Comment by jerlam
18 hours ago
People would be unhappy with a charger that only worked slowly and during the day, even if it was free.
18 hours ago
People would be unhappy with a charger that only worked slowly and during the day, even if it was free.
They'd also be unhappy with a solar panel that only generated power when a car was plugged in. Fortunately it would still be connected to the grid, resolving both concerns.
Why would I be unhappy? Consider this:
I drive to the mall.
I plug in the slow free charger (maybe ~3500W) as opposed to the paid one at >20000W.
Two hours later I have, say, about 7kWh topped up on my battery.
I now have restored about 40km range, so my 30km drive to and from the mall would be entirely restored.
A non-grid tied charger cannot be depended on. You might get 40km worth of charge. You might also get zero if it's cloudy or the sun is behind a building.
You might say, oh this is fine, anything is better than nothing. But someone cheaper than you will think the same thing, and they will leave their car plugged into the charger all day long, because the cost of free surpasses everything. And it means that the charger will never be available.
> You might say, oh this is fine, anything is better than nothing. But someone cheaper than you will think the same thing, and they will leave their car plugged into the charger all day long, because the cost of free surpasses everything. And it means that the charger will never be available.
Two things:
1. Parking itself doesn't have to be free, even if the energy was. (Though I don't expect the energy would ever be free in a case like this, because sending it out to the grid isn't that big a deal, and neither is micro-billing).
2. You seem to be imagining a single isolated parking space in a bigger parking area, whereas the article (if you can call it that, it's the size and depth of a tweet) is saying it is mandatory, at a quoted rate of:
If this is to be a general requirement across all parking spaces, they don't get hogged, because there's always more parking.
Even better if we could somehow trunk my space’s 3500W of panels with the ones covering the combustion-driven car next to me. And the empty space to my other side…
You missed the most important part, in which you pay for all this (directly or indirectly).
As opposed me paying indirectly and directly for all the subsidies for the petroleum industry?
> Global explicit subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to around $1.5 trillion in 2022. […] The $7 trillion figure includes the social and environmental costs of fossil fuels.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-subsidies-fossil-fuels
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Why do you think anybody was operating under the assumption that this was free? But keeping your car topped up now is hardly free either, especially lately, so the question is really about cost comparison. And that's before you get into any externality costs.
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Why? The vast majority of cars spend most of the day stationary. I'd even venture to say most cars spend most of the day stationary in the same spot. If that spot has charging, slow or not, it would likely cover the daily energy used by that vehicle. Aside from road trips, that literally sounds like the perfect charging setup to cover most vehicle use-cases.
I'm not sure that's true?
Your car already has the battery built right into it, so a trickle charge for eight hours while you're busy at work might be enough to cover your commute.
2 kW over 8 hours would be enough for 100 km per day.
I drive to work, I park in the parking lot, 8 hours later I leave work. My car is now fully charged.
I would be utterly devastated.
It's not reliable if it's not grid tied. Your car might be fully charged. It also might not get any charge at all.
Going up thread a bit, I find "and have a fairly small connection to the grid."
Though even without that, so what? The typical commute is not half a battery's worth of kilometres.
And even for the exceptions, you're allowed to have a split between parking spaces labelled "this juice is completely free but slow at the best of times and depends on the weather" and others labelled "this juice costs ¥¥¥/kWh but is backed by that hydro plant and will fill your batteries in 30 minutes".
I mean, parking spaces already get a split between long stay and short stay, it's not like people can't handle ideas like "free and meh vs. pricy and oooh", and likewise with fuel prices: https://www.istockphoto.com/de/foto/zapfsäule-in-usa-zeigt-p...