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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Yeah exactly, it's not like the world was ready with gas stations for 300M gas cars when that happened, either.

1/3 of the US gasoline pipeline was held hostage or had a massive leak in 2021, shuts down for hurricanes, and had an explosion in 2016.

But every individual household can't high speed charge on their residential service 250 miles every day while their air conditioning is running. (/s)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware...

https://newrepublic.com/article/161498/huntersville-north-ca...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Colonial_Pipeline_leak

Why would everyone high speed charge? You can get 250 miles in Model 3 at 12 hours of 6.6kW (~22 mi/hour). Even only eight hours would get 170 miles. Eight hours of charging per night is doable for most people, I imagine.

This is what I am pointing out about the article, industry, and fear mongering on this subject.

the p50 for daily commute distance in America is ~41 miles; if cars only had a 200 mile range. they'd still last ~4+ days; and that's not accounting for the possibility of "topping" off at commercial electric properties (places or employment/entertainment, transportation hub, gas stations installing chargers)

Air conditioning peak load is 2-7pm, 5.5kW. EV peak load is like 7pm-1am, 6-12kW (and can be dialed back).

Frankly they are complimentary. If you have the service to run AC, you already have the service for an EV.

Exactly. And modern thermostats and modern electric cars can work around each other, around grid usage dynamics while also extending the average driver's battery life because 8 hours of sleep doesn't require full speed charging.

> everybody can't high speed charge on their residential service 250 miles every day

Fortunately, most people drive substantially less than 91K miles per year, so everyone charging 250 miles every day is not anywhere close to the actual requirement.

Added the /s for clarity;

The gasoline delivery pipeline is a risk to national security and the health of citizens; it has experienced a number of issues over the last 10 years.

95% of fear-mongers are concerned about the 5% use case, while ignoring that humans sleep, eat, or need to stretch legs in less miles.

Right? Imagine, having the full benefit of hindsight, and still responding to such a massive opportunity by grumping that there’s no way it could ever work!

Gas distribution is a very different problem from electricity distribution, though. Gas was initially sold at pharmacies and it worked just fine before specialized shops cropped up. You can't have that with electrical grid.

I am literally building an electric jerry can in my workshop right now so that you can carry around car recharges in your trunk. There are solutions to all of these problems and the technology is getting better all the time. All you have to do is stop looking for reasons why it can never work, and start looking for ways to make it work.

I'm not sure how that helps if the grid is already nearly overloaded and we need gas/coal to cover peak demand. The problem is not the charger and its small battery, the problem is generating clean power and transmitting it.

He’s solving the transmission problem. A portable battery does not need to be charged from the grid.

Edit to add: I have about 1.2kW of storage that can be charged by solar in a few hours that takes up about the space of a 5 gallon NATO jerry can. It can be charged thousands of time for the initial price paid. That’s with 2020 tech. Certainly density and efficiency will improve as market pressures increase.

How do you charge that small battery? Going to the powerplant with it doesn't seem like a good answer.

I don’t know if you saw my edit, but in my case, it’s charged by either a portable solar panel or (optimally) home solar panels.

In the not so distant past there were plans for neighborhood scale nuclear reactors. That would go a long way towards distribution, redundancy, and scale issues.

Why does it have to be a grid? There are plenty of electronic devices that don’t get power from the grid, some at dwelling scale. What prevents power from being delivered by truck, just like fuel is today? (Density is definitely an issue, but technology evolves)

Haven't really considered that. I guess the problem is conversion loss. If we're making some sort of fuel at power generation points, why not use that fuel in cars instead of doing another conversion back to electricity? We could make hydrogen or even synthetic gas/diesel and just keep the cars we already have.

No one pushed a deadline for transition from horses to ICE car though. It just happened over time at its own pace. People bought cars when they could afford it and there was infrastructure to support them.

It wasn't a problem because if you went on a longer trip where there was no gas, you just took more gas with you. Lack of gas stations wasn't even an issue for gas cars. People didn't just jump in their cars and go on a totally unplanned drive like we can do now.

I doubt that the world was actively preventing consumer vehicles from driving on existing infrastructure. It seems like the same people who are forcing the change over to electric vehicles are also actively working to reduce the presence of vehicles on the roads.. I don’t believe they are operating in good faith.

How are these two things related?

Utterly precedented. https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/Shoot-the-tires-Th...

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