100 Supercharger Stations | Hacker News Reader

100 Supercharger Stations

teslamotors.com

147 pointsph0rque85 comments

I don't live in America and haven't seen a Tesla charging station, so maybe some of these obvious ideas are already happening, but:

* You'll have at least 20 minutes of waiting for your car to charge, during which time Tesla could be selling you snacks and/or fast food. Filling stations in most countries already follow that proven business model.

* These charging stations have solar panels on the roof, so they presumably already have the necessary inverters and whatever other infrastructure to pump electricity back to the grid. Tesla could make some deals to put panels up on nearby buildings who could save on capital costs by just piggybacking off Tesla. They could become a power utility company over time.

* Teslas are quite expensive, so Tesla owners (and therefore drivers) are generally affluent, which are the kind of customers local businesses would want to attract. So having a charging station nearby could be something malls might even pay for or want to subsidise. Similarly the land around a supercharger station in what is otherwise "the middle of nowhere" could become significantly more valuable, so if Tesla purchases extra cheap land around stations placed along interstate highways they could stand to make quite a bit of money selling that to property developers afterwards.

I guess what I'm saying is if Tesla plays their cards right, then Tesla cars could be like giving away razor handles for cheap.

Variations on your second point are definitely in the plans. The Tesla charging stations are being put up in conjunction with Solar City, a solar panel leasing company, which was founded by Elon Musk's cousins.

These Supercharger stations are generally already on someone else's property, like a hotel or mall near a highway.

Cumulative total energy delivered to date: 4.9 million kWh

That works out to about $250,000, or about $10 per Tesla Model S sold to date. Early days and all, but it looks like about $100† tacked on to the selling price of the car covers lifetime supercharger network power use. Capital expenditures to build them probably dwarf their electric bills.

␄

† To the limits of Fermi Estimation

It's a $2000 upgrade fee to use the superchargers (on the 60kWh battery). The $2000 fee is included in the 85kWh battery model.

I didn't think that was correct but it does say that down in the 'How It Works' section. Its interesting how the skate over that one little detail.

How did you pick your electricity cost?

It's a lot lower than I would guess.

$0.05/kwh. About what industrial users pay in most of the US.

I thought superchargers were solar powered?

That's for the future. Apropos, the source of power for electric cars is a frequent discussion issue among environmentalists. In some parts of the country, for example the Northwest, there's a lot of hydroelectric power, so an electric car is better for the environment than a gas-powered car. But in places where most of the power is generated using coal, it's not so clear-cut -- owning an electric car or a gas-powered car might have roughly equal effects on the environment.

Factor in nuclear-as-drop-in-replacement for coal, or future solar / wind generation capacity then purchasing an EV now still makes sense. Cars are on the road for 20+ years, new generation capacity is coming online constantly, so I think it makes sense for people to buy EVs.

EVs make sense for some people. But not most people. Not yet.

> But not most people. Not yet.

Out of curiosity, what do you think needs to change for them to make sense for most people?

I personally feel the Model S has made an enormous step towards "makes sense" for a lot of people, and I have to think the X will "make sense for most"

I guess one of the benefits is that you're decoupling the energy transfer method from the energy source. If there is new development of solar, wind, geothermal, wave energy etc. electric cars will be ready to receive energy from them versus trying to replace ICE cars. Even if the energy is derived from coal, cleaning the waste products at the factory is easier and is easier to upgrade the filters rather than replacing catalytic converters with better ones on regular cars.

Really? When I researched this last, even the worst power source charging a Tesla outpaced internal combustion pollution (at the point of power generation only, not counting the cost of making the batteries).

Keep in mind that what matters is not just the amount of power generation capacity, but the ability of that capacity to respond to demand.

Some background: The bulk electricity market (at least in NY state) is run as a giant linear programming problem to satisfy the demand for all regions with a set of supply curves that suppliers bid into the market. They all get paid the same price that the marginal watt (the last watt you need to buy to meet demand) costs.

