every single time i try to sit down and write my rant about the public EV charging network, i get stuck because i want it to be a Good Blog Post, i want to cite my sources, i want to do my research. and it's fucking impossible to do so anymore. if i want to look up old tax credits for EV charger installation all i get is articles about how to apply for the credit reintroduced in 2023. it sucks. so i'm just going to write my unsourced rant with things that i've convinced myself of over the last few years of driving an EV without being able to charge at home. (if you've got corrections for me, post a comment and if i agree i'll put it up here.)
putting power in context
today i drove round trip between Seattle and Bellevue at mostly freeway speeds, averaging around 50-60 mph. my car, a kia EV6, told me i made this trip averaging 4.4 miles per kWh. if you flip that fraction around, you get 227 Wh/mi (or 141 Wh/km, which is evidently quite remarkable, particularly for highway driving; in practice on 70 mph highways it fares much closer to the EV6 numbers listed on that site).
if you ask wolfram alpha about 227 Wh it'll give you some nice real-world comparisons, like "one-fifth of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT", or "5.3 times the energy capacity of the iPad 3 battery". again this is to go one mile. trying to wrap my mind around the fact that i can cook three potatoes in my microwave (900 W @ 15 min) for the same amount of energy as it takes to drive a mile throws me for a loop every time.
every mile you drive, you have to recharge that, right? unless you like turning stupidly expensive cars into bricks? it takes a little less than 10 minutes to recharge 227 Wh on a standard household circuit, or two days to recharge my car from 20% to 80%, and that's if you have the ability to charge at home. which i don't, because i live in an apartment.
so i have gotten to know public chargers a bit over the last three years and oh man let me tell you
why do i need an app to charge my car again?
again, the internet doesn't work anymore, and i don't have time to do real research like digging through newspaper archives and the federal register, so this is conjecture working backwards from what i know.
It Seems To Me that a lot of public EV charging infrastructure in the US was incentivized by tax credits. people in the US love to avoid paying taxes however they can, so tax credits end up being a great incentive to get rich people and business owners to do things. they gave out tax credits for buying EVs and for installing EV chargers, and so businesses installed EV chargers.
but businesses aren't just gonna dole out electricity for free. public "level 2" chargers are the equivalent of running your dryer on max heat for as long as a car is parked there and charging. and because it's The Future, business owners don't want to write down meter readings and charge customers directly, and car drivers don't want to be social ever.
this sounds like a great opportunity for a middleman. But Wait, if an average charging session is going to be an hour or so, and cars can only charge at a few kW because they can't do road trips yet, you're really only billing like $2-$3 per session. if you charge a credit card each time, like 10% of that is going to your card processor. it'd be cheaper for us, and thus for customers [citation needed], if we could bill them $10 or $20 at a time and maintain an account for them. and thus the Charging Network was born
this started a system of every single public EV charger requiring a fucking app, so that you can authenticate your prepaid payment account with an internet-connected EVSE. it is tiring. on my phone i currently have five separate apps solely for starting and stopping a charger i've plugged my car into. there was one charging network i had to use sometimes where they evidently lost the ability to update their old app, so you had to intuit that maybe there was a different app with the same name that might work. and these apps are just universally frustrating garbage interfaces
imagine if you had to install an app for every different company you bought your gas from. you have to type in your fucking credit card number, no autofill, no mobile wallet support, and if you don't do it fast enough your session times out. and if you don't have their app and you're out of cellular range or your phone is dead you just can't get gas, there is no other option. this is an era that public EV charging is still in, although we're thankfully slowly on the way out of.
the economics here are changing a bit, because drive batteries in cars are getting much, Much larger, and DC fast chargers are getting much faster, so a 30-minute charge session can easily push past $10 or $20, and it becomes far more economical to just put a damn credit card reader on the charger. (tesla, unsurprisingly, still refuses to do so; i also don't think i've ever seen a chargepoint charger with a credit card terminal either, but it doesn't seem like they own any of their chargers.)
a brief aside on electrify america
personally i give credit to the invention of "put a credit card terminal on the charger" to Electrify America, one of the first companies that decided to try and build out a DC fast charging network along major freeways to compete with tesla superchargers. (not directly compete, because at the time only tesla's cars could use their chargers, and wouldn't usually have any reason to use EA's, but you get what i mean.) there is not much credit to give them, honestly, because they are the only network that started primarily with DC fast charging in mind, so they never had to consider the implications of credit card processing fees eating 15-20% of their bottom line.
