Electric Cars Not Yet Viable

[keith wright]

On Saturday, 29 June 2019 10:15:42 UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
....

Pay with a credit card and plug in, then the next guy parks in between stations that are in use, so he unplugs you and connects himself. Extension cords would have become available by then.

The paying-for-charging negotiation would be electronic, between the car and the charger. Next guy might unplug you and connect himself, but he'd pay for the current.

Currently only Tesla uses authentication between the car and charging station for billing purposes.

The high-speed DC charging standard implemented on all EVs that support it has a communication channel provided for car to charger negotiation for such purposes - only needs appropriate software, no physical changes required to existing designs.

> An electronically controlled mechanical lock on the charging plug/socket wouldn't be impractical.

Most EVs already do that and lock the charging plug in place when the car doors are locked..

....

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 07:51:55 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
<fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 12:52:23 -0700 (PDT), omnilobe@gmail.com wrote:

A battery exchange station will replace the gas station.
It is faster to remove a battery block and put a fresh
block in than it is to fill a tank with gasoline. It is
safer than a self-driving auto-pilot tesla.

Is anyone doing that?

Around ten years ago I thought, if this EV thing continues, then we'll
have to go that way. Like a car wash where your car is pulled in and the
battery pack swapped.

Since a lot of the enviro-left live in cities where they park on the
street you'd think they would have thought about the impossibility of
charging "at home." Imagine what would happen if there were charging
stations all along the sidewalk, aside from being ugly. Pay with a
credit card and plug in, then the next guy parks in between stations
that are in use, so he unplugs you and connects himself. Extension cords
would have become available by then.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/leading-scientists-set-out-resource-challenge-of-meeting-net-zer.html

====

The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050
and all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all
UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV
and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal
next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt,
264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of
neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This
represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt
production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three
quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the
world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply
of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK
to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of
European industry.

=====




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[keith wright]

On Saturday, 29 June 2019 04:51:59 UTC-7, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
....

Since a lot of the enviro-left live in cities where they park on the
street you'd think they would have thought about the impossibility of
charging "at home." Imagine what would happen if there were charging
stations all along the sidewalk, aside from being ugly. Pay with a
credit card and plug in, then the next guy parks in between stations
that are in use, so he unplugs you and connects himself. Extension cords
would have become available by then.

The European/UK public chargers don't have the cable - you always use an extension cable that is the property of the car owner.

The cable is locked in place on the car and the charging station while charging is in progress.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:29:09 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 8:06:41 AM UTC-7, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:01:23 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 7:52:00 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Good thing we keep finding more oil and gas.

Addictions to other substances are destructive, as well.
Addicts don't always see it that way.

Addiction to things like air?

In the old garden of Eden, there was no economy; all needs were
satisfied.

Before modern technology, the average life spen was about half what it
is now. Most kids died.

For breathing air, that's still the economic model,

but it's an illusion: the (1952?) black fog in London killed thousands,
and air-quality regulation, with its associated costs, has been with us
ever since.

Unfiltered coal burning is nasty. Natural gas is great stuff: cheap,
reliable, safe, and clean. People keep finding more. Coal-fired power
generation is declining in the USA because gas is so cheap.

We don't just WANT air, we need it. Oil and gas, we just want. People
can live without consuming petrochemicals.

A fraction of the planet's current human population would survive
without the energy, materials, and fertilizers that we get from oil
and gas.

Corporate sales of air are not distorting your perceptions, but those of gas and
oil and coal put a LOT of PR money between your eyes and the reality.

The reality is that it's warm and dry in my house, we have electricity
and hot+cold clean water, my gas-fueled car is outside if I want to
run to Safeway and restock my electric-powered refrigerator with stuff
shipped (with oil powered ships, trucks, trains, planes) from all over
the world.

How would you do if all that oil and gas powered stuff just stopped?
Happy without electricity, heat, food, transportation?



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Cursitor Doom]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 11:08:58 -0700, keith wright wrote:

The European/UK public chargers don't have the cable - you always use an
extension cable that is the property of the car owner.

The cable is locked in place on the car and the charging station while
charging is in progress.

