would collect data on the user's past trips and make increasingly better estimates in the future about the translation between kWh and miles for the specific user.

Obviously a user in Kansas would get more miles per kWh than a user in the Swiss Alps but the vehicle has data on where all the user has driven and how many kWh were used at every instant since it was purchased.

I think that value for the charging speed is really important enough scale.

Meanwhile, there are a few ways to view battery charge:

- miles of range remaining (the default)

- ideal miles of range remaining

- percentage.

Turns out, percentage is a much more rational way to view battery charge. Charge to 70% or 80% is absolute and graspable.

Charging to range is variable and not really that helpful. Maybe if you are a really consistent and conservative driver it would work for you, but I've found it to be unpredictably inaccurate and leads to confusion.

> I think that value for the charging speed is really important enough scale.

sorry, NOT important enough to scale

I’d say this is too strong a take. The mph number is certainly not completely accurate, but it’s also not made up out of whole cloth. The number I was quoting was for a Model Y, a Model 3 will have better, X will have worse. Given that 3’s and Y’s massively outsell S and X, it’s a reasonably conservative choice.

The mph number is overstated if you use AC/heat, and/or travel >75 mph. But it’s not more than 30% off in my experience. It should do pretty well in the Bay Area where the weather tends to be mild.

Maybe I could say "rough estimate".

When charging it seems to be a fixed multiplier vs the instantaneous kw charging rate.

5 mph is what I’ve seen in practice on a Model Y. That figure is generally an overstatement of real range, but not by too much. Definitely depends on the commute length.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Well, there you go, you said it yourself. If they don't bother fixing things like smoke detectors why would one expect them to get solar panels

My first landlord wouldn't fix the back door to the building so it would shut, or the light above it.

But should everyone have solar panels on the roof?

I've been getting solicitations that say I can save money by switching my power supplier to someone with a solar farm somewhere.

Rent controled unit? Non-RC buildings will typically be more receptive to improvements.

I don't think rent control prevents an owner from installing a pay charging station or service.

It doesn’t prevent it, but it actively discourages investment.

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