[ar9av]

The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.

Renewables and stored heat batteries will cover night/low wind loads. Geothermal in the north.

Public transit options will continue to improve, electrified bikes make them an even more viable alternative.

We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles.

[bluescrn]

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles.

As usual, everything's just fine for the wealthy, with a new top-end Tesla with its nice big range, and parking/charging space on your own land. The wealthy people will probably be able to demand at-work charging at their 6-figure-salary tech jobs too. Not likely for the more average worker.

Many people will be stuck with old/basic models of cars with smaller/degraded batteries. Many people are unable to charge at home due to living in apartments etc. And right now, many people are entirely priced out of the EV market, as the used EV market is still small.

Also consider that filling up a petrol car takes ~2mins. Charging an EV takes 10-20x that. It's a huge time cost to have to sit around near a public charger, let alone having to queue to charge. And then there's the near-certainty of public chargers price-gouging like crazy once the demand is sufficiently high.

For a large chunk of the population, this transition is going to be painful (If we survive another decade of 'omnicrisis' to even reach 2035 without world war, total collapse, or mass uprising of some kind, that is)

[zonotope]

Public Transit > Cars for both individuals and society, if the infrastructure is there. Maybe we could devote more energy and resources on developing and improving that infrastructure before 2035 so that cars, electric or otherwise, are less necessary?

[bluescrn]

Public transit only works in cities. And only in cities where crime is mostly under control.

Many people don't want to live in cities, especially during times of crisis (when they become increasingly dangerous places), and we're living in a seemingly permanent state of crisis.

[bluGill]

97% of the population lives in cites. A suburb is still a city, it just isn't very dense. However most suburbs are dense enough to support good public transit as the few cities that have tried it have proved. In Sweden there are farms that get a bus every hour (which isn't good transit, but since the rest of their network is so good people ride it anyway for their rare trips to farms, and farm kids ride it since they don't have a car - the parents of course will drive)

[zppln]

Ah yes, the brilliant rural public transport network must be why EPA tractors are so popular. :)

[cjblomqvist]

Yes, there are farms in a Sweden that get busses every hour. There are also much more densely places in cities where busses stop going after 6 pm, or you have to book the bus after 6 pm a day in advance.

In general it's not that good. I've lived in Gothenburg for 30 years, the second largest city of Sweden. It takes me 10-15 min to get to work by car (inner city/business district). It would take me 40-60 min by bus. I know a lot of places that are worse.

[slackfan]

The cities and supporting infrastructure are responsible for most of climate change. Abolish cities.

[CaptainZapp]

Try Switzerland, where literally every tiny hamlet is accessible by public transport.

[bluescrn]

There's a big difference between 'accessible by public transport' and 'practical to get to a workplace by public transport'

Most small villages in the UK have some sort of limited bus service, which can be useful for pensioners and other none-working people who need to get to the nearest town/city occasionally, but the services are far too infrequent to be useful if you've got to get somewhere for a specific time on a regular basis.

[jnsaff2]

Consider who climate change is going to impact most? The climate transition, mass migrations, ecosystem collapses etc are going to hit the most vulnerable people the hardest.

[prottog]

Everything always hits the vulnerable people the hardest, as that's basically the meaning of the word. We can't use that to justify policy, since then any and every policy would be justified.

[nradov]

Climate change is likely to hit vulnerable people in the tropics the hardest. Europe did pretty well during the Medieval Warm Period. We should absolutely take steps to reduce CO2 emissions, but a slightly warmer climate is unlikely to be a disaster for poor people in the EU.

[matthewdgreen]

> Many people are unable to charge at home due to living in apartments etc.

We will solve the charging problem by running simple L2 240V AC wiring to plugs/poles on the street. It will cost a little bit of money and billing will have to be sorted, but compared to the vast hidden costs of maintaining the roads and urban parking spaces (let alone the costs of not reducing fossil fuel usage) it's basically a rounding error.

It's not even much power: the average European driver travels 32.9km/day. At a (Tesla) usage of 166wH/km that’s 5.461kWh/day, or 273W continuous average power draw assuming most people drive for 4H/day and park the rest of the time. More than a streetlight, but not that much.

[jjav]

> It's not even much power: [...] that’s 5.461kWh/day

I wouldn't call that not much power. My average (over past 10 years) entire house usage is around 15kWh/day. So that's nearly 40% of the usage of the house. But if there's two drivers per household now it's about 75% incremental power usage per household. That's pretty substantial.