Then one morning you get up a bit earlier than usual and find some
clown's taken a tap off your extension lead to run the fans and lights
for their guerrilla cannabis grow. :-D



--
This message may be freely reproduced without limit or charge only via
the Usenet protocol. Reproduction in whole or part through other
protocols, whether for profit or not, is conditional upon a charge of
GBP10.00 per reproduction. Publication in this manner via non-Usenet
protocols constitutes acceptance of this condition.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 7:56:23 PM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 07:51:55 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 12:52:23 -0700 (PDT), omnilobe@gmail.com wrote:

A battery exchange station will replace the gas station.
It is faster to remove a battery block and put a fresh
block in than it is to fill a tank with gasoline. It is
safer than a self-driving auto-pilot tesla.

Is anyone doing that?

Around ten years ago I thought, if this EV thing continues, then we'll
have to go that way. Like a car wash where your car is pulled in and the
battery pack swapped.

Since a lot of the enviro-left live in cities where they park on the
street you'd think they would have thought about the impossibility of
charging "at home." Imagine what would happen if there were charging
stations all along the sidewalk, aside from being ugly. Pay with a
credit card and plug in, then the next guy parks in between stations
that are in use, so he unplugs you and connects himself. Extension cords
would have become available by then.



https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/leading-scientists-set-out-resource-challenge-of-meeting-net-zer.html

===
The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050
and all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all
UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV
and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal
next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt,
264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of
neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This
represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt
production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three
quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the
world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply
of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK
to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of
European industry.

====
So what? Increase the demand, and the price goes up. Raise the price and a whole lot of mines will open up again that got closed down because their deposits weren't as easy to extract as those at the happy few who were able to satisfy world demand when it was lower.

When I was growing up in Tasmania, Tasmania's tin mines were forever being opened up again when the tin price was high, and closed down again as soon as there was enough supply to push the tin price back down again.

Some people don't seem to understand how free markets work.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Cursitor Doom]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:56:15 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and
all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all UK-based
vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV
fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC
811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt,
264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of
neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This
represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt
production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three
quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the
world’s
copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of
electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to
annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of
European industry.

So manufacturers and their buyers of electric vehicles will be
precipitating a global environmental disaster and the rape of all the
world's rare earth metals, eh?
We need to reverse this environmentalist madness before it destroys the
planet.
We need to:
Forget all about "renewable energy sources" and embark on an ambitious
program of nuclear power station building,
Ban the development of electric vehicles and start subsidising research
into clean diesel engines (which was doing very well by itself before
governments interfered with the program),
Forget all about switching from plastic packaging to paper and foster
development of bio-degradable plastics.
It's all so simple and obvious really. I could do a better job than the
politicians have in my sleep. Only politicians could fuck things up they
way they have. Parasites.





--
This message may be freely reproduced without limit or charge only via
the Usenet protocol. Reproduction in whole or part through other
protocols, whether for profit or not, is conditional upon a charge of
GBP10.00 per reproduction. Publication in this manner via non-Usenet
protocols constitutes acceptance of this condition.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 7:53:48 PM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:29:09 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 8:06:41 AM UTC-7, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:01:23 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 7:52:00 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Good thing we keep finding more oil and gas.

Addictions to other substances are destructive, as well.
Addicts don't always see it that way.

Addiction to things like air?

In the old garden of Eden, there was no economy; all needs were
satisfied.

Before modern technology, the average life span was about half what it
is now. Most kids died.

They got malnourished every winter - everybody except the rich had annual starvation rings on their teeth. The agricultural revolution fixed that, but infectious diseases still killed a lot of kids.

Sewage, hygiene and clean water aren't exactly modern technology.

For breathing air, that's still the economic model,
but it's an illusion: the (1952?) black fog in London killed thousands,
and air-quality regulation, with its associated costs, has been with us
ever since.

Unfiltered coal burning is nasty. Natural gas is great stuff: cheap,
reliable, safe, and clean. People keep finding more. Coal-fired power
generation is declining in the USA because gas is so cheap.

Sadly, even burning natural gas injects enough CO2 into the atmosphere that we can't afford to get much of our energy that way.

