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Comment by mbgerring | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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