I tried to add EV chargers to my rental property
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Well, yeah. I suppose it would be. I'm a bit surprised this is a surprise to the landlord. Also, many of the costs here are looming anyways. It's a matter of when, not if, the electrical needs updating to meet code.
It's funny though, all of this is just for tax revenue. They don't care about electrical wiring, plumbing, etc... I am told that when a house is first built they will inspect the electrical but I do not believe them. I've had to fix dozens of incorrectly wired sockets and really janky wiring in the circuit breaker panel and missing grounding connections.
municipalities lack consensus for any other outcome to occur, they are all land fiefdoms.
My mother in law told me yesterday that my sister in law's mother in law's house burned down while they slept (they're safe) this week due to brand new electrics in a brand new house extension, carried out by a licensed (is that the correct word for an electrician?) professional.
This is in England
I meant to say my wife's sister's partner's mother.
Our circuits are "properly fused" though with RCDs/circuit breakers, but they're high current because we can have so many large current drawing devices on a single circuit (such as in the kitchen) which is always given its own circuit.
The final ring circuit is an idiosyncracy of British wiring practice, where the cable goes out in a loop from the distribution board to sockets etc and then connects back to the board again. It allows smaller gauge wires to be run for a given current rating, and was introduced after WWII to reduce copper use during reconstruction. This does have some unusual failure modes, but the code is absolutely fine for this system as long as it's followed (including the testing regime after new installations, which will catch, for example, a ring circuit with the neutral conductor disconnected only on one side of the ring). Obviously bad work can happen anywhere.
Mandating ripping out immediately everything dangerous or carcinogenic, would be even bigger issue. And these things don't cause actually so many issues to be very life threatening. They have been around for decades after all.
Lots of paths to success here.
The egregious safety problems (eg knob and tube, fuses, Federal Pacific breakers) are taken care of by insurance companies. Or state laws that address the specific problem (eg septic, smoke detectors, etc). One can certainly have an opinion that something specific should be added to the regulations that apply when selling, but the out of touch comments here are far from informed.
Also some of the recent changes in the NEC are actually not beneficial to many people - eg the plastic gates in TR receptacles that tend to bind up and bend plug prongs, and shoddy overaggressive AFCIs running proprietary software. That you're generally left alone in the privacy of your own home without an inspector coming around every year and making you remodel is a feature, not a bug.
My old neighborhood has a bunch of 80 year olds with houses worth a million easy without any mortgages. You would think the banks would give them loans to fix things up. Nope, not a chance. The banks are waiting for them to die and make money off the next mortgage.
Sure you can - and you damn well should, especially for outright safety issues. What's the point of a building code if it ain't gonna be enforced?
> You know what people will do? Pass the buck to the buyer (Sold As Is).
Then give the buyer a grace period to bring the building up to code.
Reality simply doesn’t work this way. Just like we allow people to drive old ass cars that aren’t safe for the passengers but will pass emission inspections.
For an existing structure, the result of all these improvements, even considering rising energy costs, would never pay back over the expected life of the house. Code tries to strike a balance here by enforcing that when it's reasonable to do so (e.g. you tore down to the studs for a remodel anyway), you need to bring the areas modified up to modern-ish standards.
But old homes are expensive to rewire. And often, the safety benefits are very small. Current code requires a lot more outlets than older code, in part because many people overuse extension cords and tiny/cheap power taps when there aren't sufficient outlets, which is a safety issue, but is it worth spending thousands of dollars to pull new wire through existing walls, and then repairing the walls afterwards?
Some issues, are worth retrofitting for, and hopefully a pre-sales inspection by the buyer or insurance inspection will catch those. It would be reasonable to have a transfer inspection for those too.
You also have to remember that it takes a lot of power to be able to change an EV in timely manner. It is easily the number one consumer of energy. Older neighborhoods utilities where never designed to do that.
That is definitely not true. An 80 year old house might not even have grounded outlets, let alone GFCI or AFCI protected outlets.
> You also have to remember that it takes a lot of power to be able to change an EV in timely manner
Nobody worries about how many electric ovens, clothes dryers, or air conditioners are in an older neighborhood. 240V at 30A is a trivial load addition, and even if it were to become a concern, there are existing mechanisms to shed load during peak usage. Even a crude cut-off switch, like many air conditioners have, would be sufficient.
