
Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations - cryptoz
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-13/japan-has-more-car-chargers-than-gas-stations-carbon-climate
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skywhopper
IMO, including home chargers is fine (if it were common practice for people to
have gas pumps in their garages those would be fair to count as well), but to
be a fair comparison, I think you need to count the actual number of gas
_pumps_ in total, _and_ factor in the difference in "charging" time between
the two technologies. So if there are an average of 6 pumps at each station,
and if it takes two minutes to gas up an empty tank versus 30 minutes to fully
recharge an electric car, then you really need 75 times as many charging
points to claim you have something resembling equality.

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foobar2020
The number you propose - the number of charge stations divided by about 15 is
indeed important - but only if one also takes into consideration the fraction
of cars that are electric, versus those that use gasoline/diesel. To give an
example: suppose that in some Kyoto district there are only 300 electric cars,
versus around 5000 fuel-powered ones. Having roughly as many charge stations
as there are gas stations wouldn't be an issue there.

Also, once you have an operational charge point you can easily go parallel
with stations, just like with gas pumps.

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closetnerd
Wondering if anyone knows if current state of manufacturing, maintaining, and
disposing batteries actually is actually more ecological than using gasoline?

I'm sure the potential of batteries to be more ecological and efficient is
there, but the general assumption seems to be that they are already there and
I'm not too sold on that idea yet.

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lotsofmangos
In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of
vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle and adding them to street level
atmosphere, so that is an immediate bonus that batteries would seem to win on,
especially in the built environments in which we live.

Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes,
but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is
much less abundant than lithium or silicon.

However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very
recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to
power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.

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closetnerd
> In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of
> vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle

This is sort of a point of contention at this point in time however. As you
stated:

> putting sunlight into metal using sand.

This would be the longer term benefit of battery powered cars. Some countries
have already made progress. And unless you're driving a Tesla and only
charging it as there Supercharging stations, its not completely sunlight
powering your wheels. It currently comes with the ecological impact of
harvesting coal, burning it and etc.

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emj
In Sweden all personal transport by car takes 45 TWh per year, if everyone
converted to electric cars/hybrids it would be 13 TWh. That's what the
propaganda says anyway. Since most personal transports by car are so short
it's in the sweet spot for electric cars.

~~~
closetnerd
Interesting what those number might mean. I expect energy consumption to be in
favor of batteries, but didn't expect that much.

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selectodude
Internal combustion engines are only about 20 percent efficient, and that
ignores the energy spent pulling the dinosaur puree out of the ground. In
comparison, electric engines are about 85-90 percent efficient.

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paws
"Three years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis all of Japan's 48 operable
reactors remain shut, with no restarts scheduled."

via [http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-
pl...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/28/japan-utilities-plant-
idUSL4N0MN1X520140328)

Worth keeping the big picture in mind.

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stcredzero
The real bogeyman isn't nuclear. It's companies getting away with poor
practices, hanging onto outdated equipment, and whittling down safety
recommendations/regulations. The same thing with the BP refinery disaster.
(And two of those 3 with the gulf oil spill.)

If we look at organizations with good records with regards to nuclear power
(US Navy and France) it's somewhat different from what we have in the US.

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acveilleux
They count charging stations in homes, not just public ones.

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sbierwagen
Plus, you really should be comparing the number of _pumps_ , not gas stations.
Additionally, the power throughput of a gas pump is way, way higher than a car
charger. (Probably measured in the dozens of MWe per hour, compared to 50 KW/h
of a DC fast charger) A single car ties up a gas pump for five minutes, an
electric car ties up a charger for half an hour.

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to3m
[https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-
ha...](https://babelniche.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/power-in-your-hands/)
suggests (with calculations) a throughput of 87MW.

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sandworm
People have commented on the pumps v. station issue, but what about time?

The most accurate measure of the infrastructure might not be how many plugs
are around, but how many cars can be charged per day. Or perhaps how many
vehicle-kilometers are available to electric cars. With pay-at-the-pump any
gas pump can fill a car in say two minutes. An electric charger, even the fast
ones, will take 10-100 times as long to "fill" a tank.

So take the number of charging plugs and dived that by a factor of 10x->100x.
Then come back when the number of available "fills" per day becomes
comparable.

Then adjust for the reduced range and come back when the total number of
available vehicle-kilometers breaks even. I'm afraid that day is still a long
way off atm.

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greglindahl
The overwhelming majority of electric car charging takes place overnight in
the owner's garage, while the owner sleeps. So there's your time issue: no
having to stop to fill up once a week or so, just plug in and unplug each day.

There's no comparison to be made, because electric cars are just plain
different.

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hudibras
n=1, but my Japanese house built in 2013 has a car charger.

It wasn't even mentioned by the real estate agent as a feature, but I don't
know if that was because it's so common now or because few people use them.

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liyuanli
It would be cool to see more automakers invest in an infrastructure dedicated
to electric vehicles (not necessarily limited to charging). EVs are not
mainstream today, but they most likely will be in the near future. I see a
vague connection with mobile ecosystems like iPhone and Android. Heavy
investment in the mobile development infrastructure is paying off. It's giving
device/app makers more leverage to turn ideas into products. A great
infrastructure definitely helps drive adoption.

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Shivetya
I would be real happy if employers would focus more on adding reserved parking
with chargers instead of reserve parking for mid level management. It would
send a much better message.

It might take something akin to handicap parking to convince people to think
different. I would use the carrot method, get better parking with your plug in
(hybrid or otherwise) instead of taxing the other to death.

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oaktowner
There are companies that reserve parking for mid-level managers?!?

I agree: that sends a terrible message.

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alistairSH
Yup. One of my wife's previous employers did this. The first row of spaces
were reserved for long-time employees, which really just meant the VPs who had
been there a while. The CEO's admin might have had one of those as well. The
rank and file had very little change of ever obtaining a reserved spot.

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X-combinator
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