Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

The EV charging infrastructure is going to have some reckoning before they can abolish ICE around these parts.

I live in a dense multifamily housing community. There are 289 units and there's plenty of parking in the lot for all the cars. There are zero bicycle racks and it's not pleasant for pedestrians to access the property; it's built for cars.

There are also zero EV charging stations, and I don't expect to see any. There are no garages for cars. There are not even electrical outlets that could be subverted nearby. That means that anyone who lives here is completely unable to charge an EV on the premises. It's out of the question. That's 289 families who must use and maintain an ICE car, or if they have bicycles they get to bring them upstairs and put them inside the apartment (bicycles not allowed on the porch or balcony.)

There are hundreds of multifamily housing units in the area and we have no recycling program and we won't be seeing any EV charging stations. Nobody who lives like I do will be able to own an EV unless they are 100% able to charge while at work or running errands. It's out of the question and out of reach.

This is the reality of the urban city environment: we are not yuppies with multi-car garages and 220V multi-phase circuits and photovoltaic panels on the roof. We are working poor with enough cash for a tank of gas and a quart of oil once in a while, and that's how it's going to stay.

The only things that will supplant ICE vehicles in my neighborhood will be the public transit, the rideshare drivers, and shared scooters and bicycles. I already do plenty of commuting on electric scooters; that's the wave of the future around here - I let someone else worry about charging them!

EV charger sales or leases to Multifamily Residential properties is going to be a huge business

Driverless taxis that never park up at multifamily residential properties are going to be a huge business

> Driverless taxis

Yeah I just read an article from Musk and Uber about it, they should be here in 2013, 2014 at the latest, can't wait for the future

It has been suggest that they are wildly optimistic with that time line, but Musk insists that those people only think that because they are stupid and dont understand all the things he knows.

All the same, if we have them by 2015, might be a few years late, but well worth it. The future looks bright.

So then when driverless arrives, Renting out those close to customer electrified unused multi family parking spaces to driverless taxi operators will be big

Charging at work is an option, assuming their workplace provides chargers. (I understand that this is a rose-tinted, tech company view…but it doesn't have to be.)

It's still the same problem - you need that charging infrastructure and someone is going to pay for it, one way or another.

Getting a charging station installed at your office is often easier than it is at your apartment building. I'm sure companies get tax credits and greenwashing PR that your landlord may not really care much about. (This is also why a lot of parking lots get solar panels.)

But those credits/subsidies are usually provided with string attached, like you are obligated to allow anyone to charge on that charger. So you will have random people going on your property, charging their cars.

Then you will need to take care and maintain the chargers, maintain bureaucracy around charging and keep them operational and safe, because if somebody gets electrocuted by your charger, you are responsible for the damages.

I don't think this is true, most companies have chargers only accessible to their employees?

So in the US, health care is tied to employment not citizenship/residency.

Next up, let's tie car charging to employment. No job? Your car stops working.

Fair point, ideally we'd build public chargers that don't suck as well :)

>No job? Your car stops working.

Losing your job/income already has a pretty big impact on keeping your car running.

It’s somewhat common for literally all of one’s income to be tied to one’s job, so yes, that includes the money one spends on gas.

When you get fired you can keep buying gas with the money you have left. Losing access to your only charger immediately is different.

If my employee would have asked to charge his car, I would point him out to nearest public charger, because somebody needs to pay that electricity and it won't be me.

You can charge people for electricity.

If I want to do it legally, then I need to become an energy provider company and keep all bureaucracy and maintenance as an energy provider company. Sorry no, there is a public charger of somebody who already did this leg work.

Some of the public charger networks have offerings to manage that for you. You can task Chargepoint to install and maintain a charging facility on your premises for instance. This way you just need to organise the parking and the access to the connection, but everything else is outsourced.

I could surely also task OMV to build gas station on my property, question is why should I do that?

In theory yes, but try a small game: to charge "quick enough" you need let's say 7kWp power, at 3kW you can't even balance cells, so you just end up with 80% or so maximum charge. But EVEN at 3kW: 10 workers means 30kW load, in a building there are normally MUCH more. They start all around the same timeframe. That's means a BIG grid peak load, after another peak load (when the Sun start shining). An AC grid without enough battery storage (the sole who can compensate quick enough) simply will go down unable to keep a stable frequency.

The theory is that in a smart grid cars, witch happen to be rolling batteries, charge or discharge following energy needs and owner needs, the practice so far is that no such smart grid exists, inverters at maximum follow as quick as they can grid frequency witch do not allow "smart" programming at all and most chargers do not even have DC ports needed to pilot the charge/discharge bi-directional usage (since on AC in-cars inverter would demand too much signaling for a still slow response).

