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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting data, any speculation as to what might occur when the electric car leaves the garage of the executive and enters that of the service industry employee?

The automobile was all fine and dandy when only in the hands of the wealthy, but drastically changed the landscape of the country when adopted by the masses. Will there be any serious structural problems if this happens with the electric vehicle?

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Aluminum would become more expensive, at least. Aluminum smelters are one current target for buying all the cheap base-load power at night, as they need massive amounts of electricity. If power companies can sell that power at a higher price to EV consumers instead, then the smelters will have to compete against them.

Wouldn't it be fair to say that if everyone needs their cars charged at all times, that we'd start distributing electricity throughout the day?

Probably. If nightly base-load power becomes as demanded as daily base-load, then the price would equalize and neither day nor night would be cheaper. However, some level of incentive would still need to be kept, otherwise the spike of car charging would just be shifted to 1800-2000, when everyone gets home and plugs in.

And really, the aluminum smelters was just one example. As the nightly price equalized with the daily price, all electricity would begin getting more expensive, and everything else with it. Much as, in current times, increases in oil price can increase the price of everything.

Here's a hypothetical: Do you think it would be feasible to create a plug that has a unique id such that an electric car could be charged remotely, but billed to the owner of the car rather than the person providing access to the power grid?

Isn't that in effect what happens at charging stations? Not a unique plug id, but public access "billed to the owner of the car".

yeh you could do it but what a hassle. Would require new meters at the premises, as well as each individual circuits for each charging station that you wanted to bill (otherwise there would be no way to separate out the usage).

IOW yes, but no.

Yes, absolutely, that wouldn't be difficult at all. A car's charging plug could have a chip such as is present in newer credit cards, and the transaction would be automatic.

Yup. This is done on mining vehicles already for (liquid) fuel security... a big issue in 3rd world countries. It's pretty easy tech.

Indeed there are individual aluminium smelters in Australia that use 25% of their state's total power.

There could be a glut (and reduced prices) of crude oil. The expensive oil sands projects could take a dive. Planes/ships could become a lot cheaper to operate.

You could always invest in a nuclear power company. Regardless of Obama's fear of anything his personal friends don't own, we're gonna need to upgrade our electric infrastructure somehow and solar and wind just don't scale like gen IV nuclear does.

In case anyone misses the point: for the past 6 years the ADministration has been dragging it's feet in building new Nuclear power plants that are a lot "greener" than current ones and are obviously way "greener" than coal.

what are you talking about?

Fukushima killed the political climate for nuclear. Obama had proposed $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear plants[1]. No one in Congress was going to vote for that with a nuclear meltdown in the news.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-pow...

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