Dead battery fears ease as public charge stations multiply
Making an electric car is easy. We’ve been doing it for more than a century. Charging them, however, is tough. It requires infrastructure — a grid on the grid — and presents a chicken- egg conundrum: Who wants a plug- in car when there’s nowhere to plug it in? Who wants to build car chargers, when there aren’t enough cars to charge?
Rest easy, Tesla- heads and Nissan Leaf geeks; we’re getting there. The number of charging stations in the US has reached a critical mass. The US Department of Energy says there are now 14,349 electric vehicle charging stations nationwide, comprising almost 36,000 outlets. Meanwhile, electric vehicle owners still do most of their charging at home outlets that aren’t included in that tally, according to the agency.
Silicon Valley- based ChargePoint, which operates one of the nation’s largest charging networks, just announced that it has 30,100 outlets to plug in a vehicle in the US, or roughly double the number of McDonald’s restaurants in the US$ 6b. Now SolarCity i s in a hole, losing maybe US$ 200 million last quarter, according to Bloomberg.
But that deficit has little to do with solar technology and everything to do with policy decisions among regulators. For instance, earlier this year, regulators in Nevada protected the state’s utility companies by instituting rules that made solar a bad deal for homeowners.
Musk learned something import- country. Tesla Motors, meanwhile, has 294 supercharger stations where travellers can top off their batteries quickly and another 2906 destination chargers at such places as wineries and luxury hotels.
ChargePoint’s chief executive officer, Pasquale Romano, said the proliferation of plugs will help electric vehicles go mainstream, mitigating drivers’ fears of getting stranded with a dead battery.
“It won’t be long before drivers start suffering from ‘ gas anxiety’, not range anxiety,” he said. But with US$ 2- a- gallon petrol in much of the country, it might take longer than Romano thinks. Americans, it turns out, have been buying a record amount of petrol this year, as a solid labour market and cheap fill- ups encourage them to drive more.
In June, US drivers bought 9.7 million gallons ( 36.7 million litres) of petrol per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, more than they have since the government started keeping track in 1945.
Petrol prices this past Labour ant from Tesla: he doesn’t have to change everything himself — he just needs to show the way. He didn’t need to “disrupt” the carmakers. He only needed to co- opt them, get them to see electric cars as an industryrejuvenating product and make them want to whip Tesla’s ass before Tesla blew past them. The result: the whole car industry is reinventing itself.
Can’t you see — especially you Wall Streeters — that he’s doing the same Day weekend were the cheapest in 12 years.
“I don’t think anybody could have seen this coming a few years ago,” said Jeff Lenard, vicepresident at the National Association of Convenience Stores. “They’re driving more, and the sustained period of $ 2 gas has changed behaviour both behind the wheel and in the showroom.”
So far, the rash of car- charging ports appears to be holding little sway at dealers. In the first six months of the year, Americans bought about 65,000 cars that required charging. Ford alone sold that many pickups every month.
Not surprisingly, petrol stations aren’t going the way of bookstores and film- processing labs soon. Sure, there are far fewer service stations with a few pumps out front, because cars have grown more reliable, but that decline has been outpaced by a growing number of convenience stores selling petrol along with groceries.
New Zealand has 142 public charging stations. now with energy? It’s great that politicians sign treaties about climate change, but the energy revolution will happen because of entrepreneurs and technology. At the moment, Musk is the one guy with the chutzpah to show us the way. It’s the most important thing he’s ever done.
Let’s hope it works. Listening to reggae in Reykjavik just doesn’t seem right.