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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Mining isn’t limited by what’s in the ground it’s limited by demand. For example in 2010 28,000 tons of lithium was mined in 2020 that was up to 82,000 tons a 3x increase in 10 years despite Covid.

In terms of charging times, many people simply charge at home. On average EV users spend less time at fast charging stations than ICE drivers do at gas stations especially if you include time driving to a gas station. If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips.

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> If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips.

The GP does have a point there. A lot of vacation travel in Europe happens by car - the traffic jams at the summer holidays on the route from Munich down to Slovenia and Croatia or from Munich to Italy are legendary, and this one drive and how it works out is what determines the purchase decisions for many Germans.

I'd love if the railways could be used - but the network especially in the Balkans is shoddy, international booking is a nightmare, it is about 4-8x (!!!) as expensive as a car ride for a family of four... so yeah.

Summer holidays is a long time period, which means EV charging stations have plenty incentive to build out enough charging stations to meet demand. They can actually be quite profitable with surprisingly minimal demand.

It's about eight weekends with excessive demand, that's it. No way you can make the build-out for the hundreds of thousands of cars of peak demand worth it.

Even 8 weekends is probably enough.

8 weekends/year * 2 days * 8h/day * 200kW fast charging * 20c/KW premium (over electricity rates) = 5,120$ per year. Fast chargers cost ~50k to install so payback is only 10 years.

Granted this assumes higher than normal rates for those weekends, but not excessively so.

If your math is correct, why haven't some clever forward thinking investors already made the investment to cash in on such lucrative deal?

My guess is, IRL it's not as lucrative in practice as your math makes it out to be.

Being vastly ahead of EV adoption is simply wasting capital.

However, EV fast charging locations along major highways tend to have a lot of unused capacity.

Lots of people in the UK can't charge at home. Many people live in terraced houses and can't always park on their own street never mind outside their house.

In the evening this road will be full, bumper to bumper. There are many streets like it. https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8

There are things that can be done about it, e.g. lamp post charging but it's not simple.

UK is funding on street parking: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-...

This is one of those transition points where charging infrastructure needs to be appropriate for the number of EV’s. Building out massive infrastructure early is simply a waste of money.

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