Test charging stop for large EV’s, busses, trucks, mohos.

PartyOf Five wrote:
While I don't question any of the numbers above, I also don't question the business sense of these & so many other companies - if its not going to work, they're not going to invest $1 into it. Success (according to the masses at least) goes to those who make the most money, and the ones who lead this race are generally the ones who can think beyond the box.

With wind, solar, and other power forms becoming popular, it could be reasonable that that coal plant has fewer customers, or that it's customers need less power - enabling more charging stations at the truck stop.

From Wikipedia: In 2019 there were 241 coal powered units across the United States which generated 23% of the United States electricity in 2019, an amount of electricity similar to that from renewable energy or nuclear power... Installed capacity was about 236 GW.
So if you have 5 coal plants per state today, then each serves a couple hundred miles- is there a need for 14 truck stops within each one's service region?

If it was the businesses leading, I would agree. The problem is this is the politicians driving the process and using our tax dollars to allow them to ignore the financials. If the govt throws a few billion at it, industry happily will put together a program to test running trucks on unicorn farts.

Coal plants are being taken off line. We are actually entering a period where excess production capacity is steadily going down.

I wasn't proposing to build coal power plants but just using that to explain the scale of what these chargers need in terms of power supply. You could use in nuclear, hydro or solar the charging stations as equivalents, doesn't matter but we are talking huge concentrated demands. A couple acres of solar panels aren't going to be even close to enough to service an individual truck stop. And more importantly, the existing power plants are already being used for other purposes. For every 14 truck stops as described, you are going to have to build the generation capability of an average power plant.

Also, not considered is the grid upgrades to accommodate such installations. Nightly charging of cars takes advantage of the grid and production already available to service the peak loads in the daytime. A trucker with flat batteries at 10am, isn't going to wait until 8pm when there is excess capacity available to recharge. If the truck stop is say 10miles from the power plant, it could easily be $10's of millions to upgrade the lines feeding a truck stop.