240v at 30A is most definitely not a trivial load. Most homes have 100 amp service. That would be 30% of your homes total power capacity just for changing EV. You wouldn't be able to run AC and the dryer and charge an EV at the same time at that rate. But more importantly there is only so much power at the pole.
> That would be 30% of your homes total power capacity just for changing EV
That's the thing - most people have a 8 to 12 hour window to fully charge their car(s) overnight and when you and your neighbors are using practically no energy. Worst case is there is no active management and there is just a new peak at midnight. Best case is that the electric company incentivizes you to not only charge at non-peak times, but also pays you to allow them to manage the charging times.
This technology is not science fiction - it already exists. I got a $250 rebate from my electric company to install a connected level 2 charger. It is not currently managed, but if there is some dystopian future where all of my neighbors aren't burning hydrocarbons, all have EVs, and somehow the infrastructure hasn't kept up, as long as my car is fully charged in the morning, I don't care if it happened from midnight to 2 AM or 4 AM to 6 AM.
But also...
> Most homes have 100 amp service
Most homes built decades ago, maybe. And to be clear, we're talking about US 120V system. I would be very surprised if any house built since...lets be generous...the 1980s doesn't have a 200A supply or couldn't easily be updated.
Putting in a 200 amp panel ran me about $1,000. Power company checked off on it and upgraded my meter in the process. I also added a 240v 30amp socket in the garage for things like an EV, and put a whole house surge protector on in the process.
My house has rock solid power at every socket and plenty of capacity for the future as well, definitely worth the investment.
As it stands today, an EV charger (or an outlet designated for EV charging) is considered to be 'in use' 100% of the time from a loading perspective (i.e., when counting how big of a main breaker you need to handle). Which, honestly, makes sense. You can't predict when other loads are being used reliably, and you can use an EV charger for many hours. For, say, during the middle of the night.. there's a high heating load so that loading will happen simultaneously.
There are more intelligent ways to handle this (and, the products exist today!), however they're quite expensive. Maybe less expensive than a full new overhaul of your house's electrical... but eventually electrical needs to be updated to code.
Also, regarding 100A vs 200A main panels: it heavily depends on the size of the house. I know in my neighborhood, which the oldest house was built in 2008, they only gave 100A panels to houses that were ~1700sqft or smaller. For larger houses, those got 200A panels.
As in no, it does not heavily depend on size in general in the way you describe. It may do so where you are but that's about it. My house is smaller than 1700sqft, was built quite some years before 2008 and we have a 200A panel and I don't know what I would do with 100A service. It would be impossible actually. But that might be because we use electric baseboard heating and thus lots of heating circuits with quite a bunch of amps in use by that.
In general, electric heat is a bit of a menace in terms of electrical consumption... especially given electric prices lately.
I live way too far out to have natural gas service and because I have such a small house it has baseboard heating. Most larger houses here have electric furnaces instead. But having 200A service meant I was easily able to add a mini split heat pump taking care of heating most of the time but we have no space to put a furnace instead. We do have propane to heat when power is out (or just if I want the nicety of a roaring fire heating up the room on -40 evenings). The oven is electric too. I was looking at getting a tankless water heater but would need to upgrade the electric service for that apparently because my 200A are not enough in case "everything else is on at the same time" (I personally wouldn't mind the heaters shutting off for 3 minutes while I take a shower but I guess that's against code).
Also electricity prices do not generalize well. Way too much variance across an entire continent or two. What you say is expensive for you actually isn't that expensive here. Now ask someone in Europe this winter what they think about your electricity prices in comparison.
True, but not what you said. You said the changes are not safety related, but these are safety related.
Having had a 100 amp service, it was really not a big deal. Sure I'd normally charge at 11pm, when the AC wasn't running. But the home is using WAY less electricity than when I bought in 1994 when TVs consumed a ton of power, single paned windows insulated poorly, a fair number of 300 watt halogen bulbs, and tons of the 100 watt incandescents. Between LED lighting, a more efficient refrigerator, and a MUCH lower power flat panel TV our power use per day is less than it was in 1994, even with a EV.
