In reply to Keith Tanner :
thanks , I checked the local chargers and there are none on the 2 big cross streets by my house , or at the big mall,
but there are a lot on the next Main Street another mile
a little off the subject but do charging stations have 110v plugs if you needed to plug in your Ebike or Escooter ?
Cheers
tuna55 said:Robbie (Forum Supporter) said:...conclude that infastructure isn't currently holding EVs back.... lots of imaginary ones.
Witness the past two pages of this thread, then extrapolate for a far reduced automotive knowledge base among the general populace as compared with this forum, and it's plain that you have exactly the right point above.
It's so easy to sow discord and discontent without any real substance that a huge percentage of TV personalities and politicians stake their entire careers off of the idea.
I've come to the conclusion that there is some segment of the population that may not be able to mentally deal with an EV. I was going to say "not smart enough" rather than "not able to mentally deal" but that's not really the situation.
Whether it's a large or small segment depends on how I feel about my fellow man any given day.
Of course, there's always been a segment of the population that isn't really capable of operating an ICE vehicle either, and I don't think those people are going to do that well in a new car either, ICE or EV.
yupididit said:In reply to frenchyd :
Certainly EV's have maintenance cost throughout their lifetime. Less parts doesn't equal zero issues.
I've got an electric fan from the 1940's. In my lifetime I've replaced the cord end once. Period.
On the other hand, gas powered yard equipment that doesn't get used as much or for as long, seldom lasts for over 5 years. Plus demands massively more attention then the fan does.
Both are realitivelly cheap items. Doing specialized tasks.
I love ICE's the more complex the better. Hence my appreciation for a V12 over a V8 -6 or 4 cylinder. Yet those are toys. Fun to play with.
Transportation? I love cheap, reliable, and simple. Like most people. EV's are those. In gas alone, if price stay the same for the rest of my life, I'll have spent around $35,000. Plus another $1500 for oil changes and at least another $500. For various alternators water pumps etc.
Now that's a great truck with low maintenance requirements.
What do you think I'll spend for electricity on a Ford F-150? Somewhere around $2000, and nothing for oil changes
So a $40,000 replacement saves me $35000 in the 12 years the tables say I have left. I should look up a 2016 Ford F-150 XLT 4x4 V8 XLT and see what it's worth.
frenchyd said:yupididit said:In reply to frenchyd :
Certainly EV's have maintenance cost throughout their lifetime. Less parts doesn't equal zero issues.
I've got an electric fan from the 1940's. In my lifetime I've replaced the cord end once. Period.
On the other hand, gas powered yard equipment that doesn't get used as much or for as long, seldom lasts for over 5 years. Plus demands massively more attention then the fan does.
Both are realitivelly cheap items. Doing specialized tasks.
I love ICE's the more complex the better. Hence my appreciation for a V12 over a V8 -6 or 4 cylinder. Yet those are toys. Fun to play with.
Transportation? I love cheap, reliable, and simple. Like most people. EV's are those. In gas alone, if price stay the same for the rest of my life, I'll have spent around $35,000. Plus another $1500 for oil changes and at least another $500. For various alternators water pumps etc.Now that's a great truck with low maintenance requirements.
What do you think I'll spend for electricity on a Ford F-150? Somewhere around $2000, and nothing for oil changesSo a $40,000 replacement saves me $35000 in the 12 years the tables say I have left. I should look up a 2016 Ford F-150 XLT 4x4 V8 XLT and see what it's worth.
One, EV's aren't "simple". Two, cheap is relative and they aren't cheap yet. Three, you haven't projected maintenance cost for an EV over the 12 years that you have left, you basically estimate it as $0.
I'm not knocking EV's, my wife and I are both actively looking at them. Lighting, Mach-E or XC60 volvo. But, I think you're under estimating the actual cost by not factoring in EV maintenance over its lifetime like you're factoring in ICE waterpumps and alternators.
californiamilleghia said:In reply to Keith Tanner :
thanks , I checked the local chargers and there are none on the 2 big cross streets by my house , or at the big mall,
but there are a lot on the next Main Street another mile
a little off the subject but do charging stations have 110v plugs if you needed to plug in your Ebike or Escooter ?