So, natural gas turbines, who can turn on and off relatively quickly, will bid high and are likely to be the marginal watt. Nuclear plants bid very low and occasionally negative because it actually costs them money to shut down because they then can't start up again soon. So, they want to be sure that they are going to be scheduled.

This is oversimplified and ignores the difference between the day-ahead market and real-time market, products like regulation (we pay money for people to be ready to turn on/off and keep things at 60Hz), and inter-zone transmission)

The point is that a nuclear plant can't suddenly turn on in response to a spike in demand from quickly-charging car batteries. A bigass flywheel or a bigass battery (shameless plug for Sadoway: http://www.ambri.com/) might though.

One hell of a disparity between that and my parents paying ~$.18/kwh in rural Michigan.

Your rural parents don't make nearly the use of the physical wiring that cost so much to install. It shows in the rate.

That and slamming consumers is what the power companies do (here in New Zealand). See the commerce commission report (2009 - and there have been large price increases since) that found profits unreasonably high. http://www.comcom.govt.nz/dmsdocument/192

Also a kiwi here. Read the summary and it said the commission closed the investigation. Looks like every thing was legal, just the power companies maximising profits. Exactly what companies should do.

Any battery has a hard time storing an amount of energy that costs the same as itself during its lifetime. This is opposite to combustion engines, which can pump infinite amounts of dollars through their cylinders.

It's an insanely smart offering.

IC engines are far from infinite. In fact, most can "only" burn in the neighborhood of 3-5K gallons of fuel per cylinder before requiring a major overhaul.

It's admittedly quite a bit more than the supercharger equivalent, but it's far from infinite.

Was curious, did the math: 3-5K gallons * 6 cyl * 25 mpg = 450,000 to 750,000 miles.

removed my incorrect math re: dollars of fuel per engine

3,000 gallons per cylinder * 6 cylinders * $4 per gallon = $72,000

5,000 gallons per cylinder * 6 cylinders * $4 per gallon = $120,000

Double-check your math: it's $4 per gallon, not $4 per mile.

If you're putting 5,000 gallons through each of six cylinders at $4 per gallon, that works out to $120,000 of gas. Certainly outweighs the cost of the engine by a decent factor.

whoops, thanks!

I suspect the energy cost is a little higher than that because a commercial electricity customer (like Tesla) will often be subject to 'demand charges,' which are assessed based on the highest power used in a billing period. Since the point of a supercharger is to deliver a lot of power, the demand charge may be quite high.

I still agree with your conclusion though... Capital still dwarfs energy, even if they pay several times what you estimated.

I doubt that any individual super-charger station is a large enough load to be charged for their peak usage. It's a big load but nothing like a smelter or even a small factory.

Definitely more power than a small factory. A six station supercharger could be pulling 500 kW.

Up until 2012, demand charges from Souther California Edison kicked in at 20 kW at a rate of $17 per kW. One of the first 50 kW quick-chargers in LA county was shut down for months after the owner realized that operating it would tack on an extra $1000 to his monthly bill.

Wow, I had no idea their network was already this good:

> The network is already robust enough to support long-distance drives on the most popular routes across America, wherever it be a cross country trip from Los Angeles to New York, an East Coast jaunt from Rhode Island to the southern tip of Florida, or an epic 12,000-mile journey to every corner of the United States.

I'm not sure if I've just been out of the loop, or if they aren't doing a good enough job pimping their supercharger network. This removes one of the perceived problems with electric cars - long road trips. Does anyone here have real world experience doing a long road trip with a Tesla S, using the supercharger network?

There's a nice interactive map here: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

It looks like you can do cross country road trips if you take a specific route through the middle of the country. By the end of this year, it looks much better.

I am impressed. A yearly trip of mine is from Raleigh, NC to Long Island by way of Norfolk, VA, CBBT, Delmarva peninsula, Cape May ferry and Garden State parkway. That'll be doable by the end of the year if I'm reading the map correctly.

