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

valhalla360 wrote:


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.

Probably from the start of business, certainly from the start of capitalism, business has never took the cost of environmental harm into consideration. In this country, farm ground gets depleted to the point crops don't grow? Move west to new ground, until no more west. If we had understood the harm, and paid for it at the pump from the start, transportation would of been much different know. Without government control forcing change, business will not change.

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

Fact is coal fired plants have been going off line for years because natural gas plants run cheaper and cleaner

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.

A large percentage of trucks on the road today never fuel at a truckstop, they have tanks at the terminals. If E-trucks could be 'fueled' where they park for the night cheaper than putting in a tank/pump and moving each vehicle twice that would be a pretty large savings. And there is a lot of acers of roofs and parking lots that could hold solar panels. If you grow food near where you eat it you don't need to spend as much to move it. The same goes for power, produce near large demands, loose less moving it.