EA does not exist because the free market decided we needed a DC fast charging network open to any vehicle spread out across the vast US highway system. it exists because one of the conditions of volkswagen's settlement with US regulators from their emissions cheating scandal was to spend $2 billion on building "clean-emissions infrastructure", including a public electric vehicle charging network.
i fundamentally do not believe that we would have any EV adoption in the US beyond tesla if it weren't for volkswagen teaching their cars to cheat on emissions tests.
why are all the chargers broken?
consider the humble gas pump. it has had the benefit of a century of engineering to put up with Some Shit. people drive off with the hose still in the car so often that it is designed to get yoinked off as safely as possible and be replaced as cheaply as possible. every single one is inspected by your state's board of weights and measures. i would guess that most of their core components are interchangeable and readily available.
gas pumps are also placed at gas stations, which are businesses with the primary goal of selling you gas, and a secondary goal of getting you to buy overpriced sodas and dubious hot dogs and letting you pee. they usually have someone physically present working there who you can tell if something is broken, so they can report it to the business owner so it gets fixed, and they really would like it to get fixed as soon as possible because if a line forms, they're going to lose business to the guy across the street.
an EV charger is an afterthought. it leases space on someone else's property. there is no proprietor you can talk to without spending 15 minutes on hold. the nice ones are placed at wal-marts or big grocery stores where you probably need a code to get into the bathroom, but sometimes you're just chilling in a hotel parking lot in the middle of nowhere for 45 minutes with nothing to do. usually, nobody working at the wal-mart or the hotel or the mall can do a damn thing if the charger is broken, and they don't care either, because that's not their business.
an EV charger is a bespoke proprietary machine, known only to its manufacturer, and probably obsolete within three years. parts, if available, take weeks to arrive and weeks to be installed by a qualified electrician. the plugs themselves are way more fragile than a gas pump nozzle. for some godforsaken reason half of them run a shitty java app on windows embedded. also they have really thick copper wiring in them, so people have recently taken to chopping off the cables for scrap, which is really easy to do because nobody is around to notice.
a lot of the big DC fast charger networks own their equipment and lease space to operate them, but networks like chargepoint seem to not own any chargers. instead businesses (or increasingly, state departments of transportation and local electric utilities) buy chargers from chargepoint, presumably because they have to be the owner to get the tax credit, and then become responsible for maintenance. there's a tax credit for installing new EV chargers, but none for maintaining them. what the fuck do you think is going to happen?
why does it take so long?
Batteries Are Fucking Terrible For Cars!!!!!
like i don't know. it is an incredible feat of engineering that my car can charge at 250 kW on a good day. it still takes like 20 minutes to get from 20% to 80%, and then it's slow as hell the rest of the way to 100%. there is only so much engineering you can do to batteries. and then they fucking wear out. i am fairly certain battery cars are not going to save us
i am still pretty bullish on hydrogen fuel cell cars — apparently i have been since i did a research paper on the topic in high school freshman english in 2007 — because it seems to me the only way you can avoid sitting at a charger for 30 minutes while still having an emissions-free vehicle. you can maybe do electrolysis on-site using the local grid or solar or whatever and the local water supply? (i guess this assumes a world where we won't have Water Wars in a decade or so)
but if we tried Everything, and i mean Everything, to decarbonize every vehicle in america and we still had to do it with battery cars, there's going to need to be a radical shift in how charging works. i think obviously we're going to have to figure out how to harmonize the fact that people who live in apartments sometimes need cars and they'll need to be able to charge them at home; four chargers for a 100-space garage isn't going to cut it. but we also need public charging infrastructure that understands that it takes thirty minutes to fill up a single car, and that there needs to be people working there to help customers and report (and maybe even fix!) problems.
