Highway EV charging will soon need a ton of power
canarymedia.com
canarymedia.com
https://new.siemens.com/us/en/products/energy/topics/transpo...
Probably they want to halve the times in your example to 3/4th hour.
They may be able to have 10 charging stations instead of 20, but the overall grid consumption will remain the same 1600-2000 kW is a lot of power and the need for dedicated power lines won't change.
Pairing stations with "local" battery buffer is a thing, as it reduces the need for local infrastructure upgrades and the systems can also help pay for themselves by acting as part of a 'virtual power plant'.
The issue here is HNers not being aware of what's being done and what is being developed in these industries...
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
The problem is those who think building more wind and solar in the next few years is going to reverse this.
The issue I was getting at is that we need to build a shitload more electricity generation.
Whichever way you prefer, it's going to take longer than a couple decades.
Well, HN is not a specialised high power electricity engineers forum, though the original article is (IMHO) a little scare-mongering it seems like delivering a correct message, (in a nutshell) a lot of work for new lines and substations will be needed to be able to charge cars and commercial electric vehicles.
If really-really the transition will happen in the 2030's for passenger cars and in the 2040-2050's for trucks, it's not a bad idea to start working on these grid extensions.
> A growing number of EV-charging sites are adding batteries that can store up grid power at times when chargers are sitting idle and provide it when charging loads exceed available grid capacity, he noted. But that’s far from “the most optimized solution,” he said, particularly as loads grow to multi-megawatt scale.
Yes, but those are mostly for 'residential' / non-commercial applications. For more commercial / industrial application a new system is being developed:
> The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) is a charging connector under development for large battery electric vehicles. The connector will be rated for charging at a maximum rate of 3.75 megawatts (3,000 amps at 1,250 volts direct current (DC)).
350 kW chargers are widely used. As one example, Ionity's chargers are 350 kW: https://ionity.eu/en/weareonit
Repsol installed 400 kW chargers a few years ago: https://insideevs.com/news/375020/repsol-most-powerful-charg...
Kempower is working on new model chargers which support 400 kW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD_cvlitcIo
Alpitronic has a 400 kW charger coming out soon: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6931968...
The Megawatt Charging System is the next step up for heavy vehicles: https://www.charin.global/technology/mcs/
MCS sites will start deploying soon: https://insideevs.com/news/617089/charin-megawatt-charging-s...
In the meantime you can charge your trucks and buses on existing 350 kW chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UAttTG03WA
That slow? This is a half of a single average wind turbine.
Tesla already has supercharger sites with over 50 dispensers capable of 250kW. In the UK gridserve has built a charging site with a 10MW solar array, battery storage, and 350kW chargers. Fastned has many 10 x 300kW charging sites in west Europe.
Or you could put up wires on highways which means trucks can charge as they drive along. Germany, Sweden, the UK have been doing trials on this
https://www.carscoops.com/2021/07/uk-approves-e-highway-sche...
"An academic study suggested the e-highway system covering all but the most remote parts of the UK could be completed by 2030 at a cost of £19 billion (£26.4 bn),"
In context that's about the same cost as Crossrail.
Definitely the grid cannot support it today, which is why we need goals and a timeline to push ourselves rather than wait, if moving to EVs is our future. Maybe the schedule was known to be aggressive and the point of the schedule is to start now and aim high with the infrastructure, to create electricity supply simultaneously with demand, rather than wait for demand to exceed supply and then be stuck waiting for infrastructure? Either way, even if the timeline is a little too fast, and it takes another 5 or 10 years to get there, it can serve a useful purpose as a goal that aligns everyone and a catalyst that leads to action now, no? What if we’ll be late anyway, will it just take even longer if we don’t set aggressive goals? And hey, maybe we can surprise ourselves. History has many examples of how fast we can move as soon as we all agree on the goal and try hard.
Why would they need to stop to charge? Charge them on the go. See the Tom Scott video "The highway where trucks work like electric trains":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
And if they do want/have to stop, imagine charging at a rate of up to 3750 kW:
> The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) is a charging connector under development for large battery electric vehicles. The connector will be rated for charging at a maximum rate of 3.75 megawatts (3,000 amps at 1,250 volts direct current (DC)).
A freight train won't be able to deliver something to my house. Nor would it likely be able to transport livestock or grains from a farm to a processing plant.
