[kbos87]

Not to pile on but I’ll second some of the other commenters who have said that not being able to charge at home isn’t that big of a deal.

I live in a condo in a major US city and don’t have the option to charge at home.

From a convenience perspective, it’s truly turned out to be a non-issue. We’re at the point where I live that there are enough chargers around that I simply plug in once or twice a week while I’m running some errands.

From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense.

Obviously your situation may vary but I had a lot of anxiety about this and it turned out to be completely unfounded. Figure out where there are (ideally level 2 chargers) near you and you’ll be fine.

[chrisandchris]

> From a cost perspective, it probably would be cheaper for me to charge at home, but it would be small and would take years to pay off the cost difference of having a charger installed. I spend so little on charging that I don’t really pay attention to it as an expense.

May I ask what you spend? I think here charging at home vs. at public chargers is a difference of up to 100% more expensive (~0.30 cents at home vs >0.50 at public chargers).

[sokoloff]

In eastern MA, I find level 2 charging is rarely marked up (and is not infrequently free). DC fast charging is 50-100% marked up, which feels pretty fair to me to be honest.

The thing I find pleasing is office park level 2 charging often charges the retail electricity rate, but they have a large solar installation and if they sell me electricity at full retail (including distribution charges), they make a lot more than selling it to the utility. That’s good for me (I get a charge at the same cost it would be at home) and good for them.

[News-Dog]

With the number of Shopping Centers/Malls installing solar PV's on their building roofs and car parks,

it is probably only a matter of time till they install EV charges to entice customers to their Centers.

[yywwbbn]

They already tried that where I live (northeastern Europe) since the government subsidized most of the installation cost.

Most of the businesses closed them last month after the market price of electricity for commercial users shot up by 10x.

There is zero chance of having enough solar on site to charge any meaningful number of cars simultaneously.

[News-Dog]

Edit to fix typos (sorry), and add google search;

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV's'< @DDG <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...>

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed EV charger'< @DDG <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Shopping Centers/Malls ...>

search >'Shopping Centers/Malls installed solar PV and EV charger'< @google <https://www.google.com/search?q='Shopping Centers/Malls inst...>

[yywwbbn]

Yoy can do that and you might have enough panels to charge a few cars at once if you cover the entire roof with them. But even in ideal condition you’d need more than 300m2 of solar panels to charge a single car at 50kW and this would increase significantly if they don’t operate at 100% capacity.

So unless your goal is primarily virtue signaling you might as well just use the energy generated for lights and cooling since you’ll still need power from the grid for that anyway (unless it’s some hyper energy efficient shopping center with no fridges or cooling).

[ZeroGravitas]

If the idea is to get people to come and buy things in your shop while their car charges then 50kw is far too fast a charge.

[yywwbbn]

If you don’t need fast charging at home (i.e. you’re fine leaving it plugged over night) the fixed costs for a home charger a very low.

Unless the commercial chargers you use are exceptionally cheap or even free charging might cost nearly as much as gas for a similar car and 4x more than at home (obviously depends on your local situation)

[turtlebits]

You don’t even need a home charger if you drive less than 50 miles a day, Just plug into a wall outlet.