I cannot emphasize this enough. It matters. Those who self selected to drive an EV have a bevy of features in:
socioeconomic status
tolerance to new technology (route planning, travel planning, limited use, etc)
appetite for risk
amenities possessed or capable of possessing (charging infrastructure at home, etc.)
John Q. public should be assumed to have few or NONE of these attributes. Thus the sample is NOT the population.
There are “convenience” stores out there because people are not capable of eating, fueling and travelling proactively. That we get most people to the starting gate and on time with bells on is a wonder.
All true. But, just as a rough example, if half the people normally charge at home just half of their miles then the need for public charging is about 25% less. Convenient locations are still needed for public chargers, just 25% less capacity.
I think, though, that the projection that we need a million public chargers probably does take into account home charging.
There’s about a million gas pumps in the U.S. (give or take). Some fueling will take place at home - but you need more charging stations than gas pumps, because it takes longer to do the actual fueling an EV than an ICE. U.S. gas pumps will push about 6-8 gallons per minute, or about two minutes to fill a not-completely-empty tank. Sure, some (many!) people will mess around or run into the convenience store or something - but some (many!) won’t, and a gas station can turn a bunch of cars through the pumps much more quickly than charging stations.
There are two other reasons why we might need lots of chargers to effectively manage a big EV transition. The first is timing. As we discussed in the CA curtailment thread, it would be very helpful if people were charging their EV’s in the early afternoon, when solar is at its peak, rather than overnight. If a big switch to EV’s does happen, then you might expect to see efforts to make that timing happen.
The second is size. Specifically, vehicle battery size. Big batteries are expensive, and vehicles with big range are more expensive than vehicles with smaller range. And the cost of EV’s slows down the rate of adoption. So if you want to get more people to switch to EV’s sooner and faster, it would help if a cheaper, shorter range vehicle was commercially viable. To say nothing of the fact that smaller vehicles are better environmentally even when they’re EV’s, and environmental benefits are one of the main points of all this. So if you get a very dense network of readily available chargers, you might be able to drive down the average size of EV’s and speed adoption.
How do you know that - it was not mentioned as a consideration! I would say it probably ‘does not’ take that in to account. That is my point. Of course more is better in terms of number of charging stations; but we don’t need any charging stations if everyone home charges at 110 and drives 50 or so miles a day! The question is “where is the middle ground”? Is it needing a million stations or 200,000 stations or 10 million stations?
Here’s how many EV chargers the US has – and how many it needs https://electrek.co/2023/01/09/heres-how-many-ev-chargers-the-us-has-and-how-many-it-needs/
So, in order to match the charging needs of all those EVs, the United States will need to quadruple the number of EV chargers between 2022 and 2025 and grow more than eight-fold by 2030, even taking home charging into account, according to the analysts…
And looking to 2030, with the assumption that there will be 28.3 million EVs on US roads, a total of around 2.13 million Level 2 and 172,000 Level 3 public chargers will be required, in addition to home EV chargers.
California needs more than 1 million electric-vehicle charging stations by 2030 to meet demand, but currently only has about 70,000 stations, the California Energy Commission said this week.
The CEC estimates that more than 8 million zero-emission vehicles could be operating on the state’s roads by the end of this decade, and most of those are expected to plug into charging ports at night.
If the report says that most of the ZEV’s are charging at night, it seems incredibly likely that they’re including home charging in their analysis.
My apologies, I missed that line in my reading. Or forgot or misremembered it to make my point or just fouled up completely. I should have known better; “you don’t go in against a Floridian when death is on the line!”.
But is it home charging with 120v i.e. just a cable (w/ electronics and J1772 connector), not technically a charger (really EVSE) needed, or it it home charging with an L2 charger (EVSE) being utilized and counted? When they count a charger are they only counting public chargers? Also note that people home charging can just use a cable plugged into an electric dryer type outlet and get L2 charging speeds. Are they counting this? Most likely no. As the market expands people will use all of these methods as they search for the lowest cost option for the convenience level that suits them.
I’m not really sure whether using a cable that comes with the car or installing a home L2 charger really makes much of a difference except for portability and convenience. I see Amazon now has an L2 charger for just $99. You do have to get it installed.
I think it’s a little simpler than that. CA wants a lot of people who don’t have home charging to own EV’s.