There are medium- and short-distance trips where a truck makes more sense, and they may have to drive on a highway in that case.
And as someone who lives in Canada, where there are large distances between major metro areas, electrifying all those rail kilometres may not be practical, so even trains may have to stay on fossil fuels in certain situations.
In Europe in the 1920s, every bigger plant had direct train access, it is possible and would make a lot more sense than stuffing precious lithium in millions of trucks that will still pollute the environment. For edge cases (delivery of the last mile), there are a lot of smaller solutions available than 20t+ trucks.
However ICE trucks and cars will continue running for years to come maybe only prohibited in city centers which is fine.
Still the Russia vs Ukraine situation show how europe is vulnerable and dependent of gas from Russia and Africa. This will only give more leverage to external forces to influence european politics.
This year is the very first one when people were asked in some parts of europe to reduce their consumption and prepare for potential outages during winter. Depending on the geopolitics, things could improve or worsen. A nuclear plant do not get build in 6 months.
Trucking is an unavoidable issue, but (at least in the US) there is plenty of space for combined solar/wind/battery sites on trucking corridors.
Like I can’t fathom the car-rejectionist position coming from someone with multiple offspring.
[1] https://thealternativedaily.com/why-ridesharing-matters/
Of course there's nuance to be had, but most discussions just devolve into "why would anyone need a car?"
Regarding the obvious tax comment someone will make, infrastructure budgets usually come from city and council taxes, it does not come from car registration or even fuel tax when you wring out the details.
In other words cyclists have been paying their share of infra budget and getting nothing for it for a long time.
If you can't picture what it actually looks like, look up the Not Just Bikes video on Stroads. It does a good job of describing the current situation, and why it's hard for people to imagine how bikes could fit with current road infra without impacting them.
You may want that, and indeed, I would highly prefer that, but most people who discuss this can only think about political punishments to affect behavior and go back to thinking that driving must absolutely suck in order for people to choose other options, rather than making alternatives even better than driving.
You don't need to begin with the mindset of "too many car lanes, destroy them until people are forced to use the nonexistant bus". It should begin with "people prefer driving. How many we make something even better so they don't prefer driving anyone?"
Sure, that will begin a competition between transportation modes, but when it comes from trying to make something even better, not out of wrath of driving/cars, then perhaps people will listen.
Separated bike lanes does not imply removing total car throughput, in many cases separated bike lanes can be routed down low-traffic areas, alongside drainage canals or railways, through parks and such. Areas where maybe a handful of cars are using it, but hundreds of cyclists would use since it's the bike thoroughfare.
Modern city planning is often a story of "Worst of both worlds", in that because we can't even get these small projects done, people are are on foot or cycling have no choice but to be in the way of car traffic (be that cycling in traffic or making it so there has to be pedestrian crossings on major roads and that kind of thing). It's terrible for everyone when it could have been excellent had there just been some better planning and more budget toward non-car infra.
The reason why you don't see why this "angers" drivers, is because it doesn't. No driver is angered by a bicyclist on their own road not interfering with the flow of traffic. Drivers are angered by cyclists that impede the flow of traffic and create safety hazards (yes, mostly for themselves) by having a bicycle share the road with a 2000 pound steel car going twice the speed. Move cyclists to a grade separated lane and no one will be bothered.
The problem is the population of bicyclists is large enough to support such an infrastructure project in only a few places. Whereas the cost of laying down a white strip of paint is sufficiently cheap that it can be done in many more places. So it boils down to money.
Arguing that cyclists pay taxes which are used to fund roads and so should have this major infrastructure project funded just for them (if they can direct their taxes this way, will they promise to never to drive a car? Are other people allowed to dedicate their tax funds to support projects just for them? Can childless people opt out of funding public schools and instead fund special centers just for them?) -- is not going to work. Public spending is about pooled resources and public benefits. Everyone benefits from roads -- e.g. even the bicyclists purchase goods shipped to them via roads. Roads allow the economy to function so that bikes can be produced and purchased, etc. At the same time, one can argue that cars benefit from cyclists who reduce traffic. These things are sorted out via a political process -- as a result of power, not some kind of mathematical algorithm.
