this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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You will need millions of charging stations everywhere. Both AC and DC charging stations. It is actually less straightforward once you go beyond home recharging.
That's ridiculous, there aren't anywhere near a million gas stations in the US, and you will need a lot fewer charging stations than gas stations.
That's the point: If you can refuel instead of recharge, you don't need that many stations. The number of hydrogen stations would be the same as the number of gas stations. And you have it backwards: You need vastly more charging stations than refueling stations. The US has something like 150k stations, and it's not even close to being enough.
EV users charge at home. That means they make far fewer trips to charging stations than do hydrogen or gasoline users. In fact, many EV users never go to a charging station and only charge at home. Which means you need far fewer charging stations than refuelling stations.
Again, not everyone can do this. You will have to have public chargers. Plus fast charging for long distance driving. This will still require millions of charging stations, far more than any technology that allows you to refuel.
If there is less demand for charging stations than refuelling stations, then it is impossible that you will need more charging stations than refuelling stations.
One refueling station can serve thousands of customers, but a charging station needs multiple hours to charge each car. So you need far fewer gas stations. This is why the economics of gas stations worked out in the first place. Before, people bought tanks of gasoline and refueled at home. The gas station model was cheaper.
It takes 20 minutes to charge at a Tesla Supercharger. And their economics are working great, in fact Supercharger stations are more profitable than gas stations.
You mean from 20% to 80% charge? Which is realistically only 150 miles of gained range, and that's assuming everything is working at full power. The alternative gives you 0-100% in 5 minutes consistently. And best of all, it can be scaled up to trucks and above without suddenly realizing you need megawatts of power per station.
In reality, the charging solution is much harder. We've just normalized the idea of using electricity to charge things when it is actually a bigger challenge than dealing with fuels.