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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

> In urban areas, most people park on the streets

If you look at Paris or Montréal, they have L2 chargers on the streets. Easy solution for that problem, they’re just 240v/32A stations, you don’t need fancy hardware for that.

> That’s setting aside the problem than many power grids can’t handle that many cars plugged in at once.

People overestimate how much they drive, on average you’re not going to see a load that big, 13500 miles a year is 36 miles a day, or 9kwh in an efficient car, 18kwh in a bloated F-150 lightning. We might need financial incentives to charge cars at different times, sure.

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I get by fine with 240v/20a charging (16a in reality).

Street charging, leveraging things like existing utility lines to street lights, isn't a huge lift. The individual chargers can balance the current they deliver among themselves if / when they share a common feed.

Similarly in large parking lots where people spend lots of time, you can put "low power" DC charging so people can charge while they're shopping.

The key to thinking about EV charging vs petrol charging is that you can and should do it without locking the operator to the vehicle -- plug in and walk away should be the expected interaction. DC fast charging like using petrol is useful in a very specific use case (long distance travel) but the requirement of "dump a gas tank of energy into an EV" is actually absurdly complex and requires huge power infrastructure. Around where I live many of the tesla superchargers have a natural gas fuel cell electric generator right next to them.

Remember: for L2 charging the charger is part of the car. The thing with the cord is mostly just a fancy on/off switch.

Wouldn’t the time-of-day effect be amplified with enough EVs? Everyone arrives home at 6pm after work and plugs in.

My EV (and presumably most others) has settings so that it charges uses cheaper off-peak power. I tell it to make sure it's fully charged and preheated and ready to go at 7AM. So when it gets plugged in a 6PM it doesn't start charging until after midnight.

If evening peak loads become an issue then power companies can incentivise people to use less by raising the price at peak, and/or lowering it at off-peak times. And the software in the car can schedule charging to take advantage of cheaper prices. For example, you might plug in at 6pm, but the car will know to not start the charge until after 10pm, for example, or whenever power becomes cheaper.

Many EVs already allow for timing / delays for charging when plugged in. Also, charging at work should help balance out solar generation, especially.

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