Cheers
No gas stations within a few miles of my house either :)
I've never looked for 110v outlets at a charger, but they tend to be focused on cars. Kinda like how most fire hydrants don't have drinking fountains. 110V is pretty easy to find.
There is a lot more to infrastructure than just the charging stations themselves. The charging stations are the easy part. Getting power to the charging stations and managing the grid is the hard part. The current charging infrastructure is only relevant to this discussion as it relates to current EV adoption. Which is real low. It's not tough to add a couple chargers here and there for the relatively few people that use them, and it's not too difficult for someone that needs one now to find an available one. The current infrastructure meets the current demand, more or less. But that is the low hanging fruit, using mostly existing infrastructure to add a real actively small load. Scaling up to widespread adoption is a completely different animal. Some areas are planning for it, and it's very involved. Take the city of San Jose for example. New parking garages are required to have a large number of chargers, and an even larger number of charger ready spaces. But the grid won't be able to deal with large numbers of cars being plugged in when everyone gets to the office, so they are also requiring large scale battery storage. The good news is that there are solutions, but they are going to require time and a lot of money. The situation is similar for home charging. If two people on the block have EV's, no big deal. But if most households switch to EV's and plug in at 6pm, the current infrastructure can't handle that. Solar actually adds to the problem, as you have a large amount of power generated during the day, but most of it is used at night. Our current systems were not meant for that. Once again, battery storage may be the answer. But it will have it's own issues if widely adopted.
I don't think I know anybody that just hates EV's. I think the problem is that a lot of people in favor of EV's have been telling people what they should want and need. That creates a lot of pushback, especially if there is not an EV available that meets their wants and needs. If they can build EV's that meet people's range and price expectations, I don't think they will need to convince people to buy them, the market will sort that out.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
Where's the data on the grid not supporting it etc? And ask grids or just certain ones?
I know people who straight up hate EV's for no reason other than that they prefer ICE vehicles.
In reply to yupididit :
Most grids. We aren't talking about current demand with a small percentage of EV's, but if a large percentage of drivers switched to EV's. Obviously it varies greatly by area, but even the best areas aren't ready for widespread adoption. Think about the power going into an office building complex. The power lines, transformers, switchboards, etc. were designed and sized for the expected electrical loads at the time. Larger electrical services are expensive, you don't add in a bunch of extra capacity just because. They didn't plan to have hundreds of EV's plugged in at the same time, so that capacity does not currently exist. They can get some extra capacity with changes to LED lighting and more efficient HVAC, but no where near enough to offset the large draw of a bunch of car chargers. That is on the individual building/campus level. Now imagine that they did the needed upgrades to their services, and zoom out to the utility distribution for that area. They have the same problem, on a larger scale. Solar doesn't help, it actually makes it worse. It's an unpredictable power source that varies greatly depending on the time of day and the weather, it's a tough power source for distribution. Utilities have to take into account the amount of solar being fed into the grid, but can't rely on it. It's easily possible to have too much solar back fed onto the grid. Hawaii has faced that problem for years and limits future solar in some areas. The most economical way to deal with both issues right now is battery storage, which is still extremely expensive. Some areas like San Jose are planning for the future with current code requirements. But it takes years for these code changes to affect the overall balance, as they affect new construction first.
The same issue affects residential neighborhoods too. How many cars does the average family have? When people currently think about getting an EV, they think about getting one. But if they become the norm, the average household will have 2 or 3 plugged in over night. If you have an older or smaller home, that could mean a significant portion of your capacity right there.
Again, all of these problems are solve able, but they are significant. I'm sure there are some creative ways in which the grid and solar could use the cars themselves to act as battery storage to balance the grid. Maybe stagger charging times for office parking spaces.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
I don't understand your concern. I get what you're saying, but there a few things that just don't make sense.
Like why should an office building have charging at every spot? If you don't have enough juice to get to and from work, you need a different vehicle or place to live, or job. The days of 50 mile ranges are already behind us. A handful of charging spots at every building would add up, but no need for every single spot to charge, and no way they're all being used at the same time.
Do you stop and get fuel every single day? Then why would you need to charge every single day.
Cruise through any neighborhood, every 2 hours for a week. See just how many people are home at any given time. The thought of everyone in a neighborhood plugging in and charging at the same time every single day sounds like a super extreme edge case.
