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Comment by langfo | Hacker News Reader

Has the EV charging infrastructure kept pace with the EV adoption?

At least here in Norway it has, it seems like it's not very difficult to put some cables in the ground and install a big pre built metal box :)

Most gas stations have them and there is also a lot of street charging stations.

But it's still cheapest to charge at home.

It's much harder to make a magic juice that moves though the cables and boxes ;)

Is it really that much harder than making the magic juice that legacy cars run on? By now it is cheaper and less reliant on despots all over the world to get electricity than fuel in most of Europe I assume. Electricity is a great interface as well given the actual source of energy doesn't matter as much and is interchangeable.

> it's not very difficult to put some cables in the ground and install a big pre built metal box :)

But increasingly it's becoming a problem that those cables have nowhere to run to as the grid isn't capable of serving them all. There might be excess generation but unless you have the capacity in the wires to get it where it's needed you're still stuck.

Especially in dense old cuties where the grid was built when the goal was to power a bunch of incandescent light bulbs. Not all the appliances we have today let alone cars with a battery capacity equal to a household's weekly usage of electricity when the grid was designed.

The problem can be alleviated with more chargers. If every parking spot had a charger you could slow-charge with much lower pressure on the grid. 2kW over night are plenty for most people’s driving needs.

You could but the customer seems to want as fast of a charge as possible...

Having driven an EV for over 10 years, I don't see why. There's plenty of places where you have the time but still.

>incandescent light bulbs

which are an order of magnitude less efficient than contemporary LED lights.

Less efficient but still often having a better output over the frequency spectrum

The whole point is that we used to assume that maybe 1 kW was sufficient. 6kW or 9kW isn't uncommon anymore, especially when you also use it for heating

Most people charge EVs at home most of the time.

In Europe? A lot of people live in apartment buildings

EV adoption is not uniformly distributed among the population.

Plus neither is house ownership. I'd say there is a decent correlation between apartment living vs house and the access to public transport. At least in Europe.

Not in Norway. Most people live in actual houses, whether they are detached and freestanding or attached, you still have a place for your car and therefore the opportunity install a charger.

The ground floor of apartment buildings in my country (not europe, india) is almost always reserved for parking. It is mandated though not uniformly followed in my city that there be 18 parking spots for my 8 house building. We follow it, and found it really easy to install EV charging ports for each one.

I don't own a car myself, but there are public EV charging points opposite my apartment in Denmark, and some in the (small) private underground parking garage.

I have rented the pay-per-minute electric cars a few times, and have always found it easy to get a discount on the next journey by leaving it plugged into a charger.

This says there are over 50,000 charging points: https://eletric-vehicles.com/general/denmarks-public-ev-char...

At least in the apartments I have been living in the last couple of years you can always choose to have a charger. For older buildings in e.g. Stockholm city center there could be a lack of available parking spaces in the building.

roughly 47% Danish population lives in multi-dwelling apartment blocks (53% in house properties)

in Norway its roughly 25% (apartments) vs 75% (houses)

The car sits somewhere overnight. Put a charger there.

not viable solution for people in apartments, most of the cars in Prague sits on the street next to curb without any chargers nearby, I don't think there is any country which would have chargers for every car parked on street, it's always shared charger for MANY cars, which works when there are only very few EVs like right now, but once you reach certain point the only realistic solution are expensive fast chargers (which are inconvenient anyway, since it still takes much more time to refill energy for same range as ICE in same amount of time)

In the city it's even easier. You have lamps and shops powered with 240V power on the streetside. Wires and conduit running under every street. The power infrastructure is already there. It would be like adding the power demand of a busy restaurant that uses electric stoves to each street, hardly impossible.

There are 50K public chargers in Denmark. 7K of which are fast chargers. There's no shortage of public chargers and more are deployed as demand is increasing. Also, Denmark is a small country. Most return trips inside the country would be doable on a single charge if you have one of the newer longer range vehicles. Copenhagen to Aarhus is only 300km or so. You could do that without charging in a new BMW. Mostly people charge at home or at one of those tens of thousands of roadside chargers in their neighborhood.

And of course Denmark pioneered a lot of wind technology. The country is running on cheap wind power at this point and you can get really favorable rates off peak hours.

No. And it's not the number of charging stations, it's the general shittiness of those. You never know how much you will pay per kWh, there are apps, networks, roaming agreements, cards, getting through this mess and starting to charge is always a challenge and takes a significant time (sometimes comparable to charging time!). You also get gouged on pricing, companies clearly set it so that the cost of 100km is comparable to that of a gas-powered vehicle. And for some reason people think EVs can only charge by backing into a stall, never in a drive-through bay like gasoline vehicles.

I own an EV and enjoy it a lot. I would not even consider buying a gas vehicle again. But while charging at home is great, charging during a trip is annoying. This needs regulation.

Are charging stations subsidized? That could be a good excuse to add regulations.

I've heard the subsidies are the reason why there's so many shitty charging stations. People build them, collect the subsidies, and never actually care about running it well. A silver lining is at least the space is reserved once we decide to get serious about fixing this as a society.

Charging stations just need to function like regular gas stations.

Prices need to be made available online and prominently displayed at the entrance of the station. They shouldn't allow cheaper prices for subscriptions or even blocking any access without one.

Gas stations do have cheaper prices for subscriptions often.

Depends on country I suppose. The main complaint from me is the difference in price and subscription requirement to even be able to use some of them though.

Subscriptions from major charging providers can easily run 15 Euros a month and for that you get electricity for up to 50% cheaper per kWh. There are also a lot of providers that you simply cannot charge with unless you are subscribed. Payment is only possible through their app or they send you a physical rfid token that's linked to your account.

In my town (200k inhabitants) roughly 40% of stations require you to sign up with the provider first before being able to use it.

Yes, they should function like gas stations and be regulated similarly. When I approach a gas station, I see the prices usually on large signs. If not, I always see the price I am actually paying displayed on a screen. None of these things are true for an EV charging station, which I think should be regulated.

Cheaper prices with subscriptions are not a problem at all. It's just that I should always see the final price that I will be paying per kWh before starting to charge.

On a related note, there is already a plug-and-charge system that identifies the car when it gets plugged in and is capable of charging the owner, but it almost never works. This is also something that should be mandated for larger EV adoption.

In Sweden it has. When I got my EV 4 years ago, the list of public EV charging locations was about the same as the amount of petrol stations, now its 3-4x as many. And as others have mentioned, having a wall charger of your own is of course the easiest and cheapest, but fearing long distance travels with EVs in Europe is not a thing, I think.

Try driving 1300km in a day… When I was a kid that's how our family vacations started.

Bear in mind relatively few people globally did that.

We're all special, each in our own unique way.

A decent EV will let you do 300km at highway speed. Starting at 100% at home, that's 4 times a 45 minutes break every 2.5 hours, which is a good idea anyway.

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