Gain political power and you will gain the power to have these types of infrastructure funds directed for your group, otherwise it wont happen. That means cyclists need to win over the rest of the public whose representatives vote on these matters -- which up to this point is not something cyclists have been interested or capable of doing -- e.g. having good public relations and outreach to other taxpayers who aren't cyclists. Cyclists have an image problem with the rest of the public, which results in their political power being disproportionately small. That is why, in most places, all they get is the white strip of paint.
Every sliver of spare space in our cities has been claimed by car infrastructure, and that's not fair to every other possible way to live. I'm not suggesting we remove roads, but we can do better than this for everyone else in cities.
> Arguing that cyclists pay taxes which are used to fund roads and so should have this major infrastructure project funded just for them
I only drive on a handful of roads, but I'm happy to fund all the others because other people do. That's exactly the same position cycle/pedestrians are in, they pay taxes too so why can't the community cater a little bit to them as well? People far and away pay for more car roads they'll never use than they ever will bike lanes they don't use.
My taxes go to many things I don't use and that's fine, because that's how communities work. I'm even glad we're building a car super-highway project because it'll improve commutes for people who do drive. It's fine to drive, I'm not against it.
I get it, we're not going to be paying for bike highways in suburbia where there aren't even footpaths for walking, because it's so far entrenched that no-one is even trying to walk or ride. But there are so many places in our cities that with just a bit of planning we could have catered to both cars and peds/cyclists at the same time.
This being said. I mean. Cars have only been around for about a century, we've managed without them for millennia. Surely there is a way to reorganize many places so that their use can be slashed by 95%+, including by families.
One key thing is that it depends on the place. I think that in a lot of big cities it would be possible (not politically, but theoretically) to e.g. ban all curbside parking, reserve all central lanes for high frequency buses, limit all (non-bus) car traffic to 10 km/h. Car traffic would vanish on its own and the QOL increase for residents would more than make up for the inconvenience (less noise, less eyesore, more trees, safe biking, jaywalk everywhere, play in the street, etc.)
On the other hand, you can't really get cars out of hellscape car-centric suburbs (which mostly exist in the US, from my understanding) because they have been designed around the assumption that cars exist. You wouldn't get QOL improvements from slashing car traffic like you would in cities.
So I would argue to leave all these places alone, but we should try to suppress cars in dense cities as much as possible. As someone who lives in one, I would particularly like curbside parking to be nuked, because cars are an eyesore, they block visibility, and they are wasting so much usable space.
I wouldn't suggest someone run a family without a car in a modern American city, but there are still places even in America that didn't get rebuilt around cars and of course plenty of places around the world where you can raise a family without a car.
And for smaller children, in cities like Amsterdam, it’s common to see a mom riding with multiple kids sitting in a cargo bike.
Note that the maximum grade for a wheelchair ramp is 8.3%.
By the way, i visited Chicago, Michigan and Colombus, Ohio: I might now have seen everywhere, but those are closer in elevation difference to Amsterdam than Paris and Lisbon are
From what I recall of Columbus, it is every bit as flat as you say. I'd have a hard time telling you about a hill in Chicago. Then again, I'd have a hard time telling you about a time that I was on something other than an 6+ lane highway in Chicago. The view you get from a major highway is often different from what you get in areas where you think of your kids having a casual bike ride.
Right now the only option that infrastructure is actually built for is using a car for everything, even for the single person to run an errand 3 miles away. It’s possible they can be an unintended user of the car oriented roads, but it is much riskier.
it would be nice if the people going on solo trips could take bikes without worrying about their dependents becoming orphans. That way when doing something that actually requires a car highways would be less congested too! Win-win.
Seeing as how children are at extreme risk from cars yet can’t use them themselves, and chauffeuring your kids around because it’s not safe for them to walk or bike themselves is almost the central time sink of parenthood, it is weird to see parents as the primary advocates of car primacy.
For a parent, it doesn’t matter how much you advocate, your kid will have their drivers license long before you can change any of the above situations.
I know you think it’s simple, but I know from experience that it’s not. Deep car-centric cultures demand more of the same. Maybe where you’re from these attitudes seem like outliers, but in middle America, it’s really not. It’s not an awareness issue, an insignificant number of people here resent the idea. There’s no convincing them.