100 amps @ 240v is a ton of power, and if you need to peak shave there's quite a bit of room between 240v@30 amps and 240v@10 amps which is plenty for most normal driving patterns.
Also a device is available that shares the EV circuit with a dryer circuit; set your car to start charging very late at night when laundry is not running. Zero additional max load for the house.
It's always painful trying to have discussions related to any kind of physical infrastructure on HN because it's absolutely full of people that assume that physical design and maintenance is somehow the trivial, easy part.
The exterior service disconnect rule added in 2020 is safety related, it’s so firefighters can kill electrical power to a home from the outside to make it safe to enter. It has nothing to do with the utility.
33 miles a day of electricity is not that much, something like 7.6 KwH per day. For perspective AC units use from 0.5 to 5 KwH per hour.
Is it a difference, yes. However most EVs charge off peak, and would go even more off peak with a financial incentive. I set mine to start charging at 11pm when it's the cheapest rate, which nicely offsets AC use which is heaviest in the afternoon.
I see this all the time. “Investors” buy real estate by assuming repairs and maintenance to be minimal and then pocketing every dime of excess cash created by the property. Then, over time when the windows need to be replaced or the roof or the electrical system upgraded or the HVAC improved, they don’t have any budget for it because they’ve become used to living off all of the income (despite the fact that over their 10-20 years of ownership they’ve seen rents increase dramatically). So what do they do? They list it for sale at high current market rents as if all of this deferred maintenance / Capex has been completed. This puts buyers in a position of paying a massive purchase price and having massive costs to renovate / upgrade.
I hate landlords like this. Fortunately you can spot them a mile away. If the paint is peeling, then the electrical isn’t to code.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the 2023 (maybe 2026) NEC will require at least 30A 240V service to garages with electrical service.
It still works right? Great, let's add another excuse to increase the rent and we're golden!
I haven't been keeping up on all the new NEC requirements for shoving xxCI's in various places, but I can see no rationale for this one. There is no such thing as 240 volts to ground in a home - it's all 120V (that's RMS, it's 170V peak), with a "240" outlet being both line phases (say +120 and -120 at a given point in time, giving a differential of 240).
Touching a residential "240 volt" line for a dryer or stove will give you the same exact shock as touching a common 120 volt line. The risk of 240 volt circuits is that they are generally of higher ampacity, and will thus have a much higher arc current. A GFCI does absolutely nothing to mitigate this!
Honestly they would have been better mandating the garage 120v receptacles be GFCI even though they're above grade, because people tend to do things like plug extension cords into them for use outside. 240 volt receptacles generally have a dedicated purpose, like a car charger.
For my EVSE I just had it hardwired to avoid it (which also allowed me to do higher amperage too).
We did TWO Teslas in an apartment for two years sharing (alternating cars) a single plug of a single 110 outlet. It was fine. With this arrangement, yes, on days where you do big trips, there’s a supercharger visit, But normally, an outlet is totally sufficient.
An installed charger does add some very, very minor convenience (no adapter, big deal… not worth the cost). And if it needs to be shared and bills split, that’s different. But for basic charging no special installation is needed as long as you can reach.
I made this second copy of my comment because while profanity (in the other comment) makes some people take notice, it gives others the excuse they need to tune out the message, which is the same for both comments:
You don't need to install a charger.
300+ miles of range is plenty to get to a nearby city and back for most people, with or without supercharging.
The “very, very minor inconvenience” I referred to is the non-issue of having to find something to coil the cord onto when not in use, solved by most installed chargers which give you an hanging hook. BFD.
And most people living near a city aren’t 150 miles away… more like 5-10 miles away. Even 60 miles away, there’s no need to charge to 300. Except for special cases, and on those rare times you supercharge for maybe 10-15 minutes to augment it, while watching Netflix or posting on Hacker News on the screen. Let me know if you have any more questions, always happy to clear up these misconceptions!
And having an L2 charger beyond a simple 220 wall outlet is no faster than the 220 wall outlet. Sure you can upgrade and get a fast L2 charger but you can more cheaply upgrade your 110 wall outlet to 220 and it will be just as fast as any installed L2 charging unit. In other words the installation of a charger is superfluous when it comes to speed of charging, which is what you have been talking about.
