Is the adoption of electric cars too fast to be sustained?

The grid will be just fine. An advanced economy can install bigger wires and burn more natural gas. Battery technology is already diversifying around mineral mining constraints.

The problem I see is with lifestyles. There's a ceiling on how many people work and travel in a predictable manner to a predictable place with a garage that they own and can install a charger in.

Are landlords going to install enough chargers to fill entire apartment complex parking lots? Are they going to maintain and repair them? Will they charge for charging?

Do we live in a society where people won't routinely vandalize and neglect the chargers?

I fear a future where there will be a privileged set of suburbanites who get to drive their subsidized cars from their subsidized jobs to their subsidized homes and charge it with subsidized electricity, but a very large subset of people will be stuck driving combustion cars that are heavily carbon taxed and penalized. And it won't be because they don't care about climate change, but because their lives are different.

If we try to overlay the EV network on the existing ICE model, yeah, charging will be difficult. But if we rethink the whole ordeal, it becomes much simpler, and in fact, I think once EVs become dominant, you'll see fewer mom and pop charging station than you see gas stations, not because it will be more expensive and difficult to run, but because the need just won't be there.

The majority of charging will be done at home, or maybe at work (I can see EV charging parking lots becoming a benefit). Long haul trips, depending on conditions, could be charged overnight at hotels, or quick-charged at restaurants.

Cross-country EV trips are already viable, although they require some planning up front.

And yes, quick charging produces more load on the grid than fueling up at the pump, but again, the majority of charging won't be done at a quick charger. It will be done cheaply, at home, at night.

I don’t think those are the issues. As an EV owner, I do most of my charging at home, and speed/availability of chargers has yet to become an issue. We don’t have to replace every gas station. Transportation corridors and destinations

I believe the bigger issues are supply availability for nickel, cobalt, lithium, and silicon carbide. -Nickel and cobalt are key materials in high performing cathodes. Iron-phosphate is now being used for cheaper EVs, but the energy density is lower. Next breakthrough we are waiting for on the cathode side is iron-fluoride, which has a higher energy density, but doesn’t work outside of lab conditions yet. -There is not enough actively mined lithium to complete the EV transition, and we are also putting it in boxes on the ground for energy storage. -Silicon carbide chips are rapidly replacing IGBTs and MOSFETs in the engine and charging hardware, and the ramp to meet demand is going to take years

Charging is one part of the equation. You are assuming that charging is something that all cars need frequently, it doesn't have to be like that.

Concepts like Lightyear One prove that we can create cars that pass our crash requirements, have the space requirements, but yet are light enough and aerodynamic enough to have minimal power consumption.

The catch is people need to start to come to terms with the fact that personal transport has to ultimately be utilitarian. Yes it might mean you won't go 0-60 in 7 secs, yes it might mean that you will have to give up an oversized 3 tonne vehicle to 'feel safe'. Also cars shouldn't be a status symbol for anything, auto manufactures have exploited this to no end with dire environmental impacts.

Ideally what governments need to promote and invest in is public transit, especially inside densely urban areas. A car as a personal means of transport should only be something you feel you need when travelling to more 'remote' areas where public transit is non-existing or too sparse.

People are being sold a range reduction of 50 to 90% and are being told this is good for them. Traveling long distance is made much harder and refueling times are long. The faster you refuel the more exponentially quickly you permanently damage the battery. Energy density is a massive problem.

Electric cars are excellent if you fit their use case but AWFUL if you don't. You have to go into the purchase of an electric with your eyes wide open.

They are NOT as versatile as ICE vehicles.

I believe charging stations is the least of our problems: will there be enough rare earth metals to build batteries for everybody and will there be enough electricity production for all those EVs?

I think we should consider more than just electric cars as a solution to this problem. We need to rethink the way we travel in many car dependent countries.

Cars are the most in-efficient means of personal transportation. People should have multiple options for different needs.

For shorter trips: Buses, Trains, light rail, Trams(StreetCars), bikes, walking, and finally electric cars.

For long distance travel: slower overnight trains, intercity busses, high-speed rail, planes, and finally electric cars.

