Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
So the current supercharger can charge at 150kW, which takes about 20 minutes for a 50% charge. Lets pretend in the future they can get that down to 50% in 5 minutes, a 4 fold increase. Lets also pretend they can do that by only doubling the power input, not quadrupling it. So that's 300kW per 5 minutes, about the time to fill a gas car. As Edslunch pointed out, the gas stations in Canmore in the summer are jammed with road trippers. There are about 40 pumps on the main strip, I'll ignore the other ones in town for this exercise. So, 40 pumps, convert that to electric, at 300kW each. That's 12 MW of power. This allows 40 vehicles per 5 minutes to get a 50% charge.
For perspective, a home with a 200A service has 48kW potential. Alberta's largest solar facility has 15MW of nameplate capacity. And this is one small town, and ignores all the RV's, semi's etc. Think of all the pumps in Golden, and other places along the TCH. Remember that I also made some big assumptions, like 4x increase in charging speed, a 2x increase in efficiency, and only a 50% charge. This will be a huge challenge of going all electric, so if you think it is coming in 10 years, and petrol is dead, you might want to re-think that. It's also why hybrids make a lot of sense over the short term.
|
Literally nobody thinks electric will supplant gasoline in the next 10 years. The title of this thread was just click bait.
I do think this is one of those topics where you have a bunch of people telling you all the ways electric cars won't work, while the people that make them and the people that buy them are just making them work without much difficulty.
Also, you don't need charging stations all over the place in the same way you need gas stations all over the place. Every single house has its own charging station. Running 220 is a nothing. I ran it to my garage a few years ago in anticipation of either me or the next owner having an electric car at some point in the future. It cost a couple hundred bucks to make happen. People add 220 for hot tubs all the time. You can set a car to charge overnight during non-peak times. It's perfect.
Every single office, store, building, etc. has electricity already run to it for if you need a charge during the day. The energy arrives along little tiny pipelines (wires) already there. The infrastructure is already in place whereas all gas stations are an island that need a truck filled with toxic liquids cruising around to top them up on a weekly basis.
The fact that people take a road trip once a year doesn't mean electric cars won't work. Traditional gas cars and the infrastructure for gas cars isn't going to disappear overnight, so people can always drive those. If there are hours waits for charging in some places, people will open up more charging stations. Simple supply and demand. Will we need to run more electricity? Maybe. Or maybe people will store energy in batteries they've charged overnight during non-peak hours and allow people to charge their batteries off those during peak hours. Whatever happens, these will be easy problems to sort out.