[bluescrn]

> We will solve the charging problem by running simple L2 240V AC wiring to plugs/poles on the street.

The problem will be most likely solved by letting a private company with a local near-monopoly on public charing install chargers in on-street parking and apartment car parks. This private company will then charge several times the market rate for the electricity to use the chargers, several times more than wealthier people are paying to charge their cars.

[uc_banana]

That's fine. Average Joe will live in a 15-minute city and find that all his needs are covered without a car!

Edit: I am being a little sarcastic, although I really like the idea of a 15-minute city and would happily live in one. I'm also priviledged to live in a country that largely developed before the car, and thus most cities are intrinsically capable of being 15-minute cities.

However, I say this to point out what is clearly true - there is no way for every citizen to own an EV. The "15-minute city" types of vision are how this will be addressed.

[bluescrn]

A purpose-designed '15 minute city' might be great.

But applying the concept to existing cities, it so blatant that it's just a big stick to bludgeon car owners with, and there's zero intention of providing significant new amenities within a 15min walk of... everyone.

It could just lead to more people fleeing cities and seeking rural freedom, especially those able to find WFH work.

[ajsnigrutin]

> You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles

But where?

https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6

This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km.

53% of our country works outside of their place of residence, ~20% of people even drive more than 40km to work (and 40 back), and ~10% more than 60km one way.

So, this means that a rather large percentage of people will need to "only charge their car for a few hours" every two days. And again.. where?

If you have a house with a garage and cheap electricity, sure, you can. If you don't (as many not-rich people don't), you're basically fucked.

Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev...

And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.

[Fradow]

> But where?

The GP already address that "We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles."

On the other hand, yeah, it's time to get started for real to install plugs.

> Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev...

That studio shows US prices. Keep in mind prices are widely different in Europe. For example, gas is about twice as expensive where I live (about 1.9€/L currently, but it varies by country) than in the US (looking it up, it's a national average of $3.4/gal today, or $0.9/L).

[ajsnigrutin]

But if we installed plugs and made electric cars cheaper, people would transition to electric cars without force by regulation and mandates. Now we have a hard deadline, no plugs, no powerstations, and again, the poor people will be the ones who get fucked by those mandates (since the rich can charge their cars at home in their garages, and the poor live in large apartment buildings with large parking lots with zero chargers.

[stephen_g]

That seems like the opposite of what’s going to happen. Surely the hard deadline (assuming not crazy Governments) means that there will be a huge impetus for rolling out this infrastructure? Will it not literally be one of the key drivers of such investment?

[ajsnigrutin]

But they had many years to start building the infrastructure, and they didn't do anything. People with electric cars here park infront of a Lidl (store) and sit in their cars and read a book while their cars ar charging, because there is not enough charing points. Even some parking lots that have a few charging stations are pretty much useless for most, since Johnny comes home from work, gets a spot near a charger, plugs in, and the car will stay there until the next morning, even if it's charged by 2am (who's going to move their car at 2am?).

If they built the infrastructure, many people would already switch, because it would be probably cheaper... some did in the first wave, because many workplaces installed a charger at a 'premium' spot near the building entrance just to show off how 'green' they are, but with two charing spots, as soon as the third coworker got an electric car, daily phonecalls "your car is full, can you please move it, I need to charge mine" have started and made it a pain in the ass.

I prefer the carrot approach to a stick one... build it, and people will come, instead of forbidding it, and people will be forced to use a worse alternative (for many).

[jjk166]

> Surely the hard deadline (assuming not crazy Governments)

That is a terrible assumption to make

[marsokod]

> > You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles

> But where?

> https://goo.gl/maps/giAwwS5qRKBuKNDH6

> This is one of the many neighbourhoods in my country and many other european ones, with a large parking lot with a lot of cars. All there cars now need ~5 minutes at a gas station every 600-1000km.

I am not sure I understand your point here. You are showing a residential car park that is a very nice location to install multiple slow chargers for cheap. The only reason this is not done at the moment is that there are not enough EV around, but otherwise you are looking at a small investment for regular revenues on electricity sale (or you can get your building association to buy some and keep the electricity as cheap as possible)

> Add some studies that electric cars are even more expensive to charge than gaspowered ones are to refill, and it's even worse - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-shock-study-found-ev...

Be careful about this kind of studies, and even more about news article about them. While this one has a bit more data and is doing less mistakes than the usual rogue journalist study we see once in a while, the electricity cost they used for residential charging is wrong: they use at least very high prices for home electricity, in one of the worst state in the US for electricity pricings without using off-peak prices.

