[quickthrowman]

A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions of vehicles every day going to come from?

100M vehicles times 10kW divided by one million is One Million Megawatts.

One Thousand Gigawatts. That’s five hundred 2GW power plants. Four thousand solar panels make 1MW, four million solar panels make 1GW, four billion solar panels make 1000 GW.

And that’s 40% of the fleet converted to EVs, and does not account for diesel semi-tractors being converted to EV.

[wasabi991011]

> A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just chooses to spend it on other goals such as bombing Iran.

[danaris]

> The US is plenty wealthy per capita

This is not a particularly useful statistic when talking about the number of cars being bought.

Almost invariably, "per capita wealth" uses mean wealth. This is dramatically different from the median wealth.

When you've got a few individual people worth upwards of $200 billion, that means that each one of them adds roughly $1000 to the "per capita wealth" number, while only ever accounting for something like a dozen cars at the outside.

[applfanboysbgon]

> which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

That is not a tech problem, which is the claim I was replying to.

I saw your deleted comment about four charging stations costing $200,000 or so. Four petrol stations also cost that much. Nobody is saying infrastructure is free, but phasing out infrastructure is simply a matter of time and political will, not a fundamental tech problem.

[quickthrowman]

I agree that we’ll eventually fully convert to EVs, it’s just going to take way longer than a lot of people expect. It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.

Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.

[applfanboysbgon]

> It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.

Would certainly happen a lot faster if, for example, America spent the $200 billion the Pentagon just asked for the Iran war on infrastructure instead. It would even benefit Americans, imagine that! America is the wealthiest country in the world by far, it has the capital to facilitate the process, but taxpayers would rather blow it on bombing schools across the world.

[danaris]

> taxpayers would rather

I think if you look at poll numbers, you'll find that taxpayers, on the whole, would very much rather not be bombing schools across the world.

Trump's pointless (indeed, highly counterproductive) strikes on Iran are not at all popular, and quite the opposite of the platform he campaigned on.

[rjrjrjrj]

The taxpayers, on the whole, voted for a pathological liar. And that is what they got.

[Forgeties79]

Norway is hardly alone. More and more countries are increasing EV purchases and decreasing ice purchases. We are clearly headed in that direction

[quickthrowman]

I agree, I’m just saying it’s easier for a country with a sovereign wealth fund and ridiculous oil royalties to handle upgrading their infra to handle EVs for 6M is much easier than doing it in the US which has extremely low average population density, 250M+ vehicles and 400M people, and a mess of separate but inter-tied grids and varying levels of infrastructure investment depending on which state you are in.

[varjag]

We have the wealth fund precisely because we don't discretionally spend oil royalties.

[nullpoint420]

If they could find the power for the data centers, why can’t we find it for EVs?

[tw-20260303-001]

But they didn’t find power for data centres. That’s one of their problems.

[nullpoint420]

So there's no new capacity that went online for the new build-outs? None of that could've been used for residential capacity?

[danaris]

Sure there is. But some of the datacenters individually use as much power as an entire city.

When you're trying to build out dozens or hundreds of those across the country, there's no way we can ramp up capacity at that rate.

[nullpoint420]

That's exactly my point. I'd rather have those built outs to power entire cities.