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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I know a bunch of people who charge on standard 120V/15A. That'll let you add 40 miles of range overnight. It's not as good as 240V/50A that'll fully charge your car in 4 hours, but it is enough that they only rarely have to visit local fast chargers.

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That's what I do. And I still don't even bother to charge most nights. If you live in a relatively urban area and don't do a lot of driving that is more than adequate.

The problem is your emissions are minuscule and the difference between you owning an electric car or gas car is meaningless if your goal is to save the climate.

The big, heavy carbon users need to switch. But they have needs that are difficult to serve by electric

Electric generation is the low hanging fruit but some nations are already at the stage that the power sector has lower emissions than the transport sector and it is probably the next dominoe to fall. The country saves money and gets cleaner air plus battery storage to aid in greening the rest of the grid.

Everyone needs to switch to carbon neutral eventually, not everyone has to do it at the same time.

> Everyone needs to switch to carbon neutral eventually, not everyone has to do it at the same time.

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.

It was indeed already true decades ago.

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.

The direct impact of an individual vehicle is small. Collectively, they justify further investments in infrastructure and research, eventually addressing more needs.

1 car has miniscule emissions, if you call 50 tons of CO2 emissions miniscule, I don't. 2 billion cars & trucks together comprise the largest source of carbon emissions.

My car is my biggest source of emissions in my life. (I use a heat pump except on the coldest days) Though I just got a PEHV, which has greatly reduced my profile. I also live where my electric comes from renewable sources (my local utility generates more wind in a year than all customers use), so I can just ignore the impact of electric generation.

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.

I agree with the replies indicating emissions aren't trivial, but to answer to the more self-serving interests that are well represented on HN: have you experienced NEVER going to a gas station?

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...

I did that for years, just using an average power plug (now I moved to a house that already had a fast charger installed). The car, a PHEV, came with the recharger and charged fully overnight. The car only goes around 40km on EV alone, but that's more than enough for my daily needs. And it's almost "free", we did not notice any change in the electric bill after buying the car!

I find that the 30 miles my PHEV gives me is not enough for daily needs several times a week. Though I seem to be saving hundreds of dollars every month in gas while I haven't noticed a power bill increase (I've only had it for a few weeks so I can't fully gauge the impact, but so far it seems to line up with your report). At the point I can safely tell most people that they should just refuse to look at any new vehicle that isn't PHEV or full EV. Used car buyers should be willing to pay a lot more of the above - it will pay off in the long term.

Note that the big battery in a BEV is a great averaging mechanism. As long as your average drive is less than the amount you get from an overnight charge, you're likely fine. If you're adding 40 miles of range a night to a 300 mile battery, you have to have 4 consecutive days of 100 mile usage before you have to hit an external charger. Mix a few days of 20 mile usage between those 100 mile days and external charger usage is exceedingly rare.

Or, if we are getting fancy, 240V/20A, which can be run with just a single 12/2 Romex, provides around 3x the "range" per hour, since there is some fixed overhead losses to heat the battery pack, turn electronics on, etc.

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.

While it's not cost effective, I've been debating getting a $300 smart switcher that plugs into my dryer's 240V / 30A, and includes an adapter to the 50A plug my home charger users, while preventing charging while the dryer is in use.

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.

I've thought about that, but technically those are not allowed by code in most places.

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