I get the grid concern, to a point, but I really don't think it's the problem you think it is.
The good news is that we have time to extend the grid. Also, EVs at their home base can schedule their charging, and the easiest way to arrange that is tiered pricing. Since the grid has to be built for the maximum demand, there's actually a lot of unused capacity at night which is prime EV charging time for the vast majority. The utilities are well aware of this. Long term storage of "bursty" renewable energy is actually a pretty interesting area, but not really relevant here.
Some people look for why things can't work (and style themselves as realists). Some look for ways to make things work (and consider themselves problem solvers). Each group can take the other's thought processes and statements as attacks or forcing ideas. We need both, one to show what has to be done and one to give us the motivation to do it.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
Is this something your learnt in or a SME in?
Your explanation didn't give me any sources so I'm assuming this is your opinion/assumption/fear. And like RevRico says, it seems really extreme. I just don't see people recharging at work all day and at home all night. The car would always be topped off in that case. So there wouldn't be much charging to do in your scenario. A bunch of cars charging their batteries up 8% each time they're at work and home is going to break the US grid.
It might break the Texas grid though lol
A bunch of 120V outlets would be fine for @ work charging. They'll add 3-5 miles of range per hr, which is likely plenty for most commuters.
And like others have said, it's important to understand that almost nobody is charging from empty to full every day, or very often at all. Most people that plug in nightly will just be replacing the miles they used that day which is probably under 50 most days. A 240v outlet will add 20-30 miles of range per hr, so replenishing under 50 miles would take about 2 hrs of charging. Many EVs get around 4 miles of driving per kwh of charge. The newer trucks and things that are less efficient get about 2. So to drive 50 miles would probably take somewhere between 25kwh for inefficient EVs and 12-ish kwh for more efficient models. Even after we account for charging inefficiencies, that's not a massive amount of power every day. Charging an efficient EV would be like running an electric clothes dryer for similar amount of time, which nobody really gets concerned about from a grid perspective.
Keith Tanner said:The good news is that we have time to extend the grid. Also, EVs at their home base can schedule their charging, and the easiest way to arrange that is tiered pricing. Since the grid has to be built for the maximum demand, there's actually a lot of unused capacity at night which is prime EV charging time for the vast majority. The utilities are well aware of this. Long term storage of "bursty" renewable energy is actually a pretty interesting area, but not really relevant here.
Even if a lot of people plug in their home chargers at the same time, the utility could stagger their operation. It's already done with air conditioners in many areas - they add a little control box to the a/c that will cycle operation of the condensing unit, I have one on my a/c. It should be straightforward to use the same technology for EV charging.
Office buildings will install a few chargers (they put in three or four at my office a couple years ago), but I agree they shouldn't need large quantities of them.
yupididit said:frenchyd said:yupididit said:In reply to frenchyd :
Certainly EV's have maintenance cost throughout their lifetime. Less parts doesn't equal zero issues.
I've got an electric fan from the 1940's. In my lifetime I've replaced the cord end once. Period.
On the other hand, gas powered yard equipment that doesn't get used as much or for as long, seldom lasts for over 5 years. Plus demands massively more attention then the fan does.
Both are realitivelly cheap items. Doing specialized tasks.
I love ICE's the more complex the better. Hence my appreciation for a V12 over a V8 -6 or 4 cylinder. Yet those are toys. Fun to play with.
Transportation? I love cheap, reliable, and simple. Like most people. EV's are those. In gas alone, if price stay the same for the rest of my life, I'll have spent around $35,000. Plus another $1500 for oil changes and at least another $500. For various alternators water pumps etc.Now that's a great truck with low maintenance requirements.
What do you think I'll spend for electricity on a Ford F-150? Somewhere around $2000, and nothing for oil changesSo a $40,000 replacement saves me $35000 in the 12 years the tables say I have left. I should look up a 2016 Ford F-150 XLT 4x4 V8 XLT and see what it's worth.
One, EV's aren't "simple". Two, cheap is relative and they aren't cheap yet. Three, you haven't projected maintenance cost for an EV over the 12 years that you have left, you basically estimate it as $0.