We don't just WANT air, we need it. Oil and gas, we just want. People
can live without consuming petrochemicals.

A fraction of the planet's current human population would survive
without the energy, materials, and fertilizers that we get from oil
and gas.

But we don't have to get them by burning oil and gas, and we really shouldn't be using them up a lot faster than they are being laid down, quite apart from the nasty effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

Corporate sales of air are not distorting your perceptions, but those of gas and oil and coal put a LOT of PR money between your eyes and the reality.

The reality is that it's warm and dry in my house, we have electricity
and hot+cold clean water, my gas-fueled car is outside if I want to
run to Safeway and restock my electric-powered refrigerator with stuff
shipped (with oil powered ships, trucks, trains, planes) from all over
the world.

All of which you could have if the power you used was being generated by Windmills and solar farms. A battery powered car would work just as well as your Audi, though you'd need it have the moving parts enclosed in some kind of pretentious body work before it would satisfy your vanity.

How would you do if all that oil and gas powered stuff just stopped?
Happy without electricity, heat, food, transportation?

You don't need to burn fossil carbon to generate electricity. We've being generating it that way for about a century now, but wind an solar generation is now cheaper, even after you've thrown in the batteries and the pumped storage you need to carry you over the gaps when wind and solar aren't delivering.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 10:38:16 PM UTC+2, Cursitor Doom wrote:

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 11:08:58 -0700, keith wright wrote:

The European/UK public chargers don't have the cable - you always use an
extension cable that is the property of the car owner.

The cable is locked in place on the car and the charging station while
charging is in progress.

Then one morning you get up a bit earlier than usual and find some
clown's taken a tap off your extension lead to run the fans and lights
for their guerrilla cannabis grow. :-D

Traditionally they used an insulated hack saw to cut the cable off the plug and the socket, and sold the rest of the cable to a scrap metal dealer for the price of the copper content.

Taking a tap off without electrocuting yourself is trickier, and getting the power in a form which will run your fans and lights is trickier still. But you need to know stuff about electricity be aware of this, and Cursitor Doom clearly doesn't.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 10:20:56 PM UTC+2, Cursitor Doom wrote:

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:56:15 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and
all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all UK-based
vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV
fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC
811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt,
264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of
neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This
represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt
production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three
quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the
world’s
copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of
electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to
annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of
European industry.

So manufacturers and their buyers of electric vehicles will be
precipitating a global environmental disaster and the rape of all the
world's rare earth metals, eh?

Seems unlikely. It's more likely that existing mines will be re-opened.

Some mines allow cheaper extraction - easier geology, richer ores - than others, and the mines that are active at any given time are the cheapest than can collectively satisfy world demand.

Opening a up more mines isn't going to create any kind of environmental disaster, and there will be lots more rare earth metals in slightly harder to extract deposits than there in the deposits we are exploiting at the moment..

We need to reverse this environmentalist madness before it destroys the
planet.

The madness is entirely Cursitor Doom's. He hasn't got a clue about the enviroment (or anything much else).

We need to:
Forget all about "renewable energy sources" and embark on an ambitious
program of nuclear power station building,

Which creates its own environmental risks, and there are plenty of people around who are just as silly as Cursiotr Doom but scared silly of nuclear power.

Ban the development of electric vehicles and start subsidising research
into clean diesel engines (which was doing very well by itself before
governments interfered with the program),

Burning any kind of fossil carbon and injecting even more CO2 into the atmosphere is a really bad idea, even if Cursitor Doom and John Larkin are gullible enough to beleive the lying propaganda that says that it isn't.

Forget all about switching from plastic packaging to paper and foster
development of bio-degradable plastics.

One has to wonder why.

> It's all so simple and obvious really.

Everything is simple and obvious until you have to get it to work.

> I could do a better job than the politicians have in my sleep.

Cursitor Doom - asleep - doesn't post as much nonsense as Cursitor Doom doies when he's awake. Awake, he looks as if he'd perform at the Donald Trump level, or slightly below Boris Johnson. Against anybody more competent he'd go down in flames.

> Only politicians could fuck things up they way they have.