The CA report projects that by 2030 there will be more than 8 million EV’s in California. I think they’re assuming that at least 1 million EV’s will be owned by people who do not live in a residence where informal “home charging” is an option (mostly single family homes, townhomes, or duplexes where the owner has access to a 120v outlet adjacent to a parking space).
That seems a reasonable assumption to me. EV ownership in the early adoption phase will skew towards people who have single-family homes, of course. Those folks are wealthier, and overnight charging is easy if you have your own garage (or a house with an external outlet near the driveway). But to get to the point where more than 25% of your vehicle fleet is ZEV, you have to be well outside that early adopter skew. About 20% of California housing units are multi-family dwellings (more than four units), and that number is increasing (new construction is about half and half MFR versus other types). Unlike single-family owners, nearly all of those owners will lack a dedicated parking space adjacent to electrical power that they control - the basic prerequisites for home charging without having a new charging station built.
So, yeah. You can’t have the kind of EV adoption that CA is looking to have without having a lot more public chargers. Because you need to have a ton of people own EV’s that don’t have home charging.
Might depend on what is considered a “public” charger. If public means anyone that is one thing. Locally, numerous businesses have lots of chargers for their workers. Google and Apple, for example have them at pretty much every office by the hundreds or more. Most are employee only, as locked by ChargePoint or whoever the provider is, but some are open to others after hours.
Pretty much every new large apartment and condo building going up in the area has dozens of chargers and are probably pre-wired for more.
Not exactly typical companies you picked for your illustration there. How about, say, Waffle House, WalMart (for employees), FedEx, Kroger, CVS, Starbucks, Ernst & Young, or some of the other biggest employers? Or, more to the point, the tens of thousands of small employers who count for more than half of all workers?
Um, not here. I live in what is politely called “flyover” land, and there’s a lot more of that than “coastal”.
Yeah, but that’s not going to be nearly enough to meet the EV fleet that they’re projecting. They’re planning for up to 8 million EV’s by 2030. That’s more than one in four cars in California being an EV. Not new cars - which will have to be nearly 100% EV for that to happen. That’s for all cars.
That won’t work unless you can accommodate a million or more EV’s owned by people who rent or live in apartments (or both) where there aren’t chargers now. Which means you have to build lots and lots and lots of new chargers. You can’t get there with just new construction, since new units are going to be a tiny fraction of the housing stock. Well more than 95% of the residential units that will exist in 2030 are already built - for CA to get to 8M EV’s, they need to build a ton of new chargers for existing buildings.
A million seems low, frankly, for that number. Granted, the number is ridiculous. EV’s are “only” a quarter of sales now, and less than half a million per year. CA is not getting to 8M by 2030. But if they were to get there, they’d need a vastly larger charging infrastructure to both expand access to home charging and accommodate people that don’t have it.
A ‘hidden’ cost of EVs that a friend with one has just found out:
Epyx says that the average replacement tyre fitted to an electric vehicle (EV) is 18.59 inches and costs £207 while, for internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, the corresponding figures are 17.40 inches and £130.
This data is taken from the company’s 1link Service Network, which is used to manage service, maintenance, and repair (SMR) for more than four million company vehicles.
Tyres fitted to EVs are lasting 6,350 fewer miles on average than those fitted to petrol or diesel cars, according to software firm Epyx.
Wow. They may not reach 8M, but they seem poised to reach half of that or more. And that’s way better than pretty much any public energy/climate related goal in recent decades. There are a little over a million ZEV in CA today. If they average half a million for the 7 years 2024-2030, then that’s another roughly 3.5M, so that means about 4.5M in total. That’s pretty good results for an 8M goal set by CA government. And, 4.5M with some percentage owned by people without garages or dedicated parking spots will require a substantial increase in public charger availability (not as much as 8M would require, but still plenty).
I don’t see it as either, really. I’m not saying it’s good or bad - just that the report is probably correct when it says that if California’s got close to 8 million EV’s on the road, they probably need a million charging stations or more in order to serve them.
If EV’s get really mainstream - the close to 100% of the new vehicle market that CA is projecting - then that means a non-trivial number will be owned by folks living in units that today don’t have home charging. So if that’s the level of EV adoption you predict, or want to work towards, there’s a certain level of charging infrastructure that has to accompany it. So CA isn’t wrong in pointing that out, or saying that’s something that needs paying attention to.