You might have heard of people getting faster charge times with an L2 charger versus their friend’s 220 volt outlet. But the opposite happens too: 220 outlets vary depending on amps, and so do L2 chargers. It’s possible to have an L2 charger that is slower than a 220 outlet, depending on the amps of the L2 charger and the amps of the 220 outlet.
Imagine your gas car increased it's range by 50 miles every time you came home for the night. How often would you fill up your gas tank?
For me it was much rarer than I expected. Sure longer road trips over 300 miles I'd often spend 15 minutes getting 140 miles of extra range. How far away are these hikes or cities?
I spent something like 10x less time charging on the road than I used to for gas and oil, so I consider that a huge win. Even driving from Sacramento Area to Denver area wasn't a big deal. Drive for 4-5 hours, stop and grab a snack and walk the dog and back into the car. Sure I had to wait an extra 10 minutes before driving for another 4-5 hours. I'd much rather do that than have to hit a gas station weekly ish.
Now, obviously some panels don’t have the space, or the service to the house isn’t enough amps but if that’s a case why aren’t you upgrading a 50 year-old electrical panel anyway? It sounds like OP had a bunch of deferred electrical maintenance to begin with but wants to blame it on EVs.
And an earth rod, right?
Anyone can stick a breaker in, run some cable, but it takes the rocket scientists to consider neutral fault conditions, causing potential between your home, charger, car and literal earth.
It might not apply to you. Your charger might have built in protection (many don't) or your supply might be grounded to the literal earth… but this is why we have building regs and people to follow them. Even if you do the work, it's worth a chat with a qualified electrician, and to have them inspect your work. It could save your life.
To correctly add more grounding rods in multiple locations would require a common ground bus where all grounding rods are inter-connected to an oversized grounding bus cable or bus bar that is independent of the circuit panel wiring. This is rare to find in a home however. This is more common in industrial buildings that have high power and high voltage equipment. In this setup every grounding rod has to be independently tested with a megger prior to being connected to the bus.
Can you cite the relevant portion of the code? Or, for that matter, can you explain why exactly a ground loop is a fire hazard? If this was a hazard, then buildings would burn down when a grounded metallic conduit was buried underground (perfectly legal and very common, although dubiously wise if the conduit is galvanized steel), when anything conductive and connected to building ground (an outdoor appliance, a person touching a switch, etc) touched the ground, or in any building with an associated ordinary in ground swimming pool (which is extensively bonded and generally grounded at the pool equipment pad).
Now you do need to avoid connecting neutral to ground in more than one place if you are a modern NEC-following project or a utility in California, for quite good reasons, but those reasons aren’t a “ground loop” or really a fire hazard — it’s because intentionally running current through a circuit that parallels a path through ground will make a fraction of that current flow through the ground, with potentially unfortunate consequences.
Electrode Spacing. Where more than one of the electrodes of the type specified in 250.52(A)(5) or (A)(7) are used, each electrode of one grounding system (including that used for strike termination devices) shall not be less than 1.83 m (6 ft) from any other electrode of another grounding system. Two or more grounding electrodes that are bonded together shall be considered a single grounding electrode system.
http://thenecwiki.com/2021/02/article-250/
That said, it would be very strange to add another grounding rod just because you added another breaker or outlet—I can't think of any circumstance where that would be required, unless the existing service entrance was not properly grounded, in which case you have bigger problems.
Understanding your earthing arrangement is another thing you shouldn't assume. It's not a failure to engage professionals about safety equipment.
Some chargers have built in neutral fault detection.
Regardless of what people will continue to claim, a 110V 15A outlet is really not enough. It's possible if you live your life on a strict schedule, drive very little, are very diligent about keeping your car plugged in, and don't mind having to go to a public charger routinely to sit for half an hour because you couldn't be bothered to hire an electrician one time to make the situation better for you in any possible way.
I charge at work, and L1 charging was fine for me when I was WFH during covid. I don't bother using outside chargers because L2 is too slow for short trips and fast charging is expensive.
This doesn't seem to be particularly strict or diligent and it's based around average driving mileage. Our house came with an L2 charger box, but we drive much less than average in the US and it feels wasted on us. I run the charger once every 2-3 weeks or so and I'm fine.
