
Too many electric cars, not enough workplace chargers - eigenvector
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24947237/too-many-electric-cars-not-enough-workplace-chargers
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robterrell
I drive an electric car and try to charge at work only twice a week. Although
if I notice no one is charging at some point, I'll top it off, range anxiety
is no joke.

Our workplace has a 2-port charger just for executives. (Naturally, it's often
unused.) Meanwhile the rest of us non-executives get to slug it out for the
other 2-port charger. I have discovered that Volts are excellent fodder for
"charge-rage." Their 3.3kW chargers work so slowly, it's difficult to keep
from thinking "they can just use gas, right?" And their batteries are so
small, Volt drivers want to charge every single day. What's worse is, their
charge port is alarmed. Even if the Chargepoint display says charging is
complete, if you unplug a Volt it sets off the theft alarm.

Kind of fascinating to watch this evolve. Definitely need some better charging
tech if electric cars are going to last.

~~~
killion
My charge-rage is when I see a Tesla in one of the two charging spots at the
Stanford shopping center. They have enough range to not need the power, the
owners typically park there because they are the best spots in the garage.

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jonknee
Why do you care? I don't get upset at a Prius when I see one at the gas
station and there are no available pumps. If people are using just for the
good parking spot there is a simple fix--don't put them right up front.

If I had a Tesla and was able to both get a charge and a good spot you better
believe I would take it, even if I wasn't dangerously low on power.

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hristov
This is interesting, because the social concept of charging is being formed.
Will charging be like a gas station, where you are only allowed to be at the
charger while using it, or will it be like parking, where you usually have an
implied right to use a space until you move your car away.

I think that at least for employer provided free charging it should be the
latter. Whenever people start fighting over charging spots, or start leaving
work to shuffle cars around, the employer loses. An employer should just set
up simple free charging to as many spaces as necessary, so people can just
park, plug in and not worry about their car.

You can just run an electric cable in a conduit by a row of parking spaces,
and put in simple weather protected 110V plugs along it. Over 8 hours this
should provide more than enough energy for a simple commute. For people that
must have high speed charging, you can put in a couple of paid chargers.

~~~
morsch
Valet parking service that takes care if it? Depending on the price of the
charging station vs a regular parking space, it'd make sense.

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tdiggity
If you can't get home without charging, then an EV isn't a good idea for you.
I understand that everyone should be able to get an EV, but with the way the
infrastructure is, you gotta draw the line somewhere. Having spots that are
not dedicated, first come first serve, and without expectation of use will
make everyone far happier in the long run. Yes, things come up and you may
find yourself out of range because of an unexpected detour, but once you start
having people that MUST charge or they can't get home, then you only get what
this article mentions.

Charging money for the stations is also another way to alleviate some of this
problem, but the stations that accept credit cards are VERY expensive. For
example, a ChargePoint system is $4000 for the first unit and then $2500 for
the second unit. And then there are ongoing cell reception plans and money
sharing per kwH used. It's not cheap. The reason you see a lot of chargepoints
in NorCal is because in 2011 or 2012, chargepoint offered free chargers to
people that wanted them.

~~~
paddy_m
If you can't get home without charging your EV, you should move or get a new
job. Suburban living is not eco friendly, I would hope that there are a small
number of people who want an electric vehicle but would have such a long daily
commute that they would have to charge it every day.

~~~
tdiggity
There are a few tesla owners that drive 200 miles a day. Only a handful are
above 15k miles per year.

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scottoreilly
This is going to continue to be a problem as the US infrastructure for
electrical vehicles is slowly upgraded. I think the only solution for now is
to never depend on a charger outside of your home. People who have to drive
more than a single charge in a day just may not be able to use EVs for now.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
I think you are incorrect. Depending on a plug within your house is not a
solution. That is avoiding the problem. Solution* is U.S. government rolling
out standardized electrical socket plug for vehicles and investing in
infrastructure to make it cheap enough to be installed virtually everywhere.
After that getting commission together and drafting set of standards for
wireless charging (this is decades away, but it needs to be common if we are
to see electrical cars supplant fossil fuel vehicles universally.)

* Or one of them solutions.

~~~
mikeash
Personally, I think the solution is for electric cars to have enough range
that you don't need to plug them when away from home on routine trips, and for
charging to be fast enough and available enough from dedicated stations that
you can still do road trips.

Even if every parking space out there has a charger, I don't want to plug in
every time I park my car. I want my car to go hundreds of miles in between
charges so I don't have to care. That's not yet practical unless you spend
serious money, but anything else seems like a workaround.

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spullara
This is clearly the Tesla plan and definitely the way most people charge them.