When trying to figure out if a half a cup of something is real or not it makes sense to actually measure the capacity of the glass and what you are trying to fill it with. So I started to make a spreadsheet with a few categories of EV owners, chargers and the like. But the numbers were so far off from a million I just just did some simple math.
First, most EV owners will skew to higher end income and are home owners. Most of these will probably install their own L2 charger at home. That will be millions of L2 chargers…maybe 3M, 4M or more at least. So the study can’t be including those as part of the 1M. They must be counting only chargers anyone can use…public chargers.
So let’s assume all 8M never charge at home or work (the worst case, requiring the most chargers). This is like the gas station model where everyone goes to a fast DC charger every day or every week or however often they need to.
So, 8M people, 15000 miles/year (or pick your number) is 120B miles.
Assume a 200 mile charge in 20 minutes (or pick your numbers) and this is 200M hours of charging per year.
If you had 1M chargers that would mean each charger was used 200 hours per year or 33 minutes per day. To me it seems like they are off by at least 10x before considering that home and work charging will handle at least 50% and maybe 80% of the load for most of the roughly 60-80% of EV owners that have garages or carports in CA.
Of course, if one were to choose to install a bunch of slower public L2 chargers instead of faster DC chargers you could install more of them. But rarely is anyone going to pay to charge for 8 hours to get 200 miles of range. Places like hotels could have this, but so far they are mostly free and to attract business.
Just look at the same calculation applied to gas pumps. The U.S. consumes about 130 billion gallons of gas per year. There’s about 1.2 million gas pumps, roughly 8 gallons per minute…carry the two…and those pumps get used about 226 hours per year, or about 37 minutes per day. Roughly the same order of magnitude. Just to do a gut check, even before you adjust for fleet fuel stations and their higher pumping rates.
Why so low? It makes sense, because virtually no one’s using a gas pump at all for part of the day (say, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. most stations), and the rest of the day the gas stations will be located to handle peak, not average, use. You need to have enough pumps to handle demand when people are actually using them - not an average that includes the 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. hours.
I suspect that CA is probably including “work charging” as being part of the million chargers. Which are going to have very low turnover - you might have just one or two cars use a work charger per day. You have a lot of time with a vehicle sitting at the charger - sometimes even after it’s done charging. So you need a lot more of them to deliver the same amount of fuel as a roadside public charger or a gas pump. Even for roadside public chargers, you’re going to have a lot more of them offered in locations where people can do something while they’re waiting for a charge, which means (again) a non-trivial amount of longer charges than just 20 minutes.
But as every says about gas stations – they don’t make any money on gas, it is all about the snack market!
Tesla cars in CA: ~266K
Tesla Superchargers in CA: about 400 locations with 6000 stalls
Cars per charger: 44
The study said 8 cars per charger.
Except on a few peak demand days (where gas stations are also impacted like Thanksgiving travel) very few complain about busy superchargers.
Of course we know that gas pumps are different – people don’t sit at the pump for 15-30 minutes (fast charger) or hours (L2 charger). Why would you make such as ridiculous claim?
a) If all public chargers were L2, one charger would serve 8 cars, thus 3 hours per day per car. This is about 75 miles per day or 27K miles per year besides their home charging. Very few drive that far and no one would do that instead of using faster DC chargers (for which there would be far fewer of them.)
b) people don’t refill their gas cars at home most of the time
Not to claim that they’re similar - but to point out that the scope of infrastructure like car fueling (whether gas pumps or chargers) isn’t determined by the number of minutes the things are being used on average. It’s determined by the number of facilities needed to accommodate demand at peak locations and times.
So the fact that a million chargers would each only be used for an average of 33 minutes a day is not evidence that that’s too many chargers, any more than the fact that gas pumps are only used for 37 minutes a day is evidence that we have too many gas pumps. The average amount of use per day over the course of a year isn’t what shapes the scale of the infrastructure - it’s peak usage. You have to have enough “spaces” at either type of infrastructure to accommodate the peak demands, not the average demand.
So the fact that a million chargers results in 33 minutes per day per charger over a year doesn’t, to me, suggest that they’re an order of magnitude off in guessing how many chargers they need. Because we similarly have vastly more gas pumps in this country than we would need if they were scaled to meet average daily use.