Charging is an issue for almost everyone I know. If I could get my utility company PG&E to upgrade my power, I could consider it, but we're told we have to wait years. So we have no way to charge, and there are not enough chargers around here are.
The big, heavy carbon users need to switch. But they have needs that are difficult to serve by electric
That was true decades ago, but now it's gone far too long without any real action, and things have gotten far enough out of control that everyone really does kinda have to do it at the same time if we want a shred of hope to turn this flaming bus ride over the cliff-edge around (or even slow it down at all). It could have all been a relatively painless transition, but now there will be suffering involved, and the longer it's delayed, the worse the suffering will be.
I would say that the transition we are currently witnessing is real action: while the pandemic made it difficult to be certain, the extremely rapid growth of renewables — even though electricity is far from the only concern — seems to have resulted in emissions either peaking or being very close to peaking.
I'm not sure if we really could have gone much faster. 20 years ago I would have bet on nuclear energy and hydrogen cars, not because they were cheap, but because nuclear was already at the right scale and hydrogen can obviously be scaled up quickly whenever the energy is cheap. Instead, we got PV so cheap I'm planning on getting a balcony system with a pay-back period of less than a year because it makes sense to get that immediately while my partner and I plan how to do a full-power system, and batteries are so cheap they're not only used in cars but also for grid power time shifting.
But to expand on what I said before, electricity is far from the only concern: we need to reduce emissions by 99.9% to be sustainable. If you look at this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector, the remaining 0.1% is the smallest line in the pie chart — "grassland". Switching all road transport to electric helps a lot (11.9%), it's not something to be dismissed simply because other things also need to be fixed.
Yes making a car uses a lot of carbon, but the car lasts a long time and generally in a ICE car the carbon emissions from using it are greater the manufacturing.
Seriously, that is a great feature of EVs...
Not to mention the massively reduced cost/mile. I expect my used Nissan Leaf to pay for itself in ~5years...
Not to mention the AMAZING acceleration of even a non-performance oriented EV...
In new-ish (but not new enough to have EV charger prewiring) construction, garages sometimes have a dedicated 20A receptacle circuit for a garage freezer. If its a dedicated circuit with one outlet, you can rewire the 120V/20A to 240V/20A to get 3.8kW vs 1.4kW on a 120V/15A. The cost to do this (to code) would be about $150, or $50 if you don't care about GFCI. Could also buy a used, cheap, hardwired EVSE rather than making it an outlet.
Dryer is next to garage, still need to make a "fancy" hole in the wall, but definitely like the idea of the faster, more efficient charging option.
In the meantime, slow-ass 120V/15A charging is plenty for my needs.
The people who are doing the most driving are the suburban folks living in houses with big yards and driving 30 miles into work every day.
And that's a larger chunk of the total population in the US than the apartment dwellers who own cars.
Your metro may vary.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Charging will come to newer apartments, and then older apartments.
But there's still a lot of single-family homes, yes? Like, the majority of people living in those areas are in single-family homes? So probably the majority of car owners?
Easily 50%+ of households around you could probably have an EV. And yet people act like it's only some tiny miniscule slice of the population which could easily change to an EV.
But large chunks of some of the largest metro areas are made up of massive suburbs largely built from the 2000s onwards. I'm talking Houston, Phoenix, DFW, Austin, Atlanta, Denver, San Antonio, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Knoxville, and similar areas. And that's just areas I've visited.
Sure, there are 100+ year old neighborhoods in Dallas. But around me, some homes were made in the 50s, a big spurt were made in the late 70s and early 80s, then a massive amount were built in the 00's to literally still being constructed. Massive neighborhoods, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and more exist where there was farmland just five years ago. This makes up a large percentage of the growth of this city. It's not like they're building 100 year old houses for the 30% of growth over the last 25 years.
Go take a look at satellite images of Prosper TX. Of Princeton TX. McKinney TX. Allen TX. Rockwall TX. Dickinson TX.
Where I grew up in Houston in the late 80s/early 90s, you practically couldn't find a house that was built before 1975 other than the derelict remains of old farm houses. The house I grew up in was built in '93 and was kind of out there at the time (had to take a dirt road to get to the neighborhood!) And there's been a ton of construction since then, going further and further into the swamps. Woods where I grew up playing in are now full of single family homes.
So no, the sprawl of suburbs continuously marching more and more into the country side isn't a new thing and it isn't something rare in the slightest. It's happening practically everywhere that's growing in the US and has been for 30+ years.
But that doesn't put money into oil profits and hurts their bottom line.
It only makes more sense if you want to make the grid greener & have price arbitrage based on the time of day.
I’m sure there are problems with this (feel free to point them out).
It would be nice if somehow we could move to lighter cars where the same range would require half the battery capacity, therefore half the charging resources to go from low to full.
Charging it from low to high generally uses the same energy as five charges of 1/5th the capacity.
It has 240v AC, which I use to charge.
I seriously doubt you need to "upgrade" anything, just plug in the car.
Unless you're trying to have the highest grade fast charging at home, your existing electrical connection is almost certainly adequate. But since a car at home can charge overnight, you almost certainly don't need any kind of fast charging...
Putting them there makes the necessary grid upgrades much smaller than they otherwise would be.
Now a semi truck might actually get significant added range.
EV efficiency is around 24-30 kWh/100 miles[2], so that's around 8-10 kWh/day.
200 W is what I expect as a 24h average; that's 4.8 kWh/day, 48%-60% of average usage.
I'd expect a semi to be a much smaller percentage because of getting driven further each day — drivers get in the news for spending longer than they're supposed to behind the wheel.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-drivers-log-328-trillion...
[1] https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/number-o...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_EPA_fuel_economy
I pointed out a semi because for long distance shipping they don't use much power (they get as much as 10mpg - but I don't know how to turn that into watts) and because of that long trailer they could potentially be close to energy neutral around mid-day (though only for a couple hours during ideal conditions).
Most cars are around 2m wide, 4-6m long, less windows. Off noon, the side pannels become relevant.
Capacity factor for sensible systems are around 10-15%, which encompasses both weather and night.
I guess we don't know where you live, but on the surface of planet Earth, you only get 12 hours of daylight, averaged over the course of a year. Plus dusk and dawn aren't really good for solar power. And then clouds are also a factor for many locations.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1kW%2Fm%5E2%2A8m%5E2%2A...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1kW%2Fm%5E2%2A10m%5E2%2...