The reality is: those who have designed the new deal have imagined to shift hyper-expensive storage costs to the people and have them mount as p.v. mount. Actually p.v. is economically interested enough so many have accept it, BEVs not much so they artificially change energy prices to "reshape the market" making BEVs interesting and as a result they create a situation that force people to switch WITHOUT the needed infra or the physical possibility.

If you can’t charge above 80% at 3kw then you have a major problem with your car. Cell balancing does not require high wattage charging.

The issue is not in the car but in hours of sunlight vs battery SOC when the Sun start giving enough energy to charge... If you charge at 3kW it's a slow charge. In winter it means you end up in the "evening" after all "Sun day" at 3kW and still the battery hardly have more than 80%.

IF you charge at let's say 7-10kW than things change...

Only companies large enough to afford that can... so what do all the smaller companies do? The rest of the world is so much much different than the West Coastal Cities, EVs are a pipe dream.

A 240V car charger is like $1000. They're not that expensive.

The folks who live near me are either students, immigrants, or they work blue-collar, minimum wage jobs. How many Wal-Mart greeters get fast-charger access in the parking lot?

This can definitely be non-zero if we put effort into it. After all, these people are buying gas, no?

At least putting in wires is easier than putting in gas pumps.

Unfortunately the real obstacle is building management having to do anything at all so it wouldn't matter even if the wires were free.

The major problem with BEV charging is not the chargers themselves. While it is a huge infrastructure project it is somewhat doable in small chunks.

The elephant in the room is generation and transmission. You need shitloads of energy for BEVs. Depending on climate and culture BEV consumption is roughly in the ballpark of a household consumption. Most grids are simply not built for that kind of increase in transmission capacity and we already struggle with enough generation.

A study was made for Switzerland. If all private cars were going electric, it will only require an additional 17% to the current electric generation. This is not a shitload... People keep forgetting that the yield of an ICE is really really bad.

> it will only require an additional 17% to the current electric generation.

That.... That is not an "only". Switzerland's total consumption is 58.46 billion kWh [1]. "Only" 17% increase is another 9 billion kWh. That's the equivalent of Estonia

[1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/switzerland/energy-consump...

Estonia is 1.3M inhabitants or about 15% of Swiss population… And that’s if all cars were going electric which is going to take many years. Not like you need to increase power generation by 15% overnight. This perfectly doable and not even a real engineering challenge.

And population of Switzerland is 8.6 million. What's your point?

It is an actual engineering challenge because it's not just Switzerland that will increase its power demands.

Total energy consumption of EU is on the order of thousands of petajoules: "Final energy consumption in the EU in 2020 amounted to 37 086 PJ" [1]

"Not an egineering challenge" is in reality "we need to increase energy supply by 6 thousand petajoules which amounts to sum total of all renewable energy currently available in the EU" (renewables account for 17% of EU's energy production). Plus add all the infrastructure needed to distribute it to charging stations.

Not a challenge at all.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

My point is that 15% is still 15% even it represents the population of Estonia or of a suburb of NY.

By the way you are mixing everything. I talk about private transport and you give me the figure for total energy consumption... Total energy consumption is not going to increase!!! The petrol burnt in an engine is already counted. Because of all the loss due to the pathetic yield of IEC engines, your are not going to increase the total energy consumption but decrease it when you will electrify transport.

For Switzerland electrification of all private transport represent the addition of 2 nuclear reactors, so no nothing to write home about regarding sizing of the grid.

> 5% even it represents the population of Estonia or of a suburb of NY.

So? Why can't you make the next logical step? If it's a 17% increase for Switzerland, then it will be at in the same ballpark much for all other countries, won't it? Then an increase for Germany will be probably as much as two Switzerlands etc.

> By the way you are mixing everything. I talk about private transport and you give me the figure for total energy consumption.

I'm not. I'm just pointing the flaws in the insistence that "it's not even an engineering challenge"

> For Switzerland electrification of all private transport represent the addition of 2 nuclear reactors

Ah yes. It's just such an easy not an egineering challenge to do.

Switzerland built and put online 3 reactors in 6 years between 1965 and 1971, so yes it's a proven fact that's it's technically easy. Now from a political point of view that's another issue.

You're confusing speed with easy.

> renewables account for 17% of EU's energy production

That's yearly production. Solar has very poor seasonality, wind is not that bad is still nowhere close to nuclear/gas, therefore capacity-wise these numbers are the floor, not the ceiling.

To add on top of that Europe is migrating from nuclear in generation altogether :)

Hehe, seasonality and load-following... Some other discussions on this topic have people saying things like "just build more solar and wind, build twice as much or however you need to sustain the energy". So, a 17% increase becomes a at least a 34% increase in required new energy...