[1]: https://smartfinancial.com/average-miles-driven-per-year
* Take a trip ~150mi round trip to a nearby town.
* Return home with car at relatively low state of charge (since, I started with ~80% SOC).
* Immediately next morning, I need to take a trip ~200mi
Couldn't do it if I was charging using 120V. I could do it even with relatively wimpy 240V (20A), though.
Sure if you have the need for bursty travel (emergency helping a relative in another part of the state maybe, picking up friends from a regional airport, etc) a 240V/20A charger would work much better. But as long as you can find a fast charger along your route this shouldn't be a huge factor. The argument is that most average travel needs can be taken care of by L1 chargers and L2s and L3s can help usecases further out of the average. But I admit, my assumption of normality on driving mileage is just an assumption and it may just be more pareto distributed.
You. Do. Fucking. Not. Need. An EV charger, to charge your EV. A 110 or 220 outlet with a cord and an adapter will work just fine. Apologies for the US centric terminology but I expect the situation is roughly the same (though numbers vary) elsewhere.
We did TWO Teslas in an apartment for two years sharing (alternating cars) a single plug of a single 110 outlet. It was fine. Yes, on days where you do big trips, there’s a supercharger visit, But normally, an outlet is totally sufficient.
An installed charger does add some very, very minor convenience (no adapter, big deal… not worth the cost). And if it needs to be shared and bills split, that’s different. But for basic charging no special installation is needed as long as you can reach.
Their daily commute is less than 100km so they have no problems charging the batts with their granny charger.
In our household we have one to four ~90% capacity commutes per week and being able to always get a full charge with the 11kW charger helps a lot.
So YMMV. I agree with you. Especially agree with the point that people should analyze their usage, maybe get some experience living with an EV and never give up on the first mental hurdle without even trying.
This has two benefits: it is cheaper to charge and the grid works more efficiently — price is lower when the demand is low and/or production is high.
If you are thinking of charge scheduling, the car does that. Or should… if you buy an EV from a good EV company, not an old crusty legacy automaker.
But yeah I have a hard time believing it's gonna be a big enough saving to offset the cost of the charger.
Unless you buy an electric car from one of the companies that is actively promoting gas cars and trying to make their own electric cars super crappy in hopes the entire concept will fail. Meaning, any gas car maker.
Yes, scheduling saves money. But even paying high electric rates during peak hours can still be way cheaper than gas, depending on what exact rates we're talking about, which varies by location.
But the plug has nothing to do with scheduling if you just use the car's own scheduling or plug/unplug yourself.
Two days ago kWh was at 0.03€ For two hours only, after 0.41€ peaks during the day. Of course this scheduling is automatic. Using Gridio (https://www.gridio.io/) for that.
200 miles a day is not the median driving pattern. It's closer to 30 miles
That it's been working for you for a few years does not invalidate this point, in the same way as not wearing a seat belt is unsafe.
3 miles per hour of charging is simply not enough. 12h x 3mph = 36mi range added, and that's not enough to reliably expect even a 30 mile roundtrip, let alone any errands you might run. I'd say we go through easily 55-60 miles of range for a 42mi commute. Plus, you're charging at peak hours for part of that.
Obviously I'm not saying you're lying, you did it, that's great, but you sure weren't driving many miles in both cars.
So my caveat to your claim would be: only if your EV itself has enough range, which means you're limited to newer EVs, rather than buying older ones on the second hand market that were manufactured with less range (and by now probably only have ~80% of their original, lesser range, remaining).
I plan to add a charger to my rental property, either when my current tenant buys an EV or when they move out (to avoid disrupting them). The home is fairly new and was built with 200 amp service so I don't anticipate any permit problems. The idea is to differentiate my property in the marketplace and justify a higher rent.
What I don't want is a tenant running a homemade 240v cable to the outlet for the electric clothes dryer and manually plugging/unplugging back & forth. That's unsafe.
[1] The fire department will pull the meter when they arrive and start fighting a fire, so they aren't spraying water on live circuits.
> We recently decided to update our duplex’s electric system.
I'm left wondering what exactly they meant by "update our duplex's electric system" if they did not mean put in a new service, new main panel, and bring the branch circuits up to current code? Like what were they actually envisioning doing, that did not include redoing the branch circuits?
