a trip down I-5 shows

But that wasn't what the article was about. It was about the EV charging experience during a 400 mile trip. I assume that sort of distance wouldn't be particularly unusual in the USA or indeed Australia (although it would be in the UK where I am).

What would have happened if the driver hadn't been able to find a charging point at Interstate 5 at Frazier Mountain Park Road? Even then, he could only get 9 miles of charge after a 75 minute wait. If he ran out of petrol with an IC car, he'd probably be able to get a lift to a garage and buy a gallon can of petrol and take it back to his vehicle, which would be enough to get him 30 miles or so to a garage and to fill up. With an EV, the ironic option would be to get a service vehicle with a pretty big IC-powered generator in the back, and wait an hour for it to charge his EV's batteries sufficiently to get enough range to reach a charging station. Or are there EV service vehicles with large batteries in the back with which to charge the stranded EV vehicle's batteries?

So parking is fixed allocation, or first come first served?

passed where?

easy enough to install fibre at the same time as the power wires, but that's like half a solution.

True that.

A power cable cable originating at their energy meter can do that too, possibly even a remote current transformer if they are using CT meters.

seems this is going to make their charging more expensive.

The fibre can go next to power wires in a conduit, SELV signal in a cat5 can't.

Nor do they understand "single point of failure", and the implications to the economy & national security.

John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

You are actively trying to be even more stupid than the current group leader of utter stupidity, Jan Pan. And you are succeeding, putz.

Who's complaining? I was quoting from an article written by someone who had experienced an issue - or issues - while on a 400-mile EV drive. I took one point and extrapolated to an entirely reasonable situation where if he'd been 9 miles on he'd have run out of power. I didn't see Ed Lee's post, but according to Bill Sloman, Ed had suffered a very similar situation, and required a tow truck to get him out of it - at a price.

I actually like the idea that battery-powered EVs will be the norm *one day*. After all, I can't see an autonomous petrol-powered car being developed, so by the time I'm too old to drive safely, I'll appreciate getting in to a car and telling it the destination, rather than me driving it there.

You can move electricity a lot easier than liquid fuels...

Oh, well now, that isn't at all evident. There is extensive infrastructure for both. A single tanker truck full of fuel delivers about as much usable energy as 450s of work of your typical 1GW nuclear power plant. How this works out in terms of convenience or cost of transport is not so easy to find.

Jeroen Belleman

No, there isn't. You can't, for example, drive a tanker full of fuel through most residential neighborhoods. Yet, damn near every home has power lines run to it!

Power lines don't worry about "low overpasses" or weight limits on roads. Or, flood waters, high winds, etc. Power is restored to disaster areas a lot quicker than fuel deliveries (of course, pumping that fuel is kinda hard without POWER running to the pumping stations. oops!)

Wow, almost *8* minutes! So, we'd need 8 trucks every hour, about

Palo Verde (here) is a 3.3GW plant serving ~4M people. So, 215,000 trucks to deliver that equivalent power -- one for every 20 people. Day, night, rain, etc.

Don't be silly. They don't run a tanker to your door, but they also don't run a 400kV power line to your home!

Well, yes. Coal power plants used to have whole trains full of coal every day. So?

You're confusing power and energy here. Try again.

Jeroen Belleman

And round here they _do too_ run a tanker to your house. Lots of folks use oil heat, usually with a service contract so that the oil company guarantees that your tank won't run dry, and they look after fixing your furnace too.

A tanker (of the size Jeroen is speaking) holds ~12000 gallons. The "oil man" drives a tiny little thing that can't fill the 200G tanks of more than a few homes. And, make several visits each heating season (less frequently in the other months if you have oil-fired hot water)

I don't usually react to Ricky, as I have him killfiled.

Anyway, one of the reasons we don't make our own electricity with chemical fuels are that small installations can't benefit from the economy of scale. Large installations with lots of pooled resources can do much better. Another reason is that chemical fuels are heavily taxed for small consumers, which quells any advantage we might gain thereby.

Jeroen Belleman

We had no viable alternative until recently, and chemical fuel _was_ cheap. Granted, BEVs are getting better.

Depends. In western Europe, automotive fuel is taxed around 70% of the retail price. That sort-of discourages you from using it for anything else.

Fuel for other purposes, agriculture, shipping, home heating and so on is not as heavily taxed. The stuff used to heat homes with would kill any motor-like contraption in short order. It's vile.

Jeroen Belleman

People should be free to express *rational* ideas in a brainstorming session. People with fragile egos and inadequate thought processes shouldn't be invited to join. Ditto "stuffed shirts" that like all the i's dotted and t's crossed -- they'll rule ideas out simply because they're only "half baked" (and they're unable to see beyond the obvious due to inadequate imaginations)

I recall a guy at an offsite (yes, we took brainstorming seriously enough that we'd "go away" together) describing how the Space Invaders game had a *sexual* appeal (!) We were all taken aback by the claim... until he backed it up.

"Hmmm... is this trivial little game SO successful because it speaks to some subconscious urge?"

Everyone looks at the world from a different perspective. And, thus, products/projects. So, for truly *revolutionary* ideas (no one is interested in *evolutionary* ideas) you let people "let it all hang out".

"Why do we have to do it THAT way? Why not this OTHER way?"

Accountants need not apply.