~~~
mikeash
Not coincidentally, that's exactly what I was referring to with "unless you
spend serious money".

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jack-r-abbit
I'm not sure how much these stations cost but I could also see the potential
for a company to employ a low level person to work as sort of a charger valet.
You drop your EV off with them and give them the keys. They manage the
rotating of cars as they get full.

~~~
abc_lisper
This. Not everything need to be solved high-tech.

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mdellabitta
Is it just me, or is the solution not to add more chargers, but to add more
cables connected to a single charger, and have it round robin charge all the
attached vehicles throughout the day?

~~~
mdorazio
It's not always that simple - the electric lines have to support the load of
additional vehicles. Even a relatively low charge rate of 12A (like a Volt)
quickly exceeds the capacity of standard electrical wiring after about 3
vehicles. It's worse if you want higher speed charging, which requires 30A+
per connector. Adding the infrastructure to support more cables can actually
be more expensive than running additional chargers, depending on how the lines
were run.

~~~
angusb
I think the idea was that instead of simultaneously charging several cars, it
charges them one by one (round robin). You just have multiple connectors to
stop employees having to leave the office to change the connectors over when
one car finishes charging. But I guess it would require smart-ifying the
charger base so it could decide when to send power to each of the cars.

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bryanlarsen
In some parts of the world there are electrical outlets for everybody so that
everybody can plug their block heaters in...

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raldi
Why not just charge employees for the electricity? That should help reduce
contention, and pay for expansion automatically as it becomes necessary.

~~~
michaelt
That won't give employees an incentive to move their now-fully-charged car as
soon as it finishes charging.

Clearly, after the charger fully charges the car, it should give the owner 15
minutes to move their car then start discharging it.

~~~
raldi
Or just charge by the hour.

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steven777400
My office builder has a handful of chargers for employee use. They are always
full. People with EVs come early, and leave their car connected for the entire
day (even if it is not needed).

I suspect some kind of "recommended policy" might be coming at some point, as
suggested in the article, since there will in no way be enough chargers for EV
owners to leave their vehicles connected all day. Although I hope they also
add more charging stations.

~~~
nodata
Do the chargers indicate when the car is not drawing current any more? Either
with a light or something internet-enabled?

(Are we at webcam filter coffee time again?)

~~~
mikestew
Leafs have blinky lights on the dash that quit blinking when the car is
charged. I don't know about Tesla. Conceivably coworkers could know when is
safe to unplug someone else's car and charge their own. Then again, we can't
even get people to make a new pot of coffee when they drain the last of it, so
who knows how considerate your fellow plug-in owners will be.

~~~
randallu
Model S has a fast pulsing green light around the charge port when it's
charging.

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BrainInAJar
I'd revise that title to "too many cars, not enough public transit."

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Yeah, I'm not convinced that this is much different from "not enough parking
spaces for everybody", or "not enough bike racks to meet demand", with the
exception that sharing is actually _somewhat_ feasible for these.

~~~
chc
It's very different, because there are enough parking spaces for everybody,
but they don't happen to have sockets in them.

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killion
With many corporate chargers you need to have a special card to charge on them
even though they are standard ChargePoint chargers. So if you are near a
Google, Microsoft, etc building at night which has hundreds of chargers not in
use you can't use them.

Because these companies get a great tax break for installing them I think they
shouldn't be able to prevent the public from using them.

~~~
tdiggity
ChargePoints also have an ongoing cost. You need to pay for the cellular
access that is built into them every month. They also charge the company
different amounts depending on if they make it free to the employees or some
dollar amount.

Also, they are expensive. They can cost $4000+ for the first unit plus
installation. This cost scares a lot of companies from even starting the
project.

In 2011 or 2012, chargepoint offered chargers for free. And now, in 2014,
there are no tax breaks.

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shalmanese
Maybe charging stations could come with N full charging cords and 2N trickle
charging cords and it would be socially acceptable to replace someone's full
charging cord with a trickle charging cord once the car was full.

~~~
NathanthePie
Better yet:

Each charging station has N cords.

The first n cords to be plugged in becomes a primary (read full) charge cord.

Once n primary cords are in use, any subsequent cords start as secondary (read
trickle charge -- an aside, do EV's really need to be trickle charged). Again,
in order of arrival, the secondary cords are put into a queue.

As the initial batch of n cars reach full charge (or maybe 90%), primary cords
swap functionality with the next secondary cord in the queue.

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ams6110
It's interesting to me how this is portrayed as a problem that workplaces need
to deal with, and not the real issue which is that EVs are still seriously
impractical.

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ck2
So is this technically a 0-World problem? (like 0-day, beyond first-world
problem)

Can I copyright that term?

