Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations | Hacker News Reader

Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations

bloomberg.com

124 pointscryptoz39 comments

IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas pumps in total, and factor in the difference in "charging" time between the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station, and if it takes two minutes to gas up an empty tank versus 30 minutes to fully recharge an electric car, then you really need 75 times as many charging points to claim you have something resembling equality.

The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars, versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations as there are gas stations wouldn't be an issue there.

Also, once you have an operational charge point you can easily go parallel with stations, just like with gas pumps.

In rural areas, it's actually common to have a gas pump near the garage. After all, what are you going to do, drive your tractor to town to fill up?

Near Dillingham Alaska: The guy I was briefly working for would have to take his boat two miles up (down?) river to get his mail.

also, most people charge their cars while sleeping, so in your day-to-day, moving around the city, maybe you will never use an electric station ever.

Is like saying I will never use a pump for my diesel engine.

those are different animals. one of which may never see a public charge utility.

(Take for example me, I just move home-gym-work, the max I can move in a given day are 30 km, so, I will never need one of those utilities)

Assuming 100% utilization of course, which around here is very far from the truth.

Peak utilization is more important than average.

Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline?

I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and I'm not too sold on that idea yet.

In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle and adding them to street level atmosphere, so that is an immediate bonus that batteries would seem to win on, especially in the built environments in which we live.

Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes, but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is much less abundant than lithium or silicon.

However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.

> In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle

This is sort of a point of contention at this point in time however. As you stated:

> putting sunlight into metal using sand.

This would be the longer term benefit of battery powered cars. Some countries have already made progress. And unless you're driving a Tesla and only charging it as there Supercharging stations, its not completely sunlight powering your wheels. It currently comes with the ecological impact of harvesting coal, burning it and etc.

In Sweden all personal transport by car takes 45 TWh per year, if everyone converted to electric cars/hybrids it would be 13 TWh. That's what the propaganda says anyway. Since most personal transports by car are so short it's in the sweet spot for electric cars.

Interesting what those number might mean. I expect energy consumption to be in favor of batteries, but didn't expect that much.

Internal combustion engines are only about 20 percent efficient, and that ignores the energy spent pulling the dinosaur puree out of the ground. In comparison, electric engines are about 85-90 percent efficient.

Ignoring the differences between coal and oil (sure oil would be better if we had an unlimited amount) a single power plant will be more efficient and cleaner than hundreds of thousands of internal combustion engines.

Battery recycling is a thing and it works well.

Tesla[1]

The main battery recycling firm[2]

[1] http://my.teslamotors.com/en_HK/node/3855

[2] http://www.kinsbursky.com/

My understanding is that ecological impacts were more of a problem with older battery chemistries (lead-acid, nickel-cadmium), whereas lithium-ion packs are relatively benign. For instance, the batteries used by Tesla are mostly composed of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, and lithium, and none of these things are especially toxic.

Mining these different metals may have some negative impact, but it's pretty easy to recycle li-ion packs, so in the long term it's a much more sustainable solution compared to gasoline, where you have to keep drilling for more and more of it forever.

"Three years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis all of Japan's 48 operable reactors remain shut, with no restarts scheduled."

via http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-pl...

Worth keeping the big picture in mind.

The real bogeyman isn't nuclear. It's companies getting away with poor practices, hanging onto outdated equipment, and whittling down safety recommendations/regulations. The same thing with the BP refinery disaster. (And two of those 3 with the gulf oil spill.)

If we look at organizations with good records with regards to nuclear power (US Navy and France) it's somewhat different from what we have in the US.

They count charging stations in homes, not just public ones.

Plus, you really should be comparing the number of pumps, not gas stations. Additionally, the power throughput of a gas pump is way, way higher than a car charger. (Probably measured in the dozens of MWe per hour, compared to 50 KW/h of a DC fast charger) A single car ties up a gas pump for five minutes, an electric car ties up a charger for half an hour.

https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-ha... suggests (with calculations) a throughput of 87MW.

Would be hard to fit a petrol station in everybody's home though.

edit - was also thinking that providing extra plug-in points on the side of your property to sell rooftop solar or grid at a premium, as part of a global charger sharing network, is probably going to happen eventually and has a good business plan in there somewhere.