> And 2035 is not some distant future project... if you want to retrofit all those parking yards with chargers, you literally have to start doing it today... also build a bunch of nuclear power plants too, because if we do it the german way, by digging coal, we didn't do much.

Yup, that's the point of this bill. To provide guarantee to the industry that they won't be building these chargers and power plants for nothing. Now they know that the market will shift towards EV with hard deadline in 2035, and you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of the cars on the road I'll be EV by 2040/2045.

[Kelteseth]

They said the same thing about ice cars in the beginning. I can feed my horse everywhere. I need dedicated fuel stations? Madness! /s This will take time and if demand rises, so will the supply.

[ajsnigrutin]

But nobody forbid horses, cars just became better and people transitioned to a better option.

Here we're forbidding ICE cars without having the infrastructure for electric ones in place and a relatively short time to do it.

[sho_hn]

Well - there are also new external factors motivating this increase in urgency.

[ajsnigrutin]

Like what? CO2? From the industry that is moving from germany to china now, because of cheaper energy sources there (mostly fossil fuel ones)?

Instead of building the infrastructure first, so people would naturally transition to electric, we're forcing people by mandates...

And again, we're doing stuff that affects billions of people and letting the industry pollute as much as ever.

Just an example: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nw-salmon-sent-to-chin...

[sho_hn]

These are adjacent but separate problems.

Regulating the supply chain for car and battery manufacturing and electricity generation is not trivial, but can be tackled and is perhaps easier than refreshing the fleet of cars. While making the fleet electric you can work on the energy mix in parallel. With combustion engines, there's a lot fewer options to work with.

There are solid models for comparing the footprints of ICE cars and EVs (including models and studies funded by car OEMs, like my employer). Most of them will show you that there's a higher upfront CO2 footprint to manufacturing an EV and therefore a certain number of miles driven until the EV "breaks-even" compared to an equivalent ICE car. There's a lot of factors that read on it - the manufacturing location of the battery (due to local energy mix and shipping overhead) is a major factor, as is battery size, cell chemistry, etc. Once thing that's immediately noticable if you look at the studies done from 2015+ is that the EV industry has managed to outpace basically every prediction for 2020, 2025, already. The trajectory and velocity is good. I'd back that horse. The market can do a lot once it gets going.

[Cthulhu_]

Not to mention the electric grids are getting overloaded, meaning they cannot add charging stations anymore until the grids have been upgraded - which will cost billions and years. This goes on top of a huge surge for renewables and getting rid of the dependency on gas - solar panels, heat pumps, infrared panels, electric stovetops and, indeed, electric cars.

The will is there for sure, but we're running into real capacity issues. We can only go so fast.

And the pessimist in me is saying it's too little, too late and we've passed the point of no return decades ago; no amount of switching to EVs will stop the polar caps melting (removing the ice means less sunlight is reflected), the permafrost melting (exposing sequestered plant material, their now decomposition releasing co2 and methane), and with that the glaciers melting (raising the sea level and lowering the salt content, causing the gulf stream to slow down / stop which will make the north colder and the equator warmer)

[ajsnigrutin]

Add to this a ban on oil and gas heating (germany 2024, other countries following) - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/germany-t...

I don't know the lifetime expectancy of gas and oil central heaters, but i'm guessing that many will fail and be replaced with some kind of electric powered ones between 2024 and 2035, needing even more electricity in the winter... plus reduced battery efficiency for cars in the winter, meaning even more.

[midasuni]

In the U.K. the average car does less than 30 miles a day. Charging overnight would require a draw off less than 1kW. Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. My shower this morning was nearer 10kW.

[uc_banana]

>Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone.

Indeed. When people's kettle usage was much more synchronised (ie, when TV advert breaks were a shared experience by most people), they had to build a power station just to cover this scenario (Dinorwic pumped storage). "Power station" is also quite generous, as it is only storage, and therefore is a net loss to the power grid.

Even the most optimistic person has to admit that there's a limit to what can be done spread the additional load of 40 million EVs each needing to charge ~10kWh per day without grid upgrades and investment.

[midasuni]

Except the grid can cope with peak usage into peoples housing when the ovens are on etc.

Sure you may need some more power stations, but the actual capacity for the wires, substations etc can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.

[uc_banana]

>can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.

Not necessarily. At the scale of the national grid, a kettle is a very short-term load. I can't imagine that it would go well if 30 million homes decided to leave their ovens on all night.