I'm not knocking EV's, my wife and I are both actively looking at them. Lighting, Mach-E or XC60 volvo. But, I think you're under estimating the actual cost by not factoring in EV maintenance over its lifetime like you're factoring in ICE waterpumps and alternators.
I meant simple the way most people think cars are simple. Pay X per month keep it filled with gas, take it to the dealer when it needs stuff. You know keep it simple.
As for cheap. $40,000 is as cheap as you'll get a new Ford F-150 EV. They go on up to $90,000 for the platinum version
You want cheaper and are willing to settle for less buy a Chevy Bolt
Keith Tanner said:In reply to ae86andkp61 (Forum Supporter) :
You're responding to me, but I'm not sure exactly what you're responding to. I'll make a guess based on your comments.
-----
All the studies I've seen show that a very high percentage of charging is done at home. 80% is a number quoted by the DOE, and I suspect that's on the low side for a modern longer range EV. But it's all about averages. Speaking of which, Americans drive an average of 31 miles per day.
I think we're saying the same thing two different ways. 
The part I was taking exception to was the assertion that you don't need charging at home, but I think I unnecessarily narrowed in on one statement in your overall discussion.
In reply to yupididit :
reply to Boost_Crazy :
Is this something your learnt in or a SME in?
Your explanation didn't give me any sources so I'm assuming this is your opinion/assumption/fear. And like RevRico says, it seems really extreme. I just don't see people recharging at work all day and at home all night. The car would always be topped off in that case. So there wouldn't be much charging to do in your scenario. A bunch of cars charging their batteries up 8% each time they're at work and home is going to break the US grid.
It might break the Texas grid though lol
I work in sales for electrical distribution. Everything from medium voltage down to residential. I do a lot of solar and EV charging. I'm a Title 24 (California energy code) expert in lighting, but it touches battery storage, EV charging and solar as they add more to it. For a good real world example, one of my projects was an office building TI for Rivian. I provided the EV chargers for the project. You would think that they would have installed quite a bit, but it wasn't many- less than a dozen I believe. It was all that the building's service could support. Every day I work with customers who need to upgrade the service of a building because of changes in use. When a building is constructed, they usually build what's called a shell. The building owner spec's it out as cost effectively as possible while still providing enough power for prospective tenants. Too much is a waste of money, too little can reduce the pool of available tenants. If a tenant wants a space with more power than the norm for the building, either the building owner or the tenant needs to pay for an upgrade. They just didn't design in enough headroom to add a bunch of car chargers. That is one thing that the new T24 code is trying to address, but it will take years.
Believe me, there is no fear on my end. I stand to make a lot of money off of the transition to EV's. I sell everything needed to charge them between the utility transformer and the charging connector on the car. Multiply that x2 because my wife does the same job as I do for a different territory, so things are looking pretty good. But I also know how much all of that stuff costs and how much is needed, there is a lot more to it than just chargers. Just think about the energy consumption of half the vehicles on the road today. Now convert that energy requirement to electricity and add it to our grid. Even with the increased efficiency of EV's, that's a big change. Right now, less than 1% of the vehicles on the road are electric.
In reply to RevRico :
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
I don't understand your concern. I get what you're saying, but there a few things that just don't make sense.
Like why should an office building have charging at every spot? If you don't have enough juice to get to and from work, you need a current vehicle or place to live, or job. The days of 50 mile ranges are already behind us. A handful of charging spots at every building would add up, but no need for every single spot to charge, and no way they're all being used at the same time.
Do you stop and get fuel every single day? Then why would you need to charge every single day.
Cruise through any neighborhood, every 2 hours for a week. See just how many people are home at any given time. The thought of everyone in a neighborhood plugging in and charging at the same time every single day sounds like a super extreme edge case.
I get the grid concern, to a point, but I really don't think it's the problem you think it is.
