[brazzy]

> Well, that's US. I am in much more densely populated Central Europe - several orders of magnitude compared to California.

The average population density of California is 250 per square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than one order of magnitude in difference.

> For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.

If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.

> And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.

There most certainly is. People overestimate the required space to a ridiculous degree.

[throwaway50606]

I don't live in Germany. Germany is a large state with a lot of empty space. I live in a much smaller, much more densely populated state.

Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin, Cologne or Amsterdam, not the average of an entire large state like Germany.

The city where I live has nearly 3 million residents on just 50km2, and it's not even the most dense city around. Compare that to San Francisco (second most dense US city) - which has 815k residents on 120km2.

People here live in very dense cities with agricultural/natural space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretches of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.

> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.

That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - the grid isn't able to provide that much power and especially not during peak hours, not to mention the missing power generation capacity. The grid is already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.