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Comment by jeffalyanak | Hacker News Reader

That's an easy problem to solve, though. Lower-speed L2 charging could easily be made ubiquitous anywhere that street parking exists.

Since the wattage demands are relatively low, it would not be too difficult to have L2 charging available anywhere that residential parking exists. Unlike fast-charging, you wouldn't need a lot of expensive high-power infrastructure, and if the power utilities were smart they'd do it themselves.

They could put little parking-meter size boxes by the side of the road—tapped off of existing residential power infrastructure—with credit card tap to pay.

I don't think it would take that long to reach a large density of that type of inexpensive, overnight charge systems.

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Already a thing in cold climates in parking lots, except it’s for your block heater. Usually it switches between sides of the lot every X minutes.

https://www.gm-volt.com/threads/plugging-into-outdoor-parkad...

Over here it's a 2 hour timer you set up, most cars heat up from 0600-0800 or 0700 to 0900, depending on when people start off to work.

Yup!

I'm not sure what the max power output of those types of deployments are, but I've seen block heaters in Canada that pull as much as 1500 watts, so that's not insignificant.

I think that calling this "an easy problem to solve" is really understating the issue. It may not require any new inventions or new technology, but it requires a monumental infrastructure effort, on the same scale as the original electrification processes that happened to industrialized societies 100 years ago.

EV enthusiasts' arrogance and cult-like devotion to dismissing the very real problems with EVs and lack of infrastructure will only hurt, not help their cause.

Never pricing in externalities of gas powered vehicles is only hurting their cause.

The effort is already underway.

California's building code requires all residential and commercial buildings have EV chargers starting on January 1, 2023.

The national electric vehicle infrastructure program (NEVI) has $7 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill passed last year and just approved the charging station construction plans for all 50 states. Within a few years we'll have "fast charge" stations for EVs every 50 miles along nearly every highway in the nation.

EVs already made up more than 10% of global new car sales this summer. Market demand will mean that apartment buildings and condos will start putting in outlets for EV charging on their own otherwise they'll not be able to attract tenants pretty soon.

Houses last for centuries, a few thousand new builds in Cali is not going to make the slightest difference. I think EV will remain a niche (<15%) until they can charge as quickly as filling a tank and until their (real) range is 700+ miles.

I'd say by 2030 buying an EV would be a viable option for most. The people buying them now are usually early adopting Tesla fan-bois who are happy to pay through the nose to be a crash test dummy for self driving.

Nearly all houses these days have electrical outlets. A 110 volt 20 amp circuit isn't the most ideal way to charge an EV, but it can work. Most houses have 220 outlets, and adding one to the garage is no big deal. Few people will ever install a DC fast charger in their house, and that's fine because it's not needed.

~700 mile range and ~30C charging rates are ridiculous bars to meet. EVs with ~200 mile range and ~2C charging rates work just fine right now for a lot of people.

The main issue right now with EV adoption is just the cost of batteries, and lack of a convenient way for people in apartments to charge.

Shipping and processing oil isn't trivial either. At least with electric we aren't poisoning the nearby air.

Well, not exactly. EV's still have emissions, they are just displaced. They happen at the power plant instead of the tailpipe. You would cause more pollution if the electricity was generated with coal instead of gasoline, for example.

Hence the word 'nearby'. And it's easier to replace fewer polluting sources via electricity.

It certainly isn't. But it's also already done. That doesn't make it better or worse, it just makes it a sort of benchmark for the infrastructure work required to replace that energy distribution system (based on liquid hydrocarbons) with something else.

There's a decently high current power line available from street lights. Not sure if they're still putting them in with high current since so many are converting to LED, but sodium lights drew ~1kW iirc.

There's already been projects to put in chargers on street lights, like this one https://lalights.lacity.org/connected-infrastructure/ev_stat... and this one https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/renewables/conv...

Over 80% of apartment parking spots in Finland have had a power plug since the 80s. It's not that hard.

People just keep thinking that every car needs a 350kW fast charger on their parking spot, when a normal three phase plug would do just fine.

It's better for the battery to charge slowly anyway.

How can you describe such a gargantuan infrastructure project as "easy"? You're talking about power structures and associated transmission to virtually every carpark in a city, as well as a way to monetize it.

It’s like that here in the NL. My power company has an EV sparking spot on every block in my neighborhood. I rented an EV for a weekend and was pleasantly shocked at how easy it was to find a charger. Well, as long as you’re not in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is hell in any kind of vehicle.

> It’s like that here in the NL.

We’ve gone from “ubiquitous” to one spot on every block.

That’s potentially plenty though. You only need street charging for a relatively small Percent of the population. For most drivers 1 night in 3 would keep you fully charged.

Sounds terrible. Now instead of worry about finding a spot, you worry about whether your car will be functional or not.

Nah you can always l3 charge for 15 minutes.

I say it's easy to make L2 street parking ubiquitous _anywhere_, not _everywhere_ all at once.

Obviously taken in totality it's a massive undertaking, but you could say the same thing about streetlamps, or roads, or basically any ubiquitous infrastructure.

Many places have started with 1-2 spots per neighborhood, which is prudent and scalable. As demand rises they should be able to keep pace with that demand without significant technical challenges.

It’s like this in Oslo and it didn’t take a lot of efforts.

> They could put little parking-meter size boxes by the side of the road—tapped off of existing residential power infrastructure—with credit card tap to pay.

Most of that is private property. They could probably treat it like a telephone pole, but it's not as simple as "just go install 400,000 chargers wherever their is street parking."

For private property it's easy and inexpensive to just install your own L2 charging. Even if you rent, it probably wouldn't be too hard to convince your landlord to let you pay for an L2 charger install if they already offer you private parking.

I was thinking more about street parking and parking lots, though, since that's an area with a the less immediately obvious solution.

I'm sure it differs between principalities, but in many places the city/government controls the area immediately beside the street and if they were onboard it would be feasible to install streetside chargers early everywhere.

Privately owned parking lots couldn't be forced to do so without legislation, but it's inexpensive and adding a few into the mix could add to their revenue streams.

How many tons of copper would that require?

I remember someone did an analog British Telecom. At the time, BT had a market cap of something like 30 billion pounds, and the estimated value of all their copper wiring was around 50 billion pounds. The (amusing and not thoroughly convincing) argument was that take away the copper, and BT was worth -20 billion pounds. Maybe with all that legacy copper, someone will start a copper mine in the UK.

not very many. most streets already have power lines. you just need a few extra feet to get to the car.

Maybe it's not your intention, but your comment seems to imply that it's too difficult to attempt because of how much copper would be involved. However, I suspect you wouldn't need to purchase all the copper up front.

You'd be aiming for short runs off of existing power infrastructure and you'd be scaling up over time. You also wouldn't be running these to every single place that a car _could_ park, just trying to get a critical mass of them near where people live.

Most people already have lots of copper cabling in their houses and most cars are parked overnight near to residential housing, so the additional copper used would only be some fraction of what is already in most homes.

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