It's a concern for the growing number of cities that are writing it into their energy code. It will be a requirement for new construction in these cities, and will likely roll over to existing properties doing improvements. Commutes in the area can get stupid long, we actually call them super commuters. Notice that the initial city pushing this is San Jose- which sees commuters from as far away as Sacramento. I never said every spot. They are requiring a specific percentage of parking spaces to have chargers, and a specific number more to be chargers ready- piped and capacity in the service. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's many times greater than what you see in parking lots today. If you install 2000A of EV charging, you need to have 2000A available. You can't just hope people don't plug in at the same time. The more people move to EV's, the more competition there will be for charging. What seems easy right now with less than 1% of the cars being EV, will change drastically when we hit higher percentages- especially once we pass the point that we can currently support. Home charging helps, to a point. That power has to come from somewhere, and it has to get to your house. The push away from traditional generation towards solar, and the move to overnight car charging creates a large delta between when the power is generated and when it is used. Hence the need for storage. Also, don't forget that as EV's are more readily adopted, it won't be small cars like most of the EV's currently on the market. They will be large SUV's and trucks, with bigger batteries.
Here is the code for San Jose. The requirement is much higher for apartments and hotels. Pages 3-10.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
I mentioned that on page 1 - referring to one of my clients installing an entirely new 3000A electrical system from the utility to provide EV chargers in an existing parking garage.
So far, only one house in my little blue collar neighborhood has an EV. It looks like they have a 120V charger on a post next to the car in the driveway, but I suppose it might be a 230V.
Boost_Crazy said:In reply to RevRico :
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
I don't understand your concern. I get what you're saying, but there a few things that just don't make sense.
Like why should an office building have charging at every spot? If you don't have enough juice to get to and from work, you need a current vehicle or place to live, or job. The days of 50 mile ranges are already behind us. A handful of charging spots at every building would add up, but no need for every single spot to charge, and no way they're all being used at the same time.
Do you stop and get fuel every single day? Then why would you need to charge every single day.
Cruise through any neighborhood, every 2 hours for a week. See just how many people are home at any given time. The thought of everyone in a neighborhood plugging in and charging at the same time every single day sounds like a super extreme edge case.
I get the grid concern, to a point, but I really don't think it's the problem you think it is.
It's a concern for the growing number of cities that are writing it into their energy code. It will be a requirement for new construction in these cities, and will likely roll over to existing properties doing improvements. Commutes in the area can get stupid long, we actually call them super commuters. Notice that the initial city pushing this is San Jose- which sees commuters from as far away as Sacramento. I never said every spot. They are requiring a specific percentage of parking spaces to have chargers, and a specific number more to be chargers ready- piped and capacity in the service. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's many times greater than what you see in parking lots today. If you install 2000A of EV charging, you need to have 2000A available. You can't just hope people don't plug in at the same time. The more people move to EV's, the more competition there will be for charging. What seems easy right now with less than 1% of the cars being EV, will change drastically when we hit higher percentages- especially once we pass the point that we can currently support. Home charging helps, to a point. That power has to come from somewhere, and it has to get to your house. The push away from traditional generation towards solar, and the move to overnight car charging creates a large delta between when the power is generated and when it is used. Hence the need for storage. Also, don't forget that as EV's are more readily adopted, it won't be small cars like most of the EV's currently on the market. They will be large SUV's and trucks, with bigger batteries.
The size of the battery isn't the biggest factor here, as the average person drives 31 miles per day and the new EVs can octuple that in real world capacity. As an EV owner, when I use local garages for a night on the town or for dinner with the wife, I do NOT use the chargers unless I actually need the power which happens....never. If I am traveling, and need a top up on the way, I use a level 3 charger which isn't what those garages will offer. If I'm traveling and have reacxhed my destination with low charge, I will use a level 2 destination charger. Mostly that will happen overnight at the hotel I picked because it has serveral level 2 chargers, or it might be in that parking garage. In that case, it will be empty of commuters and I will charge at one of the many spots the garage has provided me with overnight rates when consumption is lower.
I do this all the time....today. I have put 76k miles on my Tesla since May 2019. I rarely use superchargers even though they are free during my ownership of the car. Yes, the grid will need to improve, as it has done over the years already. Yes, batteries may need to be a part of that solution, but the good news is, storage batteries use less expensive materials (lfp,) are less finicky about charging levels, and are cheaper to produce!
Right now some commuters will plug in even if they don't need to, just for the free mileage. Long term, the solution will be idle fees which will have you move your car when its done charging. Idle fees will eliminate the vast majority of people looking for free electrons as they won't want to get hit with $1 per minute, or more, idle fees when done charging.
In reply to mattm :
I somehow deleted my post. Oh well, trying to remember what I typed...