The decision to bypass the I-80 corridor in favor of a more northernly route is curious. Wonder what spawned that?

Possibly population and buyers.

The norther route puts you close to Minneapolis and Madison / Milwaukee. Larger populations, also more liberal, generally, than a slightly more southern route.

The I-80 corridor fills in if you go to the end of 2015.

Prioritization.

Yeah, that's odd. You could move those five stations from I-90 to I-80 and the trip would be a bit shorter.

Maybe South Dakota is cheaper than Nebraska. Or they wanted to show that you could go to the National Parks.

Also Wall Drug. They should have a charging station at Wall Drug.

Affluence.

You would think they would be convincing magazine editors to doing a long-form 'we drove a tesla across the US' type article. I'd be very interested in reading something like that - what its really like to string together a long trip using supercharger stations.

Tesla recently completed a cross country road trip using the Supercharger stations. They put up a bunch of blog posts and videos about it.

Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou46vykyIAk

Any objective magazine would pair it with a gas or diesel car and do a "Top Gear" style race, and compare and contrast the tradeoffs.

Well, from a purely 'distance covering' point of view, clearly a liquid fuel car would win because of faster refueling, higher range and speed limits.

I was more thinking of a road trip article, where the travel itself is the focus of the article. Is the car comfortable on long trips? Are the superchargers always easy to find? What sort of characters and people do you meet at supercharger stations? Did the forced longer stops make the journey better or worse?

It's a big difference to 'who got there faster'. That would be a foregone conclusion.

They did this before with the nytimes and it didn't end the way Tesla would've liked. The writer had a number of problems, and Elon Musk accused him of being dishonest to create a story.

Here's the original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/automobiles/after-a-chargi...

And here's some coverage of the controversy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/automobiles/after-a-chargi...

I'd love to know if they bought trip data from places lie AAA to determine the best places to put a station...

I'd love to see their method of analysis on this...

I've done SF -> LA and SF -> Vegas without any issues.

The supercharger in Folsom enables Tahoe, and was one of the first to go in. But because of the cold and the elevation change, you have to stay there for more than 2 nights to make that one practical (or stay at the Ritz, which still seems to be the only hotel with >110v charging.)

Tesla is interesting, but there may be an upcoming battle between EV and fuel cells since it seems Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are supporting fuel cells instead of EV. But Tesla is not alone (Nissan, BMW) so this may be a battle that will split the industry. A big part of this fight will be infrastructure. Currently, gas powered cars have these advantages:

- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)

- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)

- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)

EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.

The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of advantages.

Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not be true.

Fuel cell fillers are slower than gas and not much faster than quick-charge stations.

EV charging stations are ubiquitous. Fuel cell fillers are outrageously expensive.

All US cars can charge with J1772. CHadEMO and SuperChargers have the same power output, so adapters will be possible and reasonable.

Oh, and hydrogen-fueled cars are far less efficient wells-to-wheels than electrically-fueled. We can't afford to be paying more for fuel.

A (comically large) CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter will be available for about $1000. CHAdeMO has a maximum output of 500V/100A or 50 kW, whereas Tesla Superchargers are presently 120 kW.

http://shop.teslamotors.com/collections/model-s-charging-ada...

If you know, could you expand on the capital costs to convert a typical petrol station to, or augment it with, hydrogen capacity? I strongly suspect there's rather a lot of hardware (insulated tank and plumbing, major refrigeration, etc) required, and I suspect there are in some states at least rather restrictive (post-hindenburg) laws about hydrogen storage. Much higher costs than a Tesla superstation, no?

I own an RV with a propane tank, and propane storage and filling equipment is more complicated than the petrol equivalent, and a propane fill is always done by a trained person -- no self-serve allowed! Hydrogen would be many times more complex.

Also re standardization, there is a standard electrical plug use at all EV charge points, it fits my Toyota plug-in hybrid, a Nissan Leaf, or a Tesla. I am looking forward to stopping at a Tesla superstation with my Prius, I can probably get a full charge in 5-6 minutes...

