Cold weather nearly wrecked our 2,500-mile electric car adventure
axios.com
axios.com
I stopped about every 2.5 hours which may be a bit shorter than the average person's leg in an ICE car but is about as long as I personally want to remain sitting down.
The Tesla charger network is incredibly reliable, the Model Y's cold weather range is pretty darn good relatively, and I had zero charger wait times the whole way.
I'm glad to hear Tesla is opening up its charger network to others and am looking forward to the V4 chargers with longer cables. My only wish is that other EVs had the same connector because the Tesla one is so much slimmer.
With my M3; it's essentially a 20/30 minutes pit-stop every 2hrs. Which is an okay compromise for my taste.
Tesla is probably best for travel due to their network and it's reliability.
Fuel is just a lot MORE accessible. That infrastructure was built over a long period of time. Fueling up is also quicker.
Not sure how charger locations are selected but gas stations on freeways cater to trucks. A gas station in the middle of nowhere could be brining a lot of cash from truckers since a truck holds 120 to 300 gallons of fuel. So, these gas stations make sense from a business perspective.
Installing a charger in the middle of nowhere seems like not a good idea at the moment. It has much more use in the city.
This could give these businesses a new revenue source, but more importantly, one that doesn't rely on buying fuel. It doesn't replace their model, just adds to it (with what I'd imagine to be a pretty steep investment in terms of equipment costs).
To be fair, I've not done the math to determine what might be required in terms of equipment needed to support EV charging commercially like this. My intuition is that it's certainly possible, but it's not the same thing as residential charging. For example, the solar cells I have on my home are able keep my EV topped off for my 20-30 miles of daily driving, but wouldn't handle 200-300 miles of daily driving for a single car, let alone the many potential EVs that might need that level of charging on a daily basis.
Depending on how many vehicles you’re charging a day, you’re probably looking at a 50-100kw solar PV generator (either ground mount or canopy/rooftop) along with 100-200kw of battery storage. This is not insurmountable, just requires capital and land.
Well, near me, Saskatchewan River Crossing comes to mind. It's the only spot with services in the middle of the 233 km route (which is pretty hilly, so bad on fuel economy) between Lake Louise and Jasper in Alberta. There's a resort with electricity, but it's diesel-generator powered, so not especially effective/cheap for EV charging. The route sees 1.2 million visitors per year.
Using existing electrical infrastructure would do the job functionally, but has a similar problem to that of fuel: you have to buy it from a supplier. Perhaps with fuel there are multiple suppliers you can buy from, but with electricity you often have only one choice of supplier.
With on site generation, you have another option that's either immune, or less impacted by, suppliers' changes in pricing, outages, or other shenanigans.
Anecdotally, I know that upgrading electrical infrastructure in rural places (in this case remote southern Utah) can be very expensive. Someone in my extended family built a 2 bedroom home/cabin on a remote ranch. The ranch is already wired up with what I assume is a pretty overkill connection. It's a working ranch with a workshop, etc. Lots of high voltage, high amp outlets.
The new cabin, located about 500 feet from the "main" structures, needed a hookup, and it needed to be metered separately due to local code requirements. The local electricity utility charged over $20k to extend the existing line. The existing line didn't need any upgrades to support the extension. I'm not saying it shouldn't cost anything, but $20k is a hell of a lot of money for 500 feet or so of wire. Also, that $20k was for the wire and various transformers/service panels only. Said family member had to hire the one contractor approved by the util to install two small telephone poles to carry the wire. What that cost I'm not sure, but it was steep, as it covered a week of labor costs for a team of 4 as well.
Solar and/or wind would have probably been a better choice for that hookup, but said family member believes anything "green" is some sort of trap devised by anti-American socialists. Why owning their electricity supply wasn't the obvious choice over a government subsidized utility, I'll never know, but that's the choice they made.
On site generation typically doesn't save you a substantial amount until you're far from the utility hand off, where they're going to charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars to connect to your structure. From an energy sovereignty perspective, yeah, it's a reasonable path if you already have a sufficient service entrance to grid tie and can afford the necessary trimmings. I've talked to folks who have gone big and spent ~$200k+ in the process; that is beyond the means of many though.
For the home I described, I priced out a solar system with battery bank that I think would have provided well beyond the needs of the home, and depending on how fancy the system estimated the cost to be between $15-$25k.
I basically looked at average energy usage for homes of a similar size in the area and doubled it. Given that the home was built in the past 5 years using modern insulation and building techniques, and the average age of comparable homes was 20+ years old, I figured that doubling my estimates would provide plenty of capacity. I have no idea if I'm right.
That said, if it were me, I'd have picked solar even if the cost was the same or even a bit more. The property has plenty of space for panels, rarely isn't sunny, and doesn't get a lot of snow (this year being an exception, but even then, maybe only saw enough snow to make an impact on a single day here or there so far).
If I were sizing a system for the main ranch buildings, it'd easily approach the $200k you mentioned. It takes a lot of juice to supply a machine shop, irrigation systems, barn heating, lighting etc. For that, a combo of solar, wind (which there's no shortage of in southern Utah) and traditional util provided electricity would make more sense (but would still cost a lot up front).
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/homeowners-guide-federal-t...