You are right about the battery size, but that wasn't my point. Larger vehicles will still require more power, more load on the grid vs. current EV's.
As an early adopter, you probably aren't the best example. Hopefully you did the calculations before you bought your Tesla and decided it would work for your needs. But telling other people what works for you should work for them is like telling a 1 ton truck owner that he doesn't need his truck because your Ranger hauls everything that you need it to. But that is beside the point, and not really related to infrastructure. Level 3 chargers work well for you now. The charger to EV ratio is pretty favorable. Would it work as well for you if 30% of your town switched to EV's but the infrastructure didn't keep pace?
A good analogy for electrical infrastructure is our highway infrastructure. Current EV's added just a tiny amount of electrical traffic. You wouldn't even notice it on your commute. But if you concluded that adding traffic has no affect on your commute, you would be in for a rude awakening if traffic went up an order of magnitude and they didn't add any more lanes. Traffic would grind to a halt. Much like roads, electrical infrastructure needs to be sized for peak use. Size a road for average traffic over 24 hours, and you will have a very slow rush hour. Size an electrical system for average use, I hope you like resetting breakers.
I think that was it. I'm sure I missed something.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
This is a silly argument. If you changed the words, you could argue the same for getting gasoline (it will never work, if everyone during rush hour had to stop and get fuel ..) golly you could apply this to buying a coke. Of course, if everyone did -anything- all at once, things would break. Happily, that's not how anything ever happens.
It's just a false equivalency argument. You could make the same case for anything.
Plus everyone on here who actually owns an ev is telling you over and over that they hardly ever destination charge. People charge at night when the grid is lazy anyway. The new giant housing development down the street is a dramatically more difficult scenario.
In reply to tuna55 :
A big difference, though, is that the charging infrastructure for EVs has to be built upon the existing electrical production and distribution network which already has problems with being overburdened in some areas. I don't think these are problems that are insurmountable or ones that aren't going to show up anyway, but it's definitely something that needs to be worked around as adoption increases.
As an extreme example, there was a local retailer of food that owned a building that housed their data center. As they grew, their power requirements grew along with them and eventually they had to sell the building because the local power utility was not able to provide them with any more power. And this was in a relatively modern-for-the-time office park area. I can recall working a project for a local general manufacturer of electric devices where they had to shut down their whole manufacturing and office campus in order to bring additional power in to the building to support their data center. The cost was fairly tremendous, both in real dollars and in labor and opportunity cost but that was another situation where once that was completed, there was no more power to bring in - that was the last upgrade that could be done based on the existing power infrastructure. In downtown areas, I've seen even bigger problems trying to get more wattage into buildings where sometimes there is no cost that can be paid to pull additional power - you're stuck with what you have.
I don't think that's a reason to not buy an EV, but it absolutely something that is going to need to be solved as we increase our demand for electricity. Charging at home is probably the least impactful to existing distribution, especially with slower charging that can be scheduled to happen through the downtime. And if most people take most of their trips such that they're using less wattage than they're putting in at home, rapid charging won't be as necessary as a gas station is. But we already have a grid that can go offline on a hot day when all the air conditioners turn on so when everybody in the neighborhood is also charging their car, it's going to put more load on that system.
In reply to wae :
In the evening power usage is reduced. Because most business ( heavy users of power as you noticed ) shut down.
My state offers free* solar panels. Subsidized wind generators. Because it's good business.
tuna55 said:In reply to Boost_C
It's just a false equivalency argument. You could make the same case for anything.
I'd agree here. I've heard it from the horse's mouth (contacts at grid operators like PJM or NYISO and utilities like PG&E, etc) that personal charging won't be much strain. Most will happen off peak and actually be helpful for balancing load. The small amout of fast charging during the day is but a small blip and if there increased renewable glut, could help balance as well. The grid of today needs a lot to shift to a more renewable generation anyway and incorporating charging into that scheme to hit decarbonization goals isn't an additional specific problem to be solved (at least not a huge one).
Now commercial uses may cause different problems like city bussing for example as they may need to have a different charging profile. Or if diesel replacement becomes real anytime soon (we may see H2 burning engines before battery trucks for long haul due to weight) it can cause additional strain. All solveable with enough planning. Although transmission and distribution cost money, we know how to do that.
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