Dallas, Houston to get 120 charging stations by 2012

A huge waste of money for now. Recharging stations are utterly pointless until the technologies improve to a point where it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to recharge batteries to a reasonably full level (say 80%). Right now the only locations that make sense to install recharging systems are home, work, and fleet bases because no sane people would want to stand by their cars for an hour or two just to get their cars recharged.

 

One million % agree. Saved me some typing.

 

The problem then is, cars that are fully or reasonably recharged can't free up the recharging stations on their own and will therefore have to wait for their owners to return from shopping/doing stuff to allow use for the next customer, making usage extremely inefficient and availability extremely unpredictable.

A valet can do the job of helping move the cars of course, but will require the drivers to surrender the keys and drive up the cost of recharging a whole lot, defeating half of the purpose of going electric in the first place.

 

+2 million % agree!

 

You need to put this in perspective NRG is trying to get EVs to take off in a deregulated environment. Its only a $25 million investment from a company that spends billions on power generation.

Some if not all of these chargers are 480VDC and I believe can fully charge a leaf in 30 minutes. The speed depends on what is available on the car. The main point is to sell customers power at home, but get people not to worry about being stranded. Worried about range, stop at the grocery store (ok the expensive whole foods or central market) and fill up while you shop. This is only part of the charging infrastructure. Municipal utilities in austin and san antonio are also adding charging stations. In Austin unlimited use is proposed to be $25 for 6 months which works out to less than $5/mo.

 

You're right of course. The entire concept of having recharging stations available for public use has just frankly not been thought out by many of its proponents. The ONLY way to make this work is with a valet as you mention or HUGE numbers of plugs all throughout a parking lot (sounds expensive) OR extremely fast charging plugs so that it uses the gas station model, in which case people can just go to a gas (or electric) station. Parking a car somewhere for a slow charge is completely incompatible with any scaling of numbers.

I absolutely do not see any meaningful adoption of public plugs for many years yet. The Volt or PHV Prius model, charging at home, is the only one of relevance on the horizon. Few people will ever convince their employer to give them a charge plug at work that 99% of their co-workers will never use.

Man, I really cannot wait to see how these batteries are doing five years from now, especially if regularly charged at that rate.

Even 15 minutes is longer than people are going to want to wait, so if you have plugs at a mall or something you need to assume people will be camping on that spot potentially for long periods of time, so you need a lot. And you'll need to be sure that somebody won't show up, find no open spots, and then due to remaining range concerns they have to sit there for a half hour until somebody comes out freeing up a spot. The burdens that have to be overcome for widespread EV-only adoption (e.g. Leaf) are so numerous.

 

oh your right . . . EV's are doomed ! !
That's what you call a self fulfilling prophecy. Maybe you never heard of an extension cord? We already have SEVERAL configurations made up so nothing holds us up. We just park near by. Or maybe you've never been to the mods section. You'd be surprised how creative folks can be.

 

DBM is demoing a audi that has much faster recharge. Reliability still needs to be proved, but they claim the tech can get 100 miles into the battery in 10 minutes (given the right fast charger). By 2015 the big texas cities will have a meaningful charging structure - Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio and the highways in between. The first 2 cities have severe air quality issues and need to eliminate tailpipe emissions. Meaningful meaning enough to prevent range anxiety and allow people to purchase a car. I do think PHEVs are the solution for most electrification, but for such a low cost these cities can help encourage BEV use. Dell and AMD two of Austin's bigger employers already have employee charging stations.

Part of the low cost of public charging here is a contract to track how you charge. I don't think these utilities know exactly what demand will be. Adding more plugs once a power source is built is inexpensive though. I think these chargers can add about 20 miles of electricity to a tesla or leaf in about 10 minutes. The way pricing is run in my town though you don't pay per kw, you pay by the month, so I can imagine people completely filling up the tesla instead of just putting in enough juice to get home.

 

lolz at all the people who say this is stupid and pointless. they are being put into places where you don't expect to hop in and out (like in Houston, grocery stores). where else can you get cheap "gas" while shopping around in a grocery store and not have to take another explicit step to pull it off? we have to start somewhere, and someone is going to have to take a leap of faith to be able to drive technology and money toward a solution that is more akin to today's gas station.

 

How does the charging station work? How much does it cost? How do you know some hater won't walk by your car and remove your "plug" while you're occupied shopping.

So many unanswered questions!

 

Load up that grid at peak hours! Go for it.

 

Guess Louisiana will get charging stations sometime within the next 50 years or so...

 

Before the Volt and Leaf were available, all the talk was about commuters. Remember, the Volt's limited range was justified on the basis that studies revealed the average commute was ... what, 10 -15 miles or something. That was all just about 6 months ago.

Now, EV's have arrived, and the new owners want to drive beyond the commute ... they want to take overnight trips; they want freedom from being anxious about a low battery. They want charging stations along the way ... on another thread, one writer even suggested they should be free.

I do not doubt the the EV will be the vehicle of choice in the future, and for a few that use the EV as a commuter car, the time is now. But there are many issues yet to re solved ... charging times to name one ... but governments loss of revenue (gasoline road tax) is a biggie.. Already government is looking at mileage taxes to recover loss revenue from lower gasoline sales.

Gasoline evolved as the fuel of choice in the past because it was inexpensive, easily created from a plentiful crude oil that was also used as a lubricant, in the manufacture of plastics, and so many other bi-products. Gasoline is easily stored, easily transported, easily dispensed from a pump that anyone can operate, and only requires electricity to operate.

Electricity, OTOH, is clean only if the generating facility is clean. It does not store easily, it requires expensive transmission lines and transformers to convert into useful voltages, and to deliver from the point of generation to the point of consumption. And, the availability of electricitv can be seriously reduced in many areas during the summer when A/C usage is elevated.

I suspect the nuclear disaster in Japan will impact us all more that we realize. There are very select areas of the USA where solar is plentiful, or geothermal, or wind, or hydroelectric ... where electricity from these sources is economically generated. But which, is not easily "transported" to areas of the country where these resources are not readily available.

In time .... the infrastructure will be developed for EV charging, but it will be more costly to the provider, and thereby the consumer, unless the government becomes involved ............... and then it will cost us all.