Only they have the power to truly fuck things up - in democratic countries anyway. You need a totalitarian regime to give anybody else that kind of power, and totalitarian regimes are known for fucking up big-time.

> Parasites.

The good ones are symbionts, but there aren't all that many, and Cursitor Doom doesn't like any of them.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 22:12:01 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 07:05:14 +0300, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 18:04:02 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 16:17:35 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

fredag den 28. juni 2019 kl. 01.12.45 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 17:31:20 +0300, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 07:55:53 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/06/19 07:20, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 23:42:43 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 6/26/19 10:09 PM, Rick C wrote:
On Wednesday, June 26, 2019 at 9:57:47 PM UTC-4, keith wright wrote:
On Wednesday, 26 June 2019 18:14:57 UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
...
"Charging at home will require
the installation of a dedicated high-capacity outlet"

a 40 amp level 2 charger unit is plenty for many use cases and
installing one is not a complex job. it won't charge up the car in a
couple hours. it'll charge a 3 up ~150 miles overnight, how many people
are driving 150 miles a day every day goddamn.

The summary seems to make it out like you can either charge from a 120
volt outlet over 1.5 days or you have to install a three phase AC-DC
level 3 charger with a cable 4" in diameter to charge the car.

...

'Which' is a UK magazine so a normal wall socket can do up to 2-3kW (as a reference other cars in the UK seem to be set to 10A resulting in 2.4kW).

I did forget that this was a UK magazine. I have talked about this with folks from there and I never got a clear answer, but it seems like they do 13 amp outlets easily, but to get more they wire 3 phase, which *is* a lot more hassle... at least I guess so. They talk about totally different wiring methods than we use and smaller service to the house, so maybe higher current 240 volt outlets aren't so easy. On the other hand, they tend to drive shorter distances so the daily need for charging is not as much. The 3 kW available from a standard outlet gets you around 180 miles on a model 3... assuming they don't do the derating thing that we do in the US. Can someone confirm that?

In the UK there are a number of smaller EVs available with smaller batteries and higher mileage. I don't know the names, but they seem to work well according to the owners.


I believe it's common in the UK and Europe to have smaller per-dwelling
or per apartment (flat?) structure distribution transformer/pole pig as
compared to the US where there's usually one large pole pig to supply a
neighborhood

It is the other way around. In Europe pole mounted transformers are
typically 100-315 kVA feeding dozens of detached houses up to several
hundred meters from the distribution transformer.

Here you /never/ see pole mounted transformers for
domestic properties.

So you have those low transformer buildings every few hundred meters
feeding the houses around it.

In Finland, you can get at least a 3x63 A 230/400 V up to 600 m from
the (ground or pole mounted) distribution transformer from most
electric companies.

In the US, due to lower voltage and hence large currents, a
distribution "pig" transformer only serves one or at most a few
houses.

That's silly. The size of a transfomer depends on KVAs, not voltage.

My house is 120-0-120. In other words, it is fed 240 volts.


and here we get 3*240V using only one extra wire


Residential three phase?

I even have three phases in my top floor city apartment, although it
currently just feeds the electric stove. In my country house, the
electric sauna, electric stove and a small water pump is all three
phase.

Are any of those loads actually 3-phase devices, or are they just
three single-phase loads? Controlling true three power takes more
switches or triacs than single phase, and there is no benefit for
resistive or small motor loads.

The largest single phase motors I have seen here are less than 2 kW,
everything larger are three phase. A typical example would be the heat
pump.

The nice features of 3p motors is that no starter capacitor is needed,
you can change the rotation direction by swapping two phases, you can
easily make a wye/delta soft starter etc.

Large resistive heaters are 3p, such as sauna or indirect electric
heaters. If the resistive elements are connected in wye, you could in
principle feed them with a single phase paralleling the hot ends of
the elements, but the neutral current may be too large. If the
resistive elements are connected in delta, paralleling the phase wires
doesn't obviously work. Connecting one phase wire to neutral, a
greatly reduced power would be available.


>Are there 3-phase outlets?

There are often a single 3x16 A three phase socket close to the
distribution panel, thus in practice you would need a long 3p
extension cords for ad hoc 3p loads. Such might be used especially
during the of the house to run some high power tools or temporary
heaters.

