On large scale building new power plants and transmission lines is pretty simple.
But I think the real challenge will be for the last km. It's a nice idea to add the charger to lamppost and so on. But how do we cope with increased demand there then? We are talking about dozens or hundreds of extra kilowatts of demand compared to current. And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Even bigger problem in places where people commute to, with potential of hundreds of kilowatts of extra demand in relatively short window of time...
Where I lived, virtually every big parking lot had charging stations. As big parking lots are generally wasted space anyways, why not work with them to be the place to charge? Just as I don't gas up at home, I can live with not charging at home, especially as charge times come down in the future.
Doesn't solve the issue of how electricity gets to those charging stations. Specially when there will be dozens of them in that big parking lot.
Grid basically works with electricity being produced in large plant, then it's voltage is raised for long distance transmission, at other end it is lowered in stages. And all of these stages have limited capacity of how much electricity can pass through them. And there isn't too much extra in these as that would cost more. So it's a big thing to build up...
True, but any consolidation helps the 'last x' problem, generally. Instead of worrying if every house can charge at once, you only have to worry about the shopping centers. It doesn't help at the power station level though of course.
> And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that.
Is this true? Distribution lines are obviously run with demand in mind, but I wouldn't be shocked if utilities ran last mile lines with copper that's twice as thick as it needed to be because they optimistically projected future demand, copper was cheap, and they didn't want to come back and run more lines.
But I think the real challenge will be for the last km. It's a nice idea to add the charger to lamppost and so on. But how do we cope with increased demand there then? We are talking about dozens or hundreds of extra kilowatts of demand compared to current. And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Even bigger problem in places where people commute to, with potential of hundreds of kilowatts of extra demand in relatively short window of time...