Also, planning is definitely important. If the lanes don’t go between differently zoned areas, they’re useless for primary transport. What little success we’ve had is used against us as evidence that “nobody wants bike lanes”.
It’s more about the culture than anything. The rest of your points are not really the biggest factors.
Maybe geography isn't the central issue.
There's also no reliable transit option to either location.
Am I suppose to just suck it up, throw out my vehicle, and bike 90 minutes there just to drop him off?
I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal. Even then, you might be surprised - adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars. On balance it could work out in your favor.
They say the car erased distance. I don't think we should go back to a primitive era of distance being literally insurmountable, but I do think it would be healthy to rediscover a bit of respect for it.
I entirely agree, but we all have to live with the world that we're currently in. It can take years or decades to re-envision a car-dependent area into something more car independent. For example, painting a white line over a highway's current gutter is not pedestrian/bike/transit infrastructure. It's dangerous for everyone. Yet, that's the type of "bike-friendly infrastructure" we get, and when drivers complain, it's viewed as drivers being anti-transit or anti-bicycle. No, it's just dangerous. The bike route shouldn't be inches from a high speed motorway.
> I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal...adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars.
No, it does not. Maybe in your area, it would, but here, it does not, because it's simply too far and unsafe to bicycle on the highway. It's dangerous and bad engineering. It's 5 miles (or 27 minutes according to Google) on major highways to the local elementary school. No one should ever be on a bicycle on these highways, regardless the fact that a small part of that distance might have a painted white lane denoting a bike lane full of road debris.
Instead, there should be a bicycle/pedestrian path that goes a more direct route - the distance is only 2 miles straight (or ~10 minutes), without crossing any major highways or difficult terrain. The school is also only 1.5 miles from a very nice park, but the highway would cross the path, so that conflict would need to be figured out.
Sorry if this comes of as combative, but what I'm pointing out that "painting a lane" simply does not work in the US, but that's all that is suggested and done. Streets and Roads need to be separate, and bikes should remain on streets or non-Road routes, and high speed vehicle travel should remain on roads. Not Just Bikes says this in his channel "Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous", but does so more to clarify/elevate the "Street". However, the discussion tends to miss that the "Road" is still important and needs to be respected. Putting a bike lane on a "Road" is another form of creating a "stroad".
What I think we need to reimagine is having the only connection between where people live and where they go to school be a highway. That's unfortunately a fundamental construct in suburban design - subdivisions hanging off of bike- and pedestrian-hostile highways - and it shows up everywhere. Creating new rights of way might be doable in some circumstances. But in others, these things are going to have to stop being highways (or at least lose some lanes) in order to get genuinely safe, separated walking and cycling infrastructure along existing rights of way.
Check out Not Just Bikes on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A/vid...
From Wikipedia.
"As a result of the permanent shutdown of the plant, three new natural-gas fired power plants: Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center, and Cricket Valley Energy Center were built, with a total capacity of 1.8 GW, replacing 90% of the 2.0 GW of carbon-free electricity previously generated by the plant.[6] As a consequence, New York is expected to struggle to meet its climate goals.[9][3]"
Where do the amps come from? How do they get to the chargers? How much delay is introduced by charger operation/bottleneck? Plug/voltage compatibility? Current safety? Disaster handling (can’t carry a bucket of electrons)?
This suggests material science, power generation, portable aux power sources and real time load balancing are going to be critical. Along with a whole lot of infrastructure that might have difficulty getting built. I’m not an EE - is it possible to create a solar cell that has any impact on an EV? Even enough to move it at trivial speeds? Might portable wind turbines have an effect? Will this force a return to smaller lighter cars?
Would be nice to replace some/much of the medium long haul/intercity travel with trains but that’s a political problem. So is a paying for all the steps in changing from a gas to an electric environment. Man, that Nobel-to-be for high temperature superconducting will be very much appreciated.
5 megawatts) / ((1000 watts) / (square meter))) / .18 = 27 777.7778 m2
And, of course, this is only when sun is shining with max intensity and certainly not delivered at night.
Figure in the Northeast you get 4 hours times this power on a typical day, and it’s not aligned with peak charging demand.
That comes out to 3 miles of driving for every 1 hour charge. So your car sitting at work for 8 hours will give you 24 miles of power to drive home.
Adjust up or down based on location, summer vs winter, cloud cover, solar cell efficiency, etc.