If this story were written with the electric vehicle precipitating the chain of events, I can see how that would be frustrating. But it seems they set out to do the updates, and are now complaining about doing the updates?
The utility's position seems wholly unreasonable though. If this weren't a rental property, the right answer would be to DIY the install and make the utility deal with the additional load on the distribution infrastructure.
You’re correct, you don’t need to move the panels, but you do need to provide a emergency service disconnect on the exterior of the house. You could leave all the existing branch wiring in place, assuming it is up to code, and refeed the existing panels from the new service entrance location. The relevant code section in the NEC is 230.85, added in 2020.
A large portion of the cost is new panels with AFCI and GFCI breakers, they’re $50-100 each for a 15A 1p breaker, probably $1500-2500 for each panel.
Most level 2 chargers have a 20+ foot cord. I did the plug/unplug thing while I waited to install the plug in my garage, but my dryer is just inside of the door to the garage. Perhaps you're talking about a much longer run, but even with a proper extension cord (often less than $100), it should be fine.
There are some EV fleets for which charging downtime is not palatable (taxis in busy cities, for example). Swappable batteries have been developed and are being used by some of those fleets.
The next step is standardization of swappable batteries, and divestment of battery swapping and maintenance into a separate company from fleet operation. The third step is the separate company offering services to the public.
As vehicles built for these fleets are sold used, they will spread to households.
Then we are back to "gas" stations/service stations.
The logic seems sound. Rather than having to build charging complexity into every vehicle, and supply tens of millions or hundreds of millions of chargers, charging can be done at merely hundreds of thousands of charging stations, with the customer having a three minute trip through something like a car wash booth.
The title should be "what? You do really need a pesky netural wire for EV charging, who knew"?
Situations differ. Local policies and code differ. For a couple thousand dollars, my car will be fully sun powered (from our 11Kwh rooftop solar system). Gas savings over the life of the car should more than make up for it.
(We had previously upgraded our panel to handle more load and offer more slots when we renovated, but even that was under $3k.)
IMO the solution is top down and should require public planning to scale infrastructure to desired standards in a planned way. It should also require updates to modern code rather than allowing older and probably unsafe (code changed for good reason) buildings around until they fail (usually in a catastrophic way).
It's also bad that there aren't good ways to save for such updates, far too often short term needs prevail rather than doing things right the first time. I'm not sure if taxes to encourage and fund improvements or ways of saving money tax free towards major expenditures (which are then taxed at that time) are better, but there should be some process.
Eg if the door lintel is made from wood. Does it pass certification to say it can take that weight. To find out if the lintel is even wood requires removing plaster.
What happens if you wanted to tighten the specs on concrete? Are you going to tear down every pre existing concrete building because they can't demonstrate it was made to the new specs.
along with
the "oops I dropped the hair dryer in the sink and died without ground faults" discount
Or the "the microwave blew a fuse that killed my work computer, so I lost my job" discount
the "the pilot light doesn't work well, so carbon monoxide" discount.
The "stairwell is only loose here" discount, "the deck is fine for 2 people to stand in that corner" discount
We should have higher standards for "investment" operations than 30 years out of safety standards
Probably this wouldn't be enough if every renter was a heavy EV user, but it could be good for a few years, and also would be useful for power outages and to take advantage of off-peak rates in future
Metering and payment would be an issue, but it should be possible to find a solution for that
Can EVs become more common without tenants being able to charge them ?
Obviously, it depends on the tenant's daily commutes especially, but at today's ranges a giant median chunk of US daily commuters could fast charge only once a week and meet their commute needs easily, with no other charges in between.
Home chargers are incredibly useful and a game changer, but also destination chargers (chargers at work or grocery stores or malls or other places where cars are parked for multiple hours) are also similarly game changers. Just having one or the other reduces (and in some cases eliminates) the need for any "fast" charges. But EVs themselves don't "require" any specific charging configuration and compared to gas have more options than ever before with home and destination options.
Stop by the "gas" station, open up the hood, grab your drained battery cell cards, bring them in, and pay for fully-charged cell cards to swap in.
The "gas" station can then charge the cards you brought and give them to another customer.
