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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

This space is so frustrating! All the charging companies want to be facebook for some reason.

Hopefully, someone will put them out of business with a decentralized system. They would sell standalone chargers that accept credit cards, and publish their busy/not-busy/broken status to some standard database.

Ideally, the database would be run by the government or nonprofit service. It would provide GPS coordinate based bounding box queries of each charger's status.

I think the whole US database would fit on a raspberry pi that's stuck behind a CDN (with a second raspberry pi elsewhere for disaster recovery).

Obviously, it would be run on something slightly beefier, but I can't imagine the server costs exceeding a few thousand a month.

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On the decentralization front, I think we need to normalize "Level 1 Chargers" everywhere as an alternative. A "charger" can just be a standard outlet or three in a handy to access spot. No need for credit cards because the Level 1 electricity rates are probably cheaper than parking costs or other things people will be doing on your site anyway. (It's "basic hospitality" at that point, like how phone chargers have started to proliferate in places like coffee shops.) No need for a central database or status checks, because you can just put outlets everywhere and then expect people to find them/use them as they see fit. The more "Level 1 Chargers" that exist in the wild the less people think Chargers have to be gas-station like "pumps" and maybe the more that understand electricity is just electricity and doesn't need to be centralized in the same ways as gas stations. Yes, Level 1 Charging is slow, but it is still better than no charging, and as an available, massively decentralized option it can help drive down costs of Level 2/3+/Fast Charging.

Is there any reason not to do Level 2. Every building has either 240 split phase or 208 3 phase (at least in the US). If you are going to add a new circut and wiring to support charging, why not use a full power circuit?

Level 2 makes sense outside of the US as the easy decentralized default. In the US the cost differences between installing "a regular plug" and "a dryer plug" are just substantial enough that it moves it over the hump of "easy cheap electric project" to "who's going to pay for this?" The idea of normalizing Level 1 is not to add new circuits in many cases, just add additional boring "regular" outlets to existing circuits (like all the phone chargers we see), in many cases just opening up existing outlets already on the outside of buildings for convenience charging. As soon as people hit that "who's going to pay for this?" it stops being a hospitality project and starts to balloon in people's minds towards "well, we'll need to meter this and charge people's credit cards and…" I think Level 1 as hospitality is worth normalizing and is much easier to decentralize.

What existing circuit? Most parking lots do not have any electricty wired to them, and outlets on the exterior of buildings are relatively uncomen and woukd be a tripping hazard and generally unsightly if regularly wired to a parking lot. Plus, the charger would likely draw most of the amperage the circut can provide, so using an existing circut is asking for blown fuses.

I can see level 1 in private garages, or somewhere that happens to have a conveniently located 120V plug near the parking spot. But only because the plugs are already there.

Most parking lots have existing circuits for street lamps. There's even a bonus there that street lamps installed before LEDs became common are generally "Level 2" circuits already.

Outlets on the exterior of buildings are quite common today since electric lawn tools and power tools became much more common (roughly sometime between the 70s and 90s). There are some electric codes that require a certain number of exterior outlets. Protocols for minimizing tripping hazards are a solvable problem, including yes, relocating outlets to more convenient to parking spaces. That's often still cheaper than installing Level 2 outlets in the US.

> blown fuses

If a building is still using fuses and experiences blown fuses in 2022 it has other modernization challenges. You may just be colloquially using that to also encompass circuit breakers and breaking a circuit in a circuit breaker, but in general circuit breakers have some pretty strong ratings and it's not a critical hazard if a circuit breaker breaks a circuit. It may be annoying to other users of that circuit, sure, but it's a temporary inconvenience that is solvable with "politeness". (Be polite and don't try to draw more than your circuit is capable of. Share as necessary. Etc.) To my understanding most Level 1 EVSEs are quite polite and gently check circuit state before trying to pull full amperage.

Our house has a bunch of exterior 110v outlets, but they are all on the same 20A circuit. Our level 1 charger takes many hours to charge our small EV battery, and draws 16A. There's no way for it to politely ask the circuit breaker how much amperage is left on the circuit.

If I was wiring a parking garage, I'd likely run level 2 charges, since you get twice the charge rate for the same amount of copper.

But a private capital monopoly is how this happened with gas stations in the first place!

Esso stations, still found all over the US, come from the name “Standard Oil” - “SO”.

It took the Sherman Antitrust act and government intervention for the economics of a decentralized system to make sense. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/337/293

If past is preamble, we should expect a monopoly of crappy charging experiences followed by trust busting and regulation that make a decentralized system possible.

In my uninformed opinion I see a Wild West of taking the risk to find the right charging standards and business model, with a terrible user experience. But that is how many industries have gone before too.

The nearest esso to the bay area is in Canada. You sure esso is found all over the US?

A bit of poking around suggests that esso is ExxonMobil and would therefore be sold in California under the Mobile brand.

Chargers which are not taking credit cards and you need to clown around with 29 different applications while 20 years old automatic gas station takes credit cards really grinds my gears. It is like watching negative progress.

>It is like watching negative progress.

Oh no, my friend - what you are seeing is the ongoing march of progress! Who can argue against the latest in tech needing the latest in apps?

Totally agree. I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery?

In NZ they have a government list of every fast charge station.

https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/

Probably wouldn’t be too much more effort to add chargers status to it. Or even an API that others can develop apps against (like what we do in Australia for fuel pricing).

> I don’t have to register to buy petrol, why should I to refill my car’s battery?

My guess is a harebrained idea at monetizing your charging data.

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