[0_____0]

As a USian who uses my kettle multiple times a day I'm a bit jealous of your fast boiling kettles. It can take minutes to boil a full kettle at our measly 1.5kW limit.

Just checked. 7 minutes 30 seconds to boil 1.7L :(

[ajb]

A lot of people in the UK use on street parking. You're not allowed to run a wire across the footpath even if you happen to get the spot outside your house. The current plan seems to be to make every lamppost into a slow charger, but that wouldn't be enough for everyone to replace their petrol vehicle.

[midasuni]

Most people don’t though. In England it’s 68% of homes that either have or have potential for off street parking

https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi...

[ajb]

32% is still a big number to deal with. Government can't just write off that many car owners.

[midasuni]

They wrote off 48% just fine and seem to have been rewarded.

[elif]

As someone that provides more energy to the grid than I draw from march to october, using solar panels I could afford in large part thanks to the economics of an electric car, it really bothers me when people use this argument.

During peaker plant hours I'm pumping 3-4kW to my neighbors, actively reducing grid demand..

When my car charges itself at 4am, it is using base load nuclear that needs a destination.

Also, using renters as the excuse in a wealth argument is disingenuous. That is an entirely separate poor financial decision. My house was purchased for 7 years of what my rent was costing when I bought it in 2012. In today's rent the figure would be much worse.

[numbers_guy]

You need a charging port literally every two meters on all residential streets in all cities in all of Europe, because most people park outside and have no driveway/garage available.

Also you charge ever 300 miles if you have an expensive luxury EV with a huge battery, which is definitely way beyond what the vast majority can afford, especially on EU salaries.

[saiya-jin]

Well, in the peak you won't be able to charge your car due to all slots being taken with hours long queues, when you need to drive NOW. I don't think you realize how great throughput gas stations have with few pumps, compared to place where you need to park your car for X hours. 300 miles maybe for top models, but I don't think current generation of cheapest (=most popular) electric cars will be charged every 500km, nobody sane drives from full to empty.

Electrified bikes require a bit more than just being available for purchase for often price of used basic ICE car. You need serious improvement in width and density in bike lanes, and they can't be shared with cars (or scooters/motorbikes). Many cities will struggle with that, unless removing car lanes completely.

The oil infrastructure is everywhere because we had 150 years to develop and deploy it as needed.

All this and much, much more to say - these are good moves, in right directions, but 2035 is utterly unrealistic even for rich countries, while eastern half of EU is far from rich and generally look at this Brussel activities as... clueless to be polite, very very polite. We can force it earlier than reasonable a bit, just a bit, but at costs which are insane while most of the world still burns coal and everything else like there is no tomorrow. Hard to explain to family with kids where parents earn equivalent of 800$ that they should buy this new electric car for 40k just to get to work because some bureaucrats thought that's the only way.

[mschuster91]

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.

The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. They're not as rotten as the US grid, but still - barely any smart capability, no realtime insights anywhere but on the generation and distribution level, no small-scale dynamic load management...

To support even 10% of an electric vehicle fleet getting plugged in after people arrive at home, not to mention large-scale small renewables, grid operators will have to do extensive upgrades. Street transformers need real-time load monitoring, PLC support must be present everywhere to make sure all the components of the grid can still talk to each other, and vehicle chargers and solar inverters need to talk with the grid as well.

And there are barely any standards in that area.

[ivan_gammel]

>The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge.

This is not a problem. Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. In the past they were upgraded at sufficient speed and economic model of that upgrade was reasonable. I do not see, why we won’t be able to continue the same way. We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.

[mschuster91]

> Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand.

Barely. Grid regulation has exploded in cost in the last few years.

> We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.

A lot of infrastructure has been barely, if at all, maintained for far longer timespans. The 2018 fire, for example, was caused by a worn-out hook that may have been at least 88 years old [1]. What makes you think that utility providers will do the necessary upgrades in that time?!

[1] https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-a-pge-...

[ivan_gammel]

How some fire in USA is relevant to our (European) infrastructure?

[mschuster91]

Because our infrastructure isn't in much better shape, not since the EU all but forced privatization and the new owners focused more on shareholder returns than on maintenance.

We're living on borrowed time.

[enigma20]

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles.

You are joking, right? 300 miles is 482 km. On paper, yes. What about reality?

See this CarWow video https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E?t=2240

- Volkswagen ID Buzz - 203 miles

- Mercedes EQA - 208 miles

- Audi Q4 e-tron Sportback - 235 miles

- Genesis GV60 - 253 miles

- Nissan Ariya - 267 miles

- Tesla Model Y - 285 miles

And those are big, bulky SUVs with big batteries. What about small/medium hatchbacks?