Now what you can do is have your garage roof covered in solar, charge a stationary battery, then transfer from there to your car every night. Or swap-able car batteries.
Another possibility is have a design that keeps the solar on the car following the curves of the vehicle when driving, then have a parking mode that would extend / unfold solar to cover more of the car when it is parked. That would be good for people who live in apartments without charging ports, although if parking is provided for tenants then adding charging ports (for a fee) may be a thing.
Our team is building the associated software. If you'd like to help solve this problem, reach out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33823403
That being said, I agree of course that transitioning the mix toward a lower proportion of dirty sources will be good.
With the EV powered by electricity from a dirty power plant (1) you can afford bigger, heavier, more expensive pollution control, and (2) you can build power plants away from population centers so whatever pollution does escape ends up being a small increase for people over a wide area instead of major increase for just one city.
Where I live, law dictates that power companies don't have to pay for excess power that not-the-power-company puts onto the grid. Thus, everyone that puts solar panels on their roofs shoots for putting up capacity to that is slightly under what they expect to consume. Businesses that have large roofs but comparatively little electricity demand are disincentivized from rooftop solar.
We need to change this. Building codes should require that every roof that faces a suitable direction and is not obscured by landscape, buildings, etc., must include rooftop solar. Every new garage stall should be equipped with a charger. Cars that spend the day at home can be topped off (or to 90%, whatever works best for the battery tech) during the day and be drained to run the house/neighborhood and charge daytime commuters during the night.
I have a pretty good idea when I will need to have more than 50 - 100 miles of range in my car. I don't feel like my gas tank needs to be full every day. Likewise, if my EV with a range of 200 - 300 miles has 100 miles of range most days, I have no worries at all. If I'm expecting a longer trip, I should be able to say "be sure I have 300 miles of range by 8:00" or pop in for a one-off charge at a charging station.
Surely this doesn't address dominated by multi-story apartments. Arguably, those are also the areas that have less dependence on cars and make up a minority of the housing in the US. According to the US census, 29 million people live in urban clusters and the remaining 220 million live in less densely populated areas.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
Teslas still kill kids. Electrification doesn’t solve the health problems of sedentary commute time.
There is huge demand to live in cities, close to jobs; we should be putting more resources towards that goal, reducing the demand on highway electric charging stations along the way.
The hard part is compatibility of all EVs with the charging stations, where segmentation might be in iterest in some car makers for the short term, so that's the only part where government intervention can help, but it has improved since the early days as far as I know.
Swapping batteries also makes cheaper/lighter EVs more practical as well as street parking EVs in cities. constraints that have led to the battery integration we see today may not be as applicable further down the adoption cycle.
For a car this means 100kW, a truck I suspect must get at least 400kW. IF EVs get spread at the current peace we need at list 10+ concurrent charging ability every 50km or so.
The other option is electrifying roads, witch means cars can suck power with something like a long trolley, the phase in a grid-like roof, the neutral on ground, mandatory AC for a minimum safety. VERY costly and problematic for big transports. That's is already today.
Having cars with bigger range might help A BIT, in the sense that most do not do such a long trips one after another but stay ad the first long destination for a long enough time for a 22-50kW charge, but that means cars with around 1000km range with a price people can buy, of course. Even if we can achieve that trucks remain out of options anyways.
If you make them electromagnets and drive turn just so as the car passes, now it's a linear motor and would work to accelerate the car (this is how some rollercoasters work), but still doesn't magick energy out of the ether: something has to generate that power.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's certainly no such thing as a lunch you get paid to eat.
The soil, its dirt
Through work and toil
The harvest of light
A series of electromagnets driven by A/C could possibly work, either as a linear motor (fixed magnet in the car, and the road pushes or along) or at a much higher frequency as a wireless charging thing (if you can get the power high enough without being dangerous).
But at that point there are probably cheaper options.
https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-018-07...
Smaller vehicles would also help.
All propane tanks around here have a "do not refill past this date" stamped into them.
There are 2 ways of "refilling" a tank -- the first is to swap your tank for another tank that's filled; the other is to go to a place that can refill your tank.
99% of the time when I do the tank swap they try to give me one with an expiration date that's coming up in the next 6 months. I almost never am offered one with a very long expiration date.
