the-missile:
It is fairly easy to upgrade electrical systems, so obsolete charger can evolve easily.
I am not sure what Nick wanted to say where he mentioned the street lighting able to power up the charger? That is far from being simple. Most of the street lighting is looped to others and adding a huge consumer like a charger in this loop would create a massive voltage drop and would make the street lights shutdown and the charger out of service. A street light is maximum 400W, a charger is several KW.
You would need to design the system from scratch and oversize the entire loop to be able to connect few chargers at the same time but then you would still be limited as there is no possibility to charge 30 cars in parallel unless a big transformer is at the corner. Chargers in the street aligned with parking space is a pipe dream.
It is what's written in the article:
Shell’s Ubitricity unit will install 50,000 on-street charging posts by 2025, according to a statement published Wednesday. It already has about 3,600 chargers in the country in existing infrastructure like street lamps. The U.K.’s Climate Change Committee has said the country needs 150,000 public chargers by the middle of the decade.
And there is no need to align a charger for every parking spot. Not every car on the street is an EV, so one or two or three chargers per block could be good enough. There just needed to be 'some' chargers for residents to start off with. That's the very first step for mass EV adoption.
Any modern EV is good enough for everyday usage. Range isn't an issue for people's daily usage, I think the worst range figure for a current EV is like 1250 miles or something for a e-MIni and that's already a range that most people won't even come close on a daily basis.
Battery production is good enough for current consumption, only the most devoted Elon worshipper believes what he said about HIS production is constraint by his lack of meaningful battery output from his battery factory and scaled that to the whole EV market. My city, Vancouver, is the leading market for Teslas, no other city, state, or region sells more Tesla per capita than Vancouver, not even LA. Anyone who wants a Tesla can walk into a Tesla showroom and walk out with a Tesla after signing some papers and pay for the car. Zero wait time. Actually on a per capita basis, my city sells the most EVs in the world, think we are up to 10% of all new car sales are EVs right now.
Outside of charging, i.e. the lack of convenient charging for the majority of population that don't have the luxury of home charging, there isn't a constraint on the demand for EVs. Improve the public charging network and voila, the major barrier for EV adoption is gone.
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