It's worth noting that, under this scheme, battery life can be monitored and manufacturers can recycle/replace EOL cards when the "gas" station sends them in.
No more waiting for the car to be charged. No more changes to homes. Just use the existing infrastructure! It's a win-win.
We can't even roll broadband out properly let alone the massive amounts of infrastructure required to deliver enough power to every home. That leaves centralized charging hubs which will quickly become overwhelmed and a massive time sink.
Electric cars are for the rich. And of course they say it's the future and everyone should do it, without realizing it's literally impossible. No grid in the US could come close to handling that, much less in developing countries.
Not to mention due to range limitations, many people and companies are ruled out automatically.
I don't think electric is bad, or should go away. But it's not meant for the masses. I think H has a brighter future worldwide.
The grid absolutely can handle EVs.
The range of modern EVs is totally fine for almost all cases.
The price is an issue, but even in my poor Eastern European country the number of EV exploded this year. Mainly second hand small city cars, but also others.
Almost everyone in the midwest and mountain west considers a 3 hr (one way) drive a normalish weekly or monthly event. Sure, it's not most people, but it's not some tiny outlier.
I'm completely fine with being made a fool of, but I'm going to need more than 'yeah, it can do it.'
Maybe yours can.
In California, they were recently asked to not charge cars during certain times of the day because the power system could not support the additional load.
My understanding is that California's grid could have supported the load, they just weren't able to generate the electricity required to do so.
And ok, maybe some upgrades will be needed in some places. But the situation is not so dark as the person above described it.
Are you not cooking?
Our stove needs 1kw and our oven has 6kw.
It's not crashing when everyone is cooking why would it crash when everyone is charging?
Also it costs more (energy wise) to make H and then consume it than using the energy itself. This should probably has a relevant cost saving.
Economy of scale will bring much cheaper batteries very soon. Let's say 10-20 years
It's not at all the same as everyone on planet earth in the same hemisphere trying to charge their cars during peak summer AC time, between 4 and 6ish pm.
Why do you keep parroting this nonsense? Virtually nobody charges their car at this time
If you use anything more fancy on the PV side you can also control it on the other side.
And for more than one flat, load control is already available. We're I life we have 90 cars in the parking garage and there is a load controller
Independent of this, plenty of counties use energy to heat (consumes a lot) or have ac which also pulls a lot.
Ev charging is estimated with 10% additional load on a power grid. That's doable.
Is it a challenge? Yes. In one place more than in another place
I could go on, but it just doesn't make sense to pin hopes on hydrogen.
Batteries are less energy per volume than gas. Batteries are extremely hazardous if damaged. They have a relatively short lifespan. They are hardcore industrial hazardous waste. Power generation is likely coming from a gas power plant or even a coal power plant. The required infrastructure upgrades would be astronomical.
A significantly more efficient plant than an ICE.
There's also no reason we can't provide charging at destinations rather than homes. Workplaces, shopping centers, etc.
Transit, trains, ebikes, etc. are all significantly more efficient, less polluting, and just better solutions all around.
Not to mention that public transportation in a lot of areas can be... Let's just say perceived as unsafe.
Hydrogen (by itself) is as clean as it can be. The byproduct is water.
Personally, I think if we do have hydrogen cars in the future, hydrogen cars should require a plug and an enlarged lithium battery (say, 10kWh at least). Otherwise we’ll need to produce FAR more electricity than with battery-electric cars and consumers will be on the hook for far, far higher use costs.
Why does this matter?
The post was mostly about the challenges with regulations/codes. For the most part it was a plea for governments to smooth over the jankiness they introduce to the whole process. Hardly an insurmountable challenge.
Hydrogen is dead. Upgrading the existing electrical network gradually over time (EV adoption will be gradual) is going to be significantly easier than building a distribution network from (almost) scratch as would be required for hydrogen. To think the reverse is bonkers.
Converting to hydrogen makes wayyy more sense than EV infrastructure. All of the gas station can be easily converted to hydrogen stations with different pumps and tanks. A lot cheaper than running MW of power for a EV station or upgrading neighborhoods.
Then there are people that live in apartments. It isn't feasible to have a charger for every apartment at a complex. So not everyone is going to be able to charge. Even if it is a normal outlet.