Giving people multiple choices of transport for each trip helps reduce the need for massive roads, parking lots, and traffic jams. This also reduces the urban heat island effect because we can have more green spaces.

I think cars, like all tools, are extremely useful, but we really need to think of more wholistic solutions than just electric cars so that it's actually a pleasant experience when someone does need to drive a car

Electric cars are a distraction that don't solve most problems cars bring.

It's fundamentally inefficient, both energy and space wise to move a huge box weighing around two tons for what is most of the time a single passenger.

We need to rethink how we transport people and emphasize trains, metros and bikes much more strongly.

There'll always be a need for cars for a few use cases, and we should make those electric, but the much more important step is to greatly reduce our overall car use.

Nightly charging, to which wide adoption of EV leads, smoothens the day/night load cycle and thus improves the business of power generation and delivery which is better for everyone.

Given how cheap the batteries already, i think the EV adoption would be growing exponentially and is slowed only by the manufacturers' capacities.

We have a 2022 Leaf and use it almost exclusively for outings that are <200 miles round trip, so no need to charge anywhere but at home 99% of the time. In fact most trips are probably well under 20 miles. So if you have a garage and are willing to install a 240V, 50A circuit, a lot of use cases are covered?

One weekend my wife drove it from Boston to NYC and planned ahead stopping in Connecticut once in each direction, found a ChaDeMO fast charger, topped up in less than an hour both times. Kind of inconvenient, but felt like the future is getting here, slowly?

>Will there be enough charging stations to avoid the problems of queues that take longer than a day to recharge all the cars that need it?

I dont know where you live but practically everywhere I ever want to drive has level 3 chargers available. I also tend to find most chargers arent in use. There's a surprising amount of chargers now. Fueling up at home is even possible, if not preferred. Charging wont really ever be a problem. If Chargepoint sees some location is popular and always busy, it's good business to build more chargers. They profit off what they can charge per kwh and what they pay for the kwh.

>Is the fast charging technology likely to improve fast enough to make this problem disappear?

Oh ya, level 3 charging while keeping the battery between 20-80% means you can charge full speed. Call this around 200kw, which means generally you're charging at 1000km/h. Which means about realistically speaking your time to charge 20-80% is really only about 20-25minutes in current cars.

>Are there alternative to horizontal (load balancing over multiple stations) and vertical (faster chargers) scale ups?

Charging isn't really a problem. True years ago but not anymore.

Whats not yet visible now, but might be in the future is that electrical vehicles can use a superset of fuel, meaning you can charge your evehicle with power saved - for example by heating your home with wood.

Meanwhile traditional cars are bound to the one fuel they can handle. Which might be needed elsewhere in emergencies.

Relevancy, might become blatantly obvious this winter in europe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32385157 related thread "The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles" responding to "Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?"

Personally I think it's "not fast enough" excect to the extent the speed is derailing substitutes for cars.

I think we are still at the point where most people are charging at home, but it is pretty easy to imagine overwhelming the public charging system if that dynamic changes unexpectedly.

You also have to consider that supply of EVs is not meeting demand and that helps.

Average miles per year in the USA is 12,000 miles or so. With a ev with 300 mile range that's 40 times per year, or less than once a week.

Typically a fill up in a sedan/small truck is around 75-80 kwh.

So basically the cost of the grid is related to it's peak power, which in most locales is the hottest day of the summer. So as long as you charge off peak it's not a big deal, and if anything it helps the grid. By charging off peak you are generating more revenue for the grid, while not making it more expensive to build or maintain. In fact if enough usage off peak and the cost per kwh can drop for everyone and the cost difference between offpeak and peak would decrease.

Charging 75kwh off peak once every 9 days or so, isn't a big deal. I've got a 60 amp circuit that charges my EV at 220v @ 48 amps, so one hour = 10.5 kwh. So that's about what I need to average a day. But if there was a heat warning (or say a electricity price spike) I could easily go several days without charging, even a week.

I was playing with a solar calculator and it looked like I could offset my EV's electricity use with 8 panels (on average) or something like 6 in the summer and 12 in the winter.