I don't think it is that hard, it just isn't as useful. I have a tank in my basement that holds 300 gallons of heating fuel (basically diesel); and it is pumped to my boiler. Instead of diesel it could easily be gasoline to a car; but why worry about delivery, etc. when there is already a large infrastructure to fuel my car and the marginal benefits are tiny.

Whereas, if I bought an electric car; having the charger would really be a necessity, because having to wait 30-60 minutes for your car to charge is not going to be something that you want to work into your routine.

For a lot of people it is one less thing to work into their routine. For other people it is hassle. Round where I live no houses have driveways or garages, so the only electric vehicles I have been seriously researching have been motorbikes that can fit through the front door and as much as I think electric cars are the future of much of transport, the charging cable problem hasn't yet been seriously addressed for high density urban use yet.

edit - Or fold-up cars. One that can fit in a lift.

In London there are 1300 public charge points so far. I have seen people just running charge cables out of their front window to the kerbside. Garages are not very common in centralish areas. So I think bringing it indoors is pretty extreme.

People who already have a tank in the basement are pretty rare. How much effort/money would it take to install a new tank, plus a car-compatible pump? Compare with a couple hundred bucks for an electrician to install a 240V outlet, and a few hundred more for a charger (if you don't just use the one that comes with your car).

About 10% of the US has oil or propane heat, both of which require a tank. Where I live in the Northeast it is about 30%. I've never had to pay to have a tank installed, but the tank itself costs around $500.

I think if it were actually useful, it might happen. Fleets do it. But its clearly a choice, you can effectively work getting gas into whatever errands you are doing without much of a delay; and it doesn't need to be integrated into the facility you are going to. Having a gas station on the same road as a major shopping center or on the way to work is the norm where I live. Having some limited number of electric chargers at work is not.

And Gas/Petrol has different safety rules/laws you would probley need to have your home gas tank inspected every couple of years.

People have commented on the pumps v. station issue, but what about time?

The most accurate measure of the infrastructure might not be how many plugs are around, but how many cars can be charged per day. Or perhaps how many vehicle-kilometers are available to electric cars. With pay-at-the-pump any gas pump can fill a car in say two minutes. An electric charger, even the fast ones, will take 10-100 times as long to "fill" a tank.

So take the number of charging plugs and dived that by a factor of 10x->100x. Then come back when the number of available "fills" per day becomes comparable.

Then adjust for the reduced range and come back when the total number of available vehicle-kilometers breaks even. I'm afraid that day is still a long way off atm.

The overwhelming majority of electric car charging takes place overnight in the owner's garage, while the owner sleeps. So there's your time issue: no having to stop to fill up once a week or so, just plug in and unplug each day.

There's no comparison to be made, because electric cars are just plain different.

That's a good point. And if people are leaving their cars while charging to run errands or such, they are likely to take up more charging station time than what might be presumed if they immediately opened up the spot after getting their car charged.

n=1, but my Japanese house built in 2013 has a car charger.

It wasn't even mentioned by the real estate agent as a feature, but I don't know if that was because it's so common now or because few people use them.

It would be cool to see more automakers invest in an infrastructure dedicated to electric vehicles (not necessarily limited to charging). EVs are not mainstream today, but they most likely will be in the near future. I see a vague connection with mobile ecosystems like iPhone and Android. Heavy investment in the mobile development infrastructure is paying off. It's giving device/app makers more leverage to turn ideas into products. A great infrastructure definitely helps drive adoption.

I would be real happy if employers would focus more on adding reserved parking with chargers instead of reserve parking for mid level management. It would send a much better message.

It might take something akin to handicap parking to convince people to think different. I would use the carrot method, get better parking with your plug in (hybrid or otherwise) instead of taxing the other to death.

Huh. In Silicon Valley it is already more common to have EV chargers with dedicated parking than it is to have dedicated management spaces.

There are companies that reserve parking for mid-level managers?!?

I agree: that sends a terrible message.

Yup. One of my wife's previous employers did this. The first row of spaces were reserved for long-time employees, which really just meant the VPs who had been there a while. The CEO's admin might have had one of those as well. The rank and file had very little change of ever obtaining a reserved spot.

Where mid-level = VP+, it used to be quite common. Among companies I go to these days, it would be rare enough as to be noteworthy--not that I visit a representative cross-section of all companies.

Reddit comment thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2vrlzx/japan_has...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com