They will probably have 50-70% percent of that.

Test done in UK. What about colder countries, or countries where winters are cold?

[javajosh]

installing chargers on light poles.

That seems like a reasonable idea. Almost...too reasonable.

[uc_banana]

I don't see what's reasonable about asking a streetlight installation designed to handle at most several hundred watts to suddenly provide several kilowatts.

[the8472]

Those installations are in the process of being converted from sodium vapor to LED, that should free up a few watts. And this doesn't have to be fast-charging. Combining a few hundred watts over night and at the workplace could be enough to cover the daily commute.

[uc_banana]

Assuming you live on a motorway and your local streetlight used 500W, and was converted to an LED that draws practically nothing, that frees up....about enough juice to add 20 miles of range over 12 hours. No wonder no-one bothers with this scheme.

[the8472]

That's merely the capacity that was freed up, it doesn't account for additional spare capacity in the wires. And I said "overnight and at the workplace", which should cover more than 12 hours. Maybe it's a bit tight but it should be enough to alleviate charging stops on most days. If you're going to make longer trips then may be a stop by a fast charger may be needed.

[jjk166]

There isn't additional spare capacity in the wires that were designed only to power the light. While they almost certainly are rated for a bit more juice to deal with intermittent power surges and an appropriate factor of safety for design use, you still need that buffer for any application that draws 500W, so you can't persistently run above that level.

And if you're charging when you park at home and at work, unless you find someone who works at your home and sleeps where you work, that's going to be around 2 streetlights per car, and even that's assuming 100% street parking with optimally arranged streetlights. For context, there are currently about 6 cars per streetlight in Europe, and their current total power consumption of 35 TWh/yr would be able to provide 20 miles of range per day to just 16% of that number of cars. Of course streetlights aren't normally running 24/7, but even if you triple the power usage (which the streetposts might not even be able to handle) you're still at less than half of what you'd need at a minimum. There's really no way around building substantially more charging infrastructure.

[uc_banana]

>additional spare capacity in the wires

1. What additional spare capacity? Why would any particular electrical installation (here, streetlights) be designed for about an order of magnitude more carrying capacity?

2. One of the original motivators for near-universal lighting of roads was to use the night-time baseload of power stations that could not be turned off (ie, nuclear and coal). Now that we use much more intermittent sources, this "free" energy just doesn't exist. It may be that switching to energy-efficient street lighting just makes up for this shortfall, leaving no spare power.

[jaclaz]

No, it is not reasonable at all.

An old thread and relevant posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27352700

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27353078

[uc_banana]

I nearly forgot the other fact about street-lighting. It was widely adopted at a time when there was a lot of night-time baseload that couldn't be turned off. Now that we use more intermittent sources, there just isn't this "free" night time power to be used.

[Waterluvian]

I’m also going to guess that people drive on average far less in the EU than in North America where I imagine a lot of critics are framing their mental model of the issue.

A quick search suggests that the average annual distance in the US is about double.

[aboringusername]

> Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.

The amount of turn-over of cars, daily, or even hourly at gas stations today is insane. As soon as you hit 50%+ of call cars being electric, there will be a % of those charging 24/7 (any hour/time of day, for possibly multiple hours). That's going to hit the grid. Hard.

Now imagine in 2022/2023 where governments in the EU are giving citizens cost of living payments, money off their energy bills. And that's today. Apparently because one country invaded another. But people were scared they couldn't "heat their homes" let alone charge their cars. Whatever you are paying for electric today just times that by 3/4 because that's the realistic cost once EV's are the main vehicle on the road.

As soon as EV's take off and become the "norm" the costs for electric will skyrocket. Wouldn't be surprised if it costs 1-2+ euros per kWh.

[jtc331]

It's nice to be able to hand wave away the problem. "A few hours" is "10 hours", and the instantaneous energy for each of those is very high. When I charge my EV it doubles my normal peak electrical usage (in KW, instantaneous) and quadruples (or more) my average KW usage.

In my new neighborhood a set of ~5 homes is connected to a 50 KVa transformer. Those five homes charging a single vehicle each at the same time is enough to overload that transformer even with zero other demand. That's a real problem.

My understanding is that we're talking about a doubling of demand. Are we ready to double all of our electrical generation and transmission infrastructure?

[jtc331]

I don’t understand the downvotes. These are specific datapoints we have to wrestle with to make this transition, not a position on desirability of any of these things.