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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

That seems very reasonable. The infrastructure to actually use EVs in the USA doesn't exist except for the coasts and around very large cities. Most of the area of the USA simply doesn't have it at all. Additionally, if everyone did have EV cars the current electrical grid infrastructure would not be able to support the increased load.

These aren't problems with EVs, really, but they are show stoppers. The EV car infrastructure for a large, dispersed country like the USA is much harder than the cars themselves.

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Where people live, the infrastructure exists. The US grid can handle existing load if almost 80% of current light vehicles moved to electric today (per DOE and NREL). This regulation is a cop out because the US is lazy.

https://supercharge.info/map (all automakers have adopted the NACS Tesla standard)

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/blog-can-the-g...

https://www.6sqft.com/50-of-americans-live-in-the-countrys-1...

According to this, who advocates for EVs, it doesn't exist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNBLhGsjHQI

There is neither the power, nor the electric lines, to carry all of the electricity needed. Making all of that needs to happen and happen fast but AFAIK it's not happening.

In the video she says it will cost $1.5-2k per EV to upgrade the grid which is just not that much money

> Where people live, the infrastructure exists.

Have you tried using non-Tesla charging stations? It's a disaster! Those charging terminals are hastily thrown together pieces of junk, frankly. The hardware, software, billing, everything.

Most people should be doing most of their charging at home. As someone pointed out downthread, level 1 (120V/15A) charging should be sufficient to cover most people's daily driving needs as long as they can keep the vehicle plugged in while they're not driving it. Obviously this is much easier for some (people who own a home with a garage) than others (people who do not have a garage or other fixed parking spot) but that's a problem we can fix gradually as electric cars gain market share.

Yep I agree EV charging “grid upgrades” will cost some amount but it is small potatoes in the big picture, like a couple pennies per day per person

>Have you tried using non-Tesla charging stations? It's a disaster! Those charging terminals are hastily thrown together pieces of junk, frankly. The hardware, software, billing, everything.

I've used public CCS charging for several years and I think your assessment is more than a bit harsh. Is the Tesla network more refined, reliable, and widespread? Yes. Is the CCS option "a disaster"? Absolutely not. I would call it a mixed bag. Level-2 charging has just worked 99.999% of the time. DC fast charging there are stations that can be out of service more often than I would like, but if you use the plugshare app you will almost certainly be able to reliably find chargers that are both working and available.

It is extremely annoying to potentially have to use more than one app, but I would hope that will slowly change over time. The best thing the government could do is mandate some sort of centralized billing option for all of the various providers. For and GM are trying to do it through their apps but the problem is they only cover a subset of networks.

> Level-2 charging has just worked 99.999% of the time.

If Level 2 charging worked all but 1 in 100K trials, neither you (in several years) nor I (in 10 years) should have expected to be a favorite to have experienced even a single Level 2 charger outage. Instead, I've experienced multiple such failures every year.

I'm a pretty big supporter of the potential of EVs, and been very happy with mine (even having bought the cheapest and worst one: a Nissan Leaf). But, I'm also a fan of using correct estimations and data when confronting the problems with EV-related infrastructure and I estimate public Level 2 charging to be closer to 99.5% than 99.999% (1 in 200 failures vs 1 in 100K failures). That might even be a slightly generous estimate.

I've literally never come across an L2 charger not working anywhere in my state. I have seen one offline in the last 4 years. Looking at plugshare I see one site that had an outage for 2 days across all L2 chargers in the last 90 days.

Presumably you've got a database that you just forgot to link that you can reference for your information since you're a fan of correct estimations and data, and not just using your personal anecdotal experience. Because otherwise you're just being pedantic.

Sure, here's a data summary of overall grid availability, which in most places will serve as the upper limit on L2 charging availability. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50316

That gives a typical grid availability of only 99.95%, making it pretty unlikely that the L2 network will have 1/50th the downtime of the grid itself.

That's a common response I get from people who only have lived experience in the US west. You may not be aware but east of the Mississippi all the land is lived in, all of it. It's not empty like in the west outside of cities. Living in Wisconsin in one of the vast areas you assume people don't live in I've never even seen an EV station. I live in a duplex and would not be able to charge an EV car (no outside outlets, no way to run an extension cord across the shared parking lot, only one NEMA 50 outlet used by my oven). Forced EV policies unintentionally discriminate against the poor. And yes, 50% of people might be in large cities, but 50% are not.

Looking at that supercharge.info map I see the EV stations are 50 miles apart and only on major interstates. There are significant fractions of the population (ie, probably 1/3) more than 75 miles from any charging station. And the vast majority of destinations are just as far from them. There's literally only 30 for the entire state of Wisconsin and half are clustered in the two moderately large cities in the south. Why link the map when you knew it didn't confirm your assertion?

edit: I was wrong about the grid not being high capacity enough and I am happy to be corrected and learn I am wrong about that.

Yes, we'd need about 20% more electricity generation if all cars were EV's.

Even if 100% of all new cars sold today were EV's, it'd still take 20 years before essentially all cars were EV's. Add the 10 years to get to that point. So we have 30 years to add 20% more electricity generation capacity.

We're currently adding 50GW of capacity per year to our 1.3TW current capacity. IOW, about 4% per year. At that rate it'll take about 5 years to add enough capacity to handle a 100% EV fleet.

