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Comment by jerlam

4 hours ago

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:

  80 or more spaces must install solar power generation facilities with a capacity of at least 100 kilowatts

If this is to be a general requirement across all parking spaces, they don't get hogged, because there's always more parking.