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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

Two points.

1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.

2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.

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It's a myth that EV charging requires an upgrade to a 100 amp connection. Scheduling charging to times when you're not using appliances will still result in a charged vehicle by morning.

The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)

We have a F-150 lightning, and charge it on a 12A, 120V charger. It’s fine for 6-10 trips a week. If I commuted in it to an office without a charger it wouldn’t be fine, but a smaller commuter car would be. (The truck gets 2.5 miles/kWh, commuter cars are at 4-5).

I’m sure we are outliers, but still.

Put another way: growing up with incandescent bulbs, I remember light switches that would turn on 6-8 lamp track lights. That’s half the current our EV charger draws. We had a space heater that drew more than our EV charger currently does.

Houses and neighborhoods are still built with electrical systems provisioned for pre-LED, pre-induction/heatpump workloads. They certainly have enough slack for everyone to plug in a level one or two charger simultaneously.

I wonder if the household share of grid power has gone down faster than total power has gone up, and that's why people are worried about EVs taking out the power grid even when everyone's individual house seems to handle it easily enough.

That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it.

(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)

Just gotta hope that slate auto is successful!

We are a net oil exporter. I have no idea where everyone around here thinks all this electricity to charge cars is going to come from.

> We are a net oil exporter.

That's a problem and behaviour with poor long term consequences.

Bit like Columbia being a net cocaine exporter.

> I have no idea

There are annual IEA reports on global energy demand and supply by means and country.

Those looking ahead to sustainable energy are improving technology and infrastructure to better utilize the great fusion reactor in the sky.

Certainly the US could use a plan for charging infrastructure and grid improvements- it's currently lagging both the EU and China there.

eg: Electric vehicle charging - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...

( Just the current trends in public charging stations, not trends in supply )

>Producing things that other people use is bad and literally cocaine!!!

>Stop wanting to actually make things and have a well rounded economy!!!

It's poor HN practice to badly strawman others comments.

Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and will lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.

Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.

I’m really at a loss with these “we should stop using the abundant natural resource bubbling out of the ground and completely overhaul our entire infrastructure” arguments. We also produce more wind power than anyone else. Change will come incrementally.

> Change will come incrementally.

You and I are in agreement then - and that change will ideally be away from harmful sequestered carbon.

> I have no idea

> I’m really at a loss

Seriously, starte with IEA reports, the IPCC reports, etc. they really do go into excruciating detail about these things you have no idea about and are at a loss to understand.

If you've been assuming you need to replace all the oil with the same amount of electrical power then you're seriously wrong.

Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.

While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.

You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.

Its not a 1:1 replacement but its also quite a significant amount of energy and infrastructure that is needed. You still have losses in electrical production from Gas/Solar/Wind/Nuclear to your charging round trip efficiency.

Its a massive change in how things operate in the US - significant amount of money reinvested into the grid and not solvable only through behavioral change. Thats one of a quiver of things that need to be done.

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