How much do you think it would cost to add an outdoor 120v 15a outlet? Any rational landlord would add one if it increases/keeps renters

I have to laugh - yes, on paper, the US is ready in many areas.

In reality - it's not even close. The charging experience is a disaster. The grid? I'm not confident, to put it mildly. Politically? Nobody wants to drive what feels like a Prius - light-duty vehicles are unpopular, and the last thing EVs need is anything that feels like politicization.

> light-duty vehicles are unpopular

I think by "light duty vehicle" the OP meant ordinary passenger vehicles. Under US law, essentially every vehicle with four or more wheels, under 10,000 lbs gross weight and no more than 10 passenger seating positions counts as one: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.3 That includes everything from smaller vehicles like the Mazda Miata or Mini Cooper all the way to large vehicles like the Cadillac Escalade or a Ford F-250.

Correct. I was referring to how almost everyone seems to want an SUV or a Truck. We can discuss the merits of that, or why that is, another time - however, forcing people to go back to small cars would breed resentment and turn EVs into a national political issue overnight.

Edit: And by "force," I mean "price out of the market" relative to gas-powered vehicle prices.

Almost every company making EVs these days has truck or SUV models planned if they do not already have them for sale. Even the most recent round of US subsidies for electric vehicles favors trucks and SUVs over cars by having a signficiantly higher price cap for those types of vehicle to qualify for the subsidy vs cars. For better or worse, the EV transition (in the US) is not going to force people to buy smaller cars.

I agree its an uphill battle against the lizard brain. Onward. Can't fix the human, can only engineer around it.

I actually even reject that premise, because that comes with an implicit "I know better than you, because I read the science."

Science is only a small factor in everyday decision making for most people. Art is not scientific. "Feel" is not scientific. The feel of "safety" is not scientific. Etc.

I'm unsure if the climate cares how one feels about science. Like gravity, the hard stop is ambivalent to a position on the topic.

When 37% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency expense, there are other things that need to be fixed first. Make Americans feel like they can afford more expensive vehicles - and they will buy expensive vehicles.

> Nobody wants to drive what feels like a Prius

I'm quite happy with my Prius. I think it's a skill issue. Roof racks and a tow hitch on a normal sized car handle the vast majority of cases where people imagine they need a truck or SUV. But I remember a young couple showing up to buy a mattress from my roommate, and being flummoxed when the mattress wouldn't fit inside their Subaru Forester with built-in roof rails. I had to show them how to tie it on the roof. They never did return my rope... If you can only imagine putting things inside the vehicle or in the bed of a pickup truck, then having a truck or a big SUV must seem essential. What makes it even weirder is that the Prius has more interior space than a lot of SUVs.

Electricity consumption in the US has historically been higher than it is now - why do you assume that a) the conversion to electric vehicles will be overnight b) the grid can't be enhanced to cope?

> rules that would have forced US automakers to turn EVs into their main business by 2032

8 years is plenty of time.

On a big project, 8 years is no time at all.

It's going to feel much more dire if any of the major European or Korean brands approach their 2030 targets.

The timeline is the biggest problem. Grid stuff moves extremely slowly due to the extremely critical aspect of the grid, slowish beauracracy of many organizations involved, high costs for generation and power lines, and permitting challenges. If you want to make everything electric and demand is going to triple in about a decade or so, then we simply have no way to respond to that in short order with the current reality of the system. The industry has seen more change in the past 10 years than the previous 50. There are a lot of moving parts. It's an exciting time to be working in power.

That’s not a useful observation regarding the grid - yes, if EVs magically appeared in everyone’s driveways tomorrow then there might be a problem, but over a decade or so it’s basically no issue. All this is factored into planning. Even just a little demand management helps a lot too (like incentivising people charging at certain times by making it cheaper).

What parts of the US don’t have a grid that can tolerate about two dozen kWh per car per day extra load?

The OP must be talking about eastern Alaska ;)

Are you saying places in the US lack electricity? Aside from long range travel, you only need an extra 120v 15A outlet for most EV use cases.

Not quite. You need an extra 120 V 15 A outlet near someplace where you can leave your car overnight.

That would be no problem at my house. My garage has plenty of 120 V 15 A outlets (although when I get an EV I'll have a 240 V 30 A outlet put in).

Every apartment I've lived in did have an extra 120 V 15 A outlet, but none of them had one anywhere near my parking spot.

The interesting thing about high density parking spots; is that they are, also the most cost effective to add high density charging to;

Whether outside or in a parking garage,

- they tend to be located near the trunk line

- where an additional transformer and meter can be added with least impact to aesthetics

- either buried electrical or concrete mounted conduit have the lowest construction costs (compared to finishing behind walls)

Yeah I mean maybe it would cost 50-100k to provide L2 charging for an entire apartment? Not zero but not really a big deal in the big picture

So either is an area with sparse population where there are few public chargers and lots of people with garages, or it’s a dense area with apartments where it’s relatively easy to improve the infrastructure?

Yeah exactly, I agree it will cost something to upgrade but the costs are just not that high

The amount it would cost to add minimal outlets near apartment parking is just not that high

So let them make the infrastructure instead of pushing the dates. What were they doing until now?

Surely increased pressure would deliver the desired effect, not decreased pressure!

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