Adrian wrote:
The Natural Philosopher gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying:

440 AC technology is mainstream in industrial places. I am not syaing
that upgrading stuff wouldn't in time be necessary, but power at the
sort of 50KW level, able to mostly recharge a small car in an hour, is
not a big problem.

Fine. Looking out the office window, I can see about twenty cars parked
either on the road in front of this building, plus the apron of the
building opposite. There's a two-level car park at the back of this
building which has probably another thirty cars in it.

That's 50x50kW = 2.5MW. On top, of course, of the current electricity
usage for the office and light-industrial buildings.

Assuming they are all flat out on charge.

Which they will be early in the morning, when everybody's just arrived.


Why? they wont all be flat. You ould easily dial in - say 'charge me at
8 hour rate' and just pull a trickle out. The lower the charging current
the less the charge losses also. There would be little point in having a
dumb charger anyway: typically lithium ion batteries like a constant
current, with a voltage limit. Its a piece of **** to set the current to
be what ever it needs to be to replenish you in an hour, ten hours, or a
fortnight, depending on what the situation is. I.e. you might only have
a 13A socket, or you might have a 440V 100A one. The charger would sense
that and do what it needs to accordingly.




But 2.5MW is not a huge amount of electricity.

That's for one short stretch of this road. Add in all the other
commercial premises on this one road in this one town. Then add all the
other roads in this town. Then all the other towns.

Look at the investment in petrol stations, refineries, oil tankers and
the like. That didn't happen overnight, it happened over a period of
YEARS

Indeed. A period of years during which demand slowly ramped up. In the
early days of the motor vehicle, you bought a sealed gallon can of "motor
spirit" from the chemist, then the local garage. Bulk sales didn't happen
until at least the 1910s, and probably weren't universal until the mid
'20s.

The problem of such a gradual shift over to electric vehicles is one of
economies of scale.

But it isn;'t. Thats what I am saying.

We already HAVE a grid infrastructure. As it gets loaded up it gets
upgraded. Its far more akin to people saying 'whats the point in having
a motor car when we only have roads fit for horses: we need motorways'

Well, we didn't need motorways for a long time.