Do you really think that, in a situation where you own your car and battery, you'll reliably get a battery that's as good or better than the one that's in your car? Keep in mind the value of the vehicle is 40-80% tied up in _only_ the battery.
Battery swaps aren't a realistic plan unless someone else owns the battery, and then you'll get all sorts of other nonsense in the ecosystem.
For example, if you have a new battery you also have 1000 credits. If you swap it for an older battery (which is worth, say, 500 credits), you'll have a battery and 500 credits in your account. Next time if you get a newer battery which is worth 800 credits, you'll have only 200 credits left in your account.
Also those credits could decrease as you use batteries. You could replenish them with payments.
We know battery capacity decreases with age and number of recharge cycles. There's randomness due to how hard the battery was used, temperature, manufacturing defects, but you could make an estimate about "miles remaining" and charge for that.
Then when you visit the self-service battery kiosk, you can can select "40 miles" or "30 miles" or "27 miles" (etc.) from a list of options. Pick one and the corresponding set of batteries lights up. Maybe the kiosks already do something like this? I've not seen one in real life yet.
If you think about it .. petrol is not pumped in your car straight from the refinery, right? It's brought in from time to time and stored in underground tanks.
Energy can be sipped non-stop into large capacity batteries (stored underground?) . Said batteries will have very high-discharge capabilities. When you come in to charge your car it's just a matter of grabbing a "pump" connected to the "underground tanks".
No stress on the network.
Highway charging stations will need a lot of power to charge all the cars and we’ll have to build the infrastructure to make it happen. Literally no surprise here.
> If state agencies and utilities don’t coordinate on how to supply high-voltage grid interconnections to the mega-charging hubs coming down the pike, the result could be delays and higher costs that hinder expansion of a technology that’s key to decarbonizing transportation.
>“If we wait 10 years or 15 years to make these investments, I can guarantee you they’ll be double or triple” what they would be if they were planned well in advance, said Brian Wilkie, National Grid’s director of transportation electrification in New York.
HN commenters love to shout about wind and solar being stupid ("WhAT haPPens at nIGhT!? wINd DoESN't ALwaYs bLOW!!! GOTCHA!") yet grid-scale energy storage systems are quite common and one of the fastest areas of capex investment by utilities...and then there's the constant stream of "nuclear is the future!" nonsense.
The power generation debate is over; utilities and grids aren't buying nuclear, they're buying wind, solar, and some natural gas backup capacity...and not because "liberal brainwashing" or some other nonsense, but because wind and solar are the cheapest source of power right now, and wind especially keeps dropping in price. Neither presents anywhere near the level of headaches of nuclear, and it takes months to build out and a few years to break even on carbon footprint, not decades.
There's a fair bit of dunning-krueger effect as well; scroll down to see comments from "not an electrical engineer" who is talking about "buckets of electrons" and thinks that EV charging is something where there's so many "amps" we need to think of the chil...er, have safety protocols.
Like DCFC stations and L1/L2 charge adapters don't already do a whole suite of electrical safety checks every time they start charging a vehicle....
If we're lucky, gas stations might turn into alcohol-free third places where people watch sports, have a meal and hang out while waiting for their car to charge.
Driving ranges are generally high enough that driving from 100 to 0% charge means you should take a legally mandated break. So why not embrace that?
Let’s make a gasoline powered micro energy grid for ev powered cars.
The whole ev craze is wildly stupid, inefficient and worse for the environment. Your double AA battery powered toy with an iPad isn’t going to save to world.
Obviously, the real long-play would be a cyberhorse on the far side, somehow...
I much prefer plugging my car in in my driveway (I'm lucky to have a driveway; lots of car owners don't) and I basically never think about fueling my car or range. My car charges on a 20a / 240v circuit (IE a totally normal one that didn't require a huge amount of effort or expense to install).
As an added bonus, my car's more pleasant to drive, quieter, and costs way less per mile driven.
Commercial power billing is typically for the peak draw of an installation over a period of time, so there's huge incentive to chop the tops off of these peaks with fuel cells and batteries.
The DC Fast charge power requirements are enormous and I'd be surprised if more than a small fraction of gas stations had direct grid ties suitable for reasonable DC Fast charging.
Nationalize the fossil fuel companies to staff municipal utilities.