Tesla uses a proprietary electrical plug. A J1772 adapter is included with their cars to charge at level 2 charging stations. A CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter is also available for about $1000.

This means you cannot charge non-Tesla EVs at a supercharger. Sorry.

So, just for the record, you're betting against Elon Musk himself on hydrogen fuel cells [1]. This is a guy who has stated, multiple times, that hydrogen fuel cells make no sense from first principles analysis, even considering the best case scenario. The efficiency of converting methane to hydrogen, transporting it to (non-existent) hydrogen fuel stations, and converting it to electricity in an inefficient fuel cell just doesn't make any sense. May as well just burn corn ethanol.

Also, just use common sense for a moment. Look how much flak Tesla is getting for their little battery fires. Do you have any idea what destruction compressed hydrogen gas is capable of causing? Not to mention all of the issues with storing hydrogen in the first place (hydrogen cracking).

I'm not a betting man, but I'll take any bets on hydrogen fuel cell cars becoming mainstream.

1. http://youtu.be/MmQb94EF1UY?t=29m40s

That's an interesting compare-and-contrast. I don't think the standardization thing is quite right, as the connector is pretty much standard aside from Tesla's, and it doesn't appear that adapters are hard to make (Teslas come with one). The fact that a Leaf can't connect to a supercharger is mainly because Tesla is trying to make them exclusive to move units. Charging stations that aren't actually owned by an electric car manufacturer will use the standard connector.

Ubiquity is being solved rapidly. Electric has a huge advantage here because the necessary infrastructure is almost zero. A charging station costs a couple thousand bucks, and plug it into the grid and you're ready to go. This isn't just theoretical. In my area (fairly affluent but not incredibly techy DC suburb) there are already a bunch of electric car charging stations available. The local Walgreens has one, for some incomprehensible reason. I've never seen it used, but it's there, ready and waiting.

I think recharge time is by far the biggest factor here. If recharging was fast, the rapidly growing network of chargers would make it practical to own an electric car with a Tesla-level range even for someone living in an apartment or similar. You'd have to recharge more often than you'd fill up with a gas car, but on the other hand you could just park in a recharging-equipped parking spot while you go out to a restaurant or go shopping, making it part of your regular routine.

In terms of practicality, it seems that the question is whether hydrogen can attain ubiquity before electric can attain fast recharging times. With only a couple dozen hydrogen stations in the US currently, and at $500,000+ for the necessary equipment, I doubt we'll see ubiquitous hydrogen anytime soon. With Tesla superchargers already providing an 80% charge in 40 minutes, I'd put my bet on fast battery charging winning the race.

"mainly because Tesla is trying to make them exclusive to move units"

I don't think that's the case. I believe the two major reasons are simply:

- superchargers are 120kW, ChaDeMo is 50kW. - Tesla wants to retain the ability to iterate to figure out what works well, and what is required, before standardization

At this stage in the market, electric car companies are much better off co-operating rather than competing. I'm willing to bet that every Leaf sold increases Tesla's sales in the medium term rather than decreases it. The Leaf owner is a first adopter, who demonstrates to their friends and families that electric cars are practical. Not to mention that Leaf to Tesla is a common upgrade path as income, needs and/or family size grows.

How are fuel cell cars going to avoid these issues? They will be even less ubiquitous than solar charging stations, considering it will cost much more to build one.

Hydrogen will end up being barely cheaper than gas, too. And I don't think it will be that much more environmentally safe than gas. At least electric cars have the potential to be almost fully charged by solar power in the future.

Also, I expect hydrogen-based cars to be even more expensive than electric cars.

The economics of fossil-fuel gasoline will change markedly. I wouldn't use current price points as a reliable guide to future projections.

It'll be interesting to watch.

A year ago I was thinking biofuels might be the way to go, I've since concluded that the capacity for production simply fails in any conceivable scenario to meet present levels of demand.