one might imagine a small convenience store building with 15-20 fast chargers surrounding it to meet roughly the same capacity as a 4-pump gas station, but good god that is uh. probably 350 kW × 20 = 7 megawatts of potential grid load. realistically probably 5 MW tops. some napkin math using numbers from various press releases leads me to believe that a single walmart store might have a maximum load of half a megawatt during a heat wave, and in a lot of places in the US that's probably the largest continuous grid load in the area unless you've got major factories nearby.
there is the idea of putting batteries inside the EV chargers themselves, so that you can smooth out the grid load while still providing fast charging for cars. but now you're adding more precious metals to the system???
anyone who thinks this is the future, this is how we fix climate change, doesn't know what this shit is like and how bleak the future of battery EVs is. thanks for reading my TED talk
This isn't a carefully reasoned argument. This is a pile of vibes. This is me looking at a bunch of factors that all have the opportunity to overturn the current equilibrum being thrown into what is likely to be a very short few years.
- There's not enough lithium. We cannot take every ICE car and replace it with an EV car. From memory, there's about enough that if we only used it for car batteries we could replace about 1/3 of cars.
- There's not enough lithium production. We cannot take every ICE car we make this year and make an EV car instead.
- The EU wants car manufacturers to switch to EVs by 2030. The UK just shifted that to 2035. This means they're already investing in not making ICEs in 6 years.
- Green electricity is getting silly cheap. Outside of transportation, fossil fuel demand is going to crater.
- Peak Oil is still sneaking up on us. Probably around 2050, but on a per-country or per-oilfield basis it's arriving unevenly all over the place. It's why they invented fracking. Fossil fuel supply is going to crater.
- Despite this, apparently oil rigs are "going green", which is to say, now that you get less energy out of the oil you pump out of the ground than you need to put into drilling for it, some drilling platforms have their own turbines so they can keep going.
- Your EV is twice as heavy as your ICE was. Road damage scales by the fourth power of the axle weight, so that's 16x the wear on road (and presumably tyres) before you factor in the fact that everyone apparently needs an F150 now. Sooner or later the tax incentive is going to switch hard from "don't produce CO2" to "you're paying for those road repairs, bucko".
- Insuring your car is getting more expensive. Buying a car is getting more expensive. Repairing a car is getting more expensive.
- The more Californian cities that burn to the ground, the more coastal cities flood or get hit by storms that flatten them, the more crops fail, the more political pressure there's going to be to stop producing more CO2. Right now "but I need my car!" and "I like my rural or beachfront home" are winning out, but one day "my car caught fire and I can't afford to replace it" or "I can't insure my home" are going to propel people towards places where they're not car-dependant.
- You ain't getting a beater EV because the value is all in the battery.
- Cheap, lightweight electric vehicle exist. Some east asian countries (Taiwan, I think?) have already got the infrastructure for hot-swapping scooter batteries. Electric bicycles use a lot less rare earth metals, as do electrified push-scooters. For a lot of people the math is going to start working out at ditching the car, especially in two-car households. This will likely cause a virtuous cycle with making cities better to cycle in.
- If we do replace all those cars with EVs, we can't charge them
These factors are all pulling in different directions. Some suggest a swift shift towards EVs, some a swift shift away from oil, some that your ICE car is your best bet long term. Nevertheless: I think that it's going to look like a big shift. I think ICEs are going to become unaffordable to buy, to run, to insure. I think EVs are going to remain expensive to buy and get more expensive to run while not getting sufficiently less awkward.
The upshot, I suspect, is a lot more e-bikes, a lot more electric scooters, and a lot more extremely small form factors: Kei trucks and electric "cars" that share more lineage with the golf cart than the F150. I think a lot of people are going to have to get used to having a range of 30mph and a top speed of 20-30mph, but that'll be enough. Heck, if you've got the non-freeway routes and don't need the range it'd probably save you $10k a year per car already, so you can imagine how incentivised people might get if it saves $20k a year and all they need to do is carry the battery up to their apartment to charge.
So yeah. I reckon over the next ten years the average person is going to need to replace their car and they're going to realise that they just cannot afford it and that the alternatives are justifiable.
Oddly enough, whenever I say this people get really angry. It's reassuring to know I'm making enough sense that I cannot be dismissed as a crank.