There is also the fire danger. I can't even imagine the amount of damage a fire cause by an EV could do to an apartment complex.
Then there is the vandalism issue and mantaince problems involved.
Only if you are rich dose EVs make sense. But on a mass scale they make close to zero sense.
Care to cite any sources?
This sounds suspiciously like “rip out the gas station and build a new hydrogen station”
Car manufacturers are all releasing EVs. How many are really mass producing hydrogen vehicles?
It's a scale and chicken/egg (or two sides market) problem.
Gas stations won't convert until there is a decent number of hydrogen cars on the road (in the area the station is in), and people won't buy hydrogen vehicles if there are no stations to refill at. Manufacturers won't be able to scale production to make the investment worthwhile. EVs do not suffer from this problem as there are many people already in a position to easily charge at home (yes, I know it is not everyone, but it's a large enough market to be self sufficient).
For scale, I'll posit that there isn't room for three different types of power systems. Car companies won't want to invest in hydrogen because it's clear that there will be a significant percentage of people wanting EVs. The market for hydrogen cars will always be shrinking, because EV adoption will always be growing.
Gas station business models are finely tuned, with most of their revenue from convenience goods, petrol sales are just the mechanism to get people into the store to impulse buy. EVs will play havoc with this model. Less people will go to the stations as they will charge at home, causing a feedback loop of stations closing, and ICE vehicles becoming less convenient. It will also result in less money to invest in things like hydrogen tanks and pumps.
The number of EVs is only going to continue to grow, the window for hydrogen gets smaller and smaller (and I think already closed).
> Then there is the vandalism issue and mantaince problems involved.
Not really sure what this means. Presumably you are not talking about the EVs themselves as they require a lot less maintenance than ICE vehicles.
> Only if you are rich dose EVs make sense. But on a mass scale they make close to zero sense.
EVs continue to get cheaper and cheaper. Eventually it just won't make buy new ICE vehicles, even if you have to spend thousands to put in charging infrastructure.
Perhaps it will be only the "rich" who can adopt EVs at the start, but when the majority of new cars are EV, eventually the pool of 2nd hand ICE vehicles will become mostly EVs as well. It's inevitable.
We are talking about the infrastructure of EVs not EVs them selfs. The price is dropping on EVs, but that won't matter if most people can't charge them. Which is the problem.
Vandalism is becoming more and more of a problem with EV charging stations. People are stealing the Copper wires. That will be a major issue at apartment complexes if they install charging stations.
The US. department of energy is pushing to have $1 per kilogram by 2030. ($2 per kilogram by 2025). The Toyota Mirai can go 402 miles on 16.8kg of hydrogen. And it takes 5 minutes to fill up.
How many have shipped? How many gas stations are pumping hydrogen?
> most people can't charge them
And yet there are millions of them on the road, with numbers always increasing.
The strength of EVs, and why they will win over hydrogen is that they can be adopted regardless of what the majority are doing, incremental instead of big bang. There is a sizable market of people who can charge EVs. This number is only going to grow as more and more apartments/carpark are being fitted with chargers (which people have already said are not a necessity). It's not a small task, but it can be done gradually, unlike hydrogen. Unless you get some massive coordinated effort between multiple car companies and gas stations to roll out hydrogen refil stations across an entire country in preparation for hoped for sales, people just won't buy them. EV naysayers love to talk about range anxiety for EVs. Imagine the range anxiety if you had a hydrogen vehicle today.
Prometheus and others have plans that may come to fruition.
Now if you’re talking plug-in hybrid hydrogen cars, that’s fine. You’ll be on pure electric 85% of the time anyway so the crazy expense of hydrogen fueling isn’t so bad.
Takes 5 minutes to fill up if the hydrogen is pre-cooled and you happen to be at the filling station (which is rare).
Yeah no thanks.
https://www.electrive.com/2022/05/13/almost-1-3-of-san-franc...
There are... a lot of problems yet to be solved in the perfect electrified future. I hope it happens, if only to move all the pollution from cars to the power plants far away. I have found it hard to discuss the negative / illogical aspects with true believers, which is normally fine, except now the developed world is paying a shitload of taxes to fund the dreams of true believers - logic and economics be damned.