I do see liquid hydrocarbon fuels as attractive, though, based on energy density, flexibility, storage stability, and the very large level of installed base and technological familiarity in their use. For those reasons, the US Naval Research Lab's electricity-to-fuel synthesis relying on seawater for both hydrogen and CO, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, and producing fuel at a $3-6/gallon price estimate (I suspect that will go higher, and at present, crude oil price is about 70% of the final cost of gasoline at the pump), might allow for a continuation of fossil-fuel energy systems in a carbon-neutral and sustainable fashion.

Not cheap by a long shot, but plausible.

I'm expecting CNG to become a lot more prevalent. Domestic supply is abundant and growing. Fleets and long haul trucks are increasingly converting. Natural gas utilities are pretty much everywhere, so the main thing that needs to be build out is the actual refueling stations. Standard refuling fittings are already defined.

Honda sold a CNG version of the Civic here in SoCal for a while. It didn't sell very well because the tank took up most of the trunk and the range wasn't much better than most electric cars (around 150 miles, as I recall).

On top of that, the number of refueling stations is very limited--natural gas pipes are ubiquitous in cities, but they deliver the gas at a much lower pressure. You still need a roughly $2k compressor to fill the tank overnight (which uses about as much electricity as you'd put in an electric car). Commercial stations have more expensive compressors that operate continuously to fill a holding tank which cars are filled from.

It's not impossible. But the infrastructure required to put energy in the vehicle costs the same or more as for an electric car. And you use just as much electricity as an electric car (in addition to the natural gas). And the cars aren't that much cheaper than battery EVs. And the cars have similar range and refilling limitations as EVs.

Maybe we'll see it for trucks, though.

UPS is already using Natural Gas/Diesel hybrid engines for runs between SoCal and Vegas.

The trucks are driving between relatively fixed points, so it's a simple matter to build CNG stations there. Plus, the cost of a battery scales linearly with the capacity of the battery, while the cost of the CNG tank scales the square root of the capacity. Batteries are also heavier per unit energy, which reduces the truck's legal payload capacity.

So that use case has a strong argument for CNG.

Weight doesn't really matter for a personal automobile, and you can't (easily) make the tank big enough to argue that a large tank is cheaper than a large battery. It's true, but costs unrelated to tank size are still important, and the bigger issue is that the range sucks unless you give up the entire trunk (since you can't make a CNG tank flat (like Tesla) or T-shaped (like GM).

The petrochemical industry would absolutely love for hydrogen fuel cells to become viable instead of EVs because they already have a massive amount of infrastructure and the easiest/cheapest way of getting hydrogen is to capture it from hydrocarbons.

Musk is right though, steam reforming hydrocarbons to generate hydrogen doesn't make any sense, nor does electrolysis. Using that amount of energy to generate a fuel so that you can fill up at the pump quickly is just plain nuts. We're better off using higher voltages, better batteries and super capacitors.

I notice the 100th station is in New Jersey, one of the two states that bans self-serve gas stations. I'm hoping Tesla owners don't have to ask an on-duty attendant to plug-in their vehicles there.

Technically it is not a gas station. What does the law say?

I'm sure the coverage would have mentioned it if such an absurdity applied. (I was just poking fun at New Jersey, where I grew up.) More background on the anachronistic restriction:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/09/18/new_jersey_se...

http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lsse/laws/Retail_Gasoline_A...

If you scroll up, you can see the definitions of terms. It's just gasoline and doesn't even apply to diesel.

So, no, it wouldn't apply to Tesla.

Even funnier is that they mention "New Jersey legislators" were at the opening; New Jersey being the most recent state to ban the sale of Teslas. Granted the aforementioned probably weren't on the side of Chris Crisco, but still.

Here's a map of the stations, if anyone is interested: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

So within ~20 months it'll be possible to drive almost anywhere in the USA in a Tesla S, and back to a Supercharger charging station? That's pretty impressive! As demand for vehicle based electricity use increases the demand for new electricity generation capacity will increase. All this in a protracted economic depression. Interesting times.