Because of this Biden set a goal of 50% of new cars being EVs by 2030. That's a pretty modest goal, especially since the average age of cars is in the 8-10 year range. So by the end of 2030 1/8 to 1/10th of the cars should be EVs. At that rate the current grid needs to grow by less than 1% a year.

Even a small incentive for workplaces to cover parking lots with solar should greatly help to offset the needs of EVs. The benefits would be manifold. Cities would have reduced heat island effects. Cars with less range would be more practical. Even ICE cars benefit by cooler cars in the summer, there's a significant energy spent cooling even car interior for the first few miles.

Hot swappable batteries need to be more seriously considered.

Imagine: a gas station has a huge bank of batteries on charging racks. You pay a fee to swap out your used one for a fully charged one in less time than it currently takes to fill a gas tank.

This would require industry standardisation over battery shapes, connectors, etc. The US sadly won't move on this, but the EU might. Unfortunately we might be tok far gone with the number of EV already sold without this capability, but I think there is still time.

No. A kilometre not driven is best kilometre. So it is good thing if EVs do not get charged as they will use less energy overall.

It's too late to do it slowly. If we want any chance of avoiding the worst parts of climate change.

If you're thinking of EV charging as it's commonly portrayed in the media ("You have to go to the fast charge stations and wait, or you have to have, like, 700A service to charge your 300 miles in an hour overnight!"), yeah, there are problems.

If you talk to people who actually own and use EVs, almost none of that matters, because slow charging at home overnight is what people do, and it simply doesn't take much power.

The average American drives about 35 miles a day, which on an EV is about 10kWh. Maybe more in the winter, but if you charge on a 3.8kW charger (240V/16A), that's only 2-3 hours of charging at home. You can charge on less if you want, or even on 120V and be fine most of the year, but winter will be a problem in some areas - you're using more power for heat, and the car has to warm the pack to charge in the cold, so 120V may not deliver enough power to both warm the pack and charge the pack. It's not impossible, but you make your life a lot easier with 240V/16A charging (max continuous current on a 20A circuit).

DC fast charging is only needed if you don't have a place to charge at home or at work (which will be the case for plenty of people right now and hopefully fewer long term), or for long road trips (also a fairly rare case).

My preferred method for EV charging infrastructure [0] is to simply put those 240V/20A chargers everywhere. Apartments, shopping parking lots, etc. Your car is "grazing" in enough places that it's never a big problem except for road trips. If it's not full, oh well, it'll be filled up next time. I can do 100 miles a day on a Chevy Volt (10kWh battery pack before the gas engine kicks on) purely on battery if I'm going between places that have chargers, and have some time at home to charge, etc.

Now, are there problems with sourcing the raw materials for batteries? Yes. And this is why I'm a fan of PHEVs (40-50 mile battery range, gas engine for longer travel) for the next decade or so of vehicles, because you can put a given number of cells into a lot more cars that way (you can build about 5 Chevy Volt packs for the cells going into a single long range BEV), and that offsets far more gas use, while also being less annoying to use - if you can't always charge, it's no problem, you just have a hybrid.

In terms of additional power needed, because EVs are so much more efficient than ICEs (about 85% wall-to-wheels vs 25-30% on an ICE), you only end up needing about 25% more annual power production. There are some peak demand concerns here, but they're fairly easy to mitigate as they approach - peak demand increases from population growth anyway, so it's a "Build out peak capacity slightly faster than you were planning to" concern for power companies, not an overnight panic sort of problem.

And while you're at it, EV charging after the morning commute can take up a lot of the mid-day solar surplus.

0: https://www.sevarg.net/2020/04/27/slow-dumb-charging-quit-ch...

The electrical system will need to double in capacity to support 90% electric vehicles.

The main issue is that the power grid simply is not designed for that kind of a load. If you only look at the power, it may even work, but there is the power distribution infrastructure in between. For EVs to be usable the whole electrical grid has to be significantly redesigned and exactly that kind of redesign is also needed for small scale solar to be useful.