All these discussions (not just on HN, but in political contexts etc.) lack so much of long term vision and planning.

> So, a 17% increase becomes a at least a 34% increase in required new energy...

With solar in particular, due to high seasonality we effectively have 3 solutions and none of them make much sense:

1. Install huge-ass batteries to hold "summer" energy for "winter". LCOE goes down the drain.

2. Install "winter" season capacity. In the summer you have overproduction, that in the long term noone wants to buy, because everyone is on solar. LCOE goes down the drain.

3. Install gas plant along solar for "winter" backup. Unit cost skyrockets due to low utilization, LCOE goes down the drain. You save some GHG per unit when "summer" generation is covered by PVs.

This is not accounting that with non-dispatchable solar cost of balancing for the grid also goes up. It's not really long term planning per se. Renewables are expensive, period. There is almost zero actual political discussion on cheap energy vs renewable energy. If anything, this discussion is consciously dishonest: marginal cost of energy for producers is most often given as the true cost of renewables.

And then we have efficiency. Wind energy is especially sensitive to location. As the best spots are gobbled up first (duh) the marginal efficiency of wind generation declines, which is to be expected. However, various analysts like Lazard give LCOE numbers based on existing averages, which cannot - by definition - be sustained.

First, you are only talking about generation component. 17% may not seem like much until you consider that 1. it is roughly half of existing nuclear generation, which is already decided to be phased out 2. some nuclear reactors provide heating 3. that "only" 17% is equal to total consumption of one Baltic state.

That is for Switzerland alone, which is measly small compared to EEA population. For the sake of argument round that 17% to be 10 TWh. Switzerland owns roughly 6 mio private vehicles. EEA owns roughly 250 mio. According to referenced study EEA needs "only" roughly 400 TWh additional generation, or something like 60 nuclear reactors.

You just proved my point with data - it is shitloads of additional energy.

Second, that additional energy will have to be moved somehow. You not only need ample generation, but also cross-region links, transmission grids and distribution lines to actual homes/chargers.

Even if Switzerland just buys LPG and transmits electricity using that LPG, it is much more efficient to generate energy in big plants than in car motors. I do not see electricity generation a problem. Long routes are still problem though in Europe where I am used to going with 170km/h, but 150km/h is normal on the highway in Eastern Europe.

> it is much more efficient to generate energy in big plants than in car motors. I do not see electricity generation a problem.

Those plants need to be built. Gas pipelines need to be routed to those plants. Energy distribution has to be built etc.

This is a problem only in corrupt countries. Switzerland is one of the few countries where government projects finish on time in the planned amount of money.

Ah yes. In non-corrupt countries those plants and pipelines and distribution grids appear out of thin air.

It's just amazing how "we need to build huge ass plants and all the infrastructure" is just dismissed as insignificant (also in a similar discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32992808).

Yes it's an issue when people have decided that energy generation should be outsources somewhere else... If you close your nuclear reactor you can only blame yourself if your power generation infrastructure is undersized.

Can we please stop to compare to a Baltic state when their size is smaller than that of a western Europe large city. It doesn't bring anything to the comparison. (I'm pretty sure it's an order of magnitude of what San Marino need)

Just to put in perspective your 60 nuclear reactors, currently China is building 36 new reactor, 50 more are in final project phase and in total they will add 160 new reactors in the next 20 years. This coupled with the massive installation of renewable, China is the only country that is going to handle the CO2 problem in the foreseeable future.

> Can we please stop to compare to a Baltic state when their size is smaller than that of a western Europe large city. It doesn't bring anything to the comparison. (I'm pretty sure it's an order of magnitude of what San Marino need)

Ah yes. Some countries are more equal than others.

Estonia is 15% of Swiss population if you want to compare populations. So, to indulge your insistence to only talk about Switzerland and completely ignoring the bigger picture, Estonia's population is more than Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lausanne, Bern, and Winterthur combined. Ah yes, and consumes more than San Marino of course.

But that's not the point

The point is: It's not just Switzerland that has to increase power generation by ~17%, and build all the infrastructure to distribute that electricity, and make sure all those new plants are properly connected to the grid.

On top of that Europe's grid is tightly interconnected. Here's a good twitter thread on what it means to supply/demand side of the equation: https://twitter.com/BurggrabenH/status/1567929340737863680

Pretending that "we need 17% more electricity is nothing, and is easily solvable" is uneducated at best.

China is building those very fast because you wouldn't want to be a worker in one of those construction projects. Even though I agree on principle that the dismantling of nuclear energy in EU is a disgrace.

Yup. It’s increasingly clear that EVs are fools good.

Unfortunately it may be the only tool acceptable to Americans, who are simply not willing to pay for public transport and give up an inch of roads for dedicated electric bikes and scooter lanes.

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