Thank heavens its possible to charge at places other than these stations otherwise it would be pretty annoying to have to drive a couple hundred miles to recharge. But this is great for long journeys.

I wonder if using the supercharger deteriorates the battery more than a more gentle charge (I am warned about this for fast charging my Leaf). Find it interesting that they ask that question on the supercharger FAQ but don't answer it:

"How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery? Supercharging does not alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much as they like."

I am not a battery scientist, but from everything I've read, using the supercharger should have no effect on battery life long-term. So long as it's kept within certain charge and temperature ranges, the only thing that counts down the lifetime of the battery cells are actual charge cycles, which you can pretty conveniently measure in miles of normal driving use (expected up to 30% loss after 100K miles, and the 5+ year old Roadsters actually averaged just 15% loss after 100K miles with older battery tech). The supercharger doesn't do anything that would reduce that life expectancy; it communicates with the battery about its health and charging speed begins to slow progressively after about 50%.

Not really true, there's many variables including how 'full' you charge the battery, how much you discharge it, what the charge and run temps are, it's not a simple equation.

For example, if you don't charge and discharge the battery fully, you can get many many times more cycles out of them.

Charging quickly does release more heat, which can reduce the lifecycle of the battery, but there are workarounds to minimize this.

I am not an expert at battery chemistries, but I work with EV charging systems quite a bit.

> Charging quickly does release more heat, which can reduce the lifecycle of the battery, but there are workarounds to minimize this.

I suspect that's why the GP was warned not to quick-charge his/her Leaf too often: The Leaf battery does not have an active cooling system.

What part is "not really true"? Despite only writing three sentences, I touched on every factor you just mentioned. The Tesla charger and battery system keep the battery within the safe charge and temperature ranges at all times, even when supercharging. It has active heating and cooling, even when the car is turned off, and will neither fully discharge nor fully charge the battery pack even if left unattended. There's nothing inherently damaging about temporarily charging faster AFAIK as long as you control for all those variables, which Tesla's tech does.

It must damage the battery somehow. If it didn't, Tesla would have said so in the FAQ, instead of trying to sidestep the question.

Truth is, the type of use these batteries get isn't well understood yet. No one really knows the long term effects, we can make educated guesses but until a lot of them are in the field with average use cases for years, we won't see much of the nuance.

Sorry, I was referring specifically to your statement: "the only thing that counts down the lifetime of the battery cells are actual charge cycles"

That was immediately preceded with the qualifier, "So long as it's kept within certain charge and temperature ranges...."

Which are two of the very many variables. His point that a certain number of cycles is consistent is not correct, it's affected by drive and charge style, and a lot of variable inherent in the design of the system.

Charging the battery fast isn't necessarily so bad in and of itself, but fast charging tends to generate a lot of heat, and high heat is bad for lithium ion longevity. The Model S has a battery cooling system built into the car which kicks on when needed, so this is not such a big issue.

The Leaf doesn't have any battery chillers though, so fast charging may indeed be bad for it. Also, even though most DC fast chargers only put out 50kW (as opposed to 120kW for Superchargers), if you consider how much smaller the Leaf pack is, you're actually charging the battery faster than a Supercharger can charge a Tesla.

That said, this study seems to indicate that fast charging isn't all that bad for Leafs anyway: http://insideevs.com/idaho-national-laboratory-dc-quick-char...

So I can't buy a Tesla in New Jersey, but now I can charge one there.

And the FTC blog supports direct car sales as good for consumers : http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/competition-matters/201...

> So I can't buy a Tesla in New Jersey

Sure you can. Just go to their website.

My coworker lives in NJ and owns a Tesla, seems to have no problem getting service or anything. I believe he ordered it from the website directly.

He likely 'took delivery' in another state and then transferred the title/registration into NJ. At least this is how it is done in Texas where Tesla sales are also banned.

When's the hyperloop coming?

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