Countdown until Trump stupidly bans it as it “harms” President Musk.
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biden basically did that already. ever noticed there are no byds on the road in the us?
i seem to recall it wasn’t an outright ban, but unreasonable tariffs on chinese evs specifically. a soft ban, but enough to be as effective.
The official reason for tariffs is government subsidy AFAIK, but in reality the moment they lower the tariffs, US and EU automobile industry is done.
i seem to recall it wasn’t an outright ban, but unreasonable tariffs on chinese evs specifically.
Yeah, tariffs.
Otherwise, you’d see the subcompact EVs with a 150mile range for about $9,000 US that BYD sells.
No US manufacturer can remotely compete with the cost of EVs from China. Rather than letting people buy cheap EVs, the government decided to tariff them so that they cost as much as a luxury car.
Stuff I’ve heard on naysays:
“The battery will blow up!!!”
No, it won’t if it’s a solid state battery - solid state batteries barely even notice such a charging rate, their temperature might change by half a degree from this monster charging rate.
“You can’t supply the power because lines”
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
“The grid overall can’t take 1MW”
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can’t provide 1MW? How about a reactor station with 4 units cranking 4000 MW? How about we add another 1000 in renewables? How about another 800MW with a single gas turbine? How about adding roof solar and a battery bank below ground for the charging station to supplement the power? We haven’t even touched hydro or geo yet. Making power is not a problem, and we’ll build out the power as we need it.
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
And how mamy cars in said building? How many will be allowed to charge at the same time? Should we expect same grid for large commercial buildings and rural charging stations?
If there’s literally one place in America we need to throw money at, it’s the electrical grid.
We have a decades out of date power infrastructure, Europe especially has us beat.
Just like electrification originally, and later the internet, increasing power delivery will have benefits for everyone that pay off for centuries .
Mostly we need to make the grid far smarter.
Evs should be allowed to load coordinate with the grid, so they switch on at the optimum times for grid stability in exchange for major discounts on power.
A superload like this one should have to request clearance, then the grid compensates by reducing ‘cheap ev power’ in the area, while also requesting evs configured for v2g to be ready to possibly supply.
The supercharger has a slightly higher cost per kwh to make up for this, but that is the cost of convenience.
What about defects in the machine or car? Could that lead to people being struck by lightning coming from the box next to their automobil?
Gas powered cars catch fire all the time
Fairly unlikely, we engineer things to fail safe.
Even if so we have ways to calculate the power going in and coming out, and if there’s an imbalance kill everything, that’s how gfci and arc fault breakers work.
I always think about an “imaginary” scenario where we all have ultra fast charging like this and plug our cars in at the same time. Would the grid experience a brownout?
I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is… probably not. “The grid will collapse” has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, whether* its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it’s onto EVs being the grid destroyer.
The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn’t going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation’s hostility to solar.
Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that’s not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That’s another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.
Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.
Great reply, thank you!
Perfect application and apropos name for ‘surge’ pricing