I do not know if it is even legal today, but a few decades ago some
welding transformers had taps for 220 V and 380 V. If only 220 V 10 A
was available, the 220 V tap was used and you could nominally load
with 2.2 kW. However if 3x10 A 220/380 V was available, connect the
primary 380 V tap between two phase wires from a three phase feed,
thus nominally 3.8 kW would be available.

These days a 6 pulse rectifier fed from a 3p supply would be used and
then a DC/DC converter at a higher frequency to generate the actual
(DC) welding arc. Older welders complained that the new welding
transformer was too light like a toy and did not remain in place when
moving the thick welding cables. Extra weight was added to some models
so that they looked more professional .

>I can't imagine that an electric stove has 3-phase heater elements.

Each element is single phase in domestic stoves.

 

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 10:29:09 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 8:06:41 AM UTC-7, k...@notreal.com wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:01:23 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 7:52:00 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Good thing we keep finding more oil and gas.

Addictions to other substances are destructive, as well.
Addicts don't always see it that way.

Addiction to things like air?

In the old garden of Eden, there was no economy; all needs were
satisfied. For breathing air, that's still the economic model,
but it's an illusion: the (1952?) black fog in London killed thousands,
and air-quality regulation, with its associated costs, has been with us
ever since.

The problem with you lefties is that you _really_ believe that
government can deliver you to the Garden of Eden, when in reality,
your socialist ideas bring hell on Earth. The last hundred years
should be plenty of evidence but your eyes will never see.

We don't just WANT air, we need it. Oil and gas, we just want. People
can live without consuming petrochemicals.

Petrochemicals like CO2?

Corporate sales of air are not distorting your perceptions, but those of gas and
oil and coal put a LOT of PR money between your eyes and the reality.

They make my life *immensely* better. They _allow_ all good things
from clean water to clean air for a few billion people. But your eyes
will never see.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 30 Jun 2019 00:48:36 +0300, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 22:12:01 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 07:05:14 +0300, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 18:04:02 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highland_snip_technology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 16:17:35 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

fredag den 28. juni 2019 kl. 01.12.45 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 17:31:20 +0300, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 07:55:53 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/06/19 07:20, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 23:42:43 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 6/26/19 10:09 PM, Rick C wrote:
On Wednesday, June 26, 2019 at 9:57:47 PM UTC-4, keith wright wrote:
On Wednesday, 26 June 2019 18:14:57 UTC-7, bitrex wrote:
...
"Charging at home will require
the installation of a dedicated high-capacity outlet"

a 40 amp level 2 charger unit is plenty for many use cases and
installing one is not a complex job. it won't charge up the car in a
couple hours. it'll charge a 3 up ~150 miles overnight, how many people
are driving 150 miles a day every day goddamn.

The summary seems to make it out like you can either charge from a 120
volt outlet over 1.5 days or you have to install a three phase AC-DC
level 3 charger with a cable 4" in diameter to charge the car.

...

'Which' is a UK magazine so a normal wall socket can do up to 2-3kW (as a reference other cars in the UK seem to be set to 10A resulting in 2.4kW).

I did forget that this was a UK magazine. I have talked about this with folks from there and I never got a clear answer, but it seems like they do 13 amp outlets easily, but to get more they wire 3 phase, which *is* a lot more hassle... at least I guess so. They talk about totally different wiring methods than we use and smaller service to the house, so maybe higher current 240 volt outlets aren't so easy. On the other hand, they tend to drive shorter distances so the daily need for charging is not as much. The 3 kW available from a standard outlet gets you around 180 miles on a model 3... assuming they don't do the derating thing that we do in the US. Can someone confirm that?

In the UK there are a number of smaller EVs available with smaller batteries and higher mileage. I don't know the names, but they seem to work well according to the owners.


I believe it's common in the UK and Europe to have smaller per-dwelling
or per apartment (flat?) structure distribution transformer/pole pig as
compared to the US where there's usually one large pole pig to supply a
neighborhood

It is the other way around. In Europe pole mounted transformers are
typically 100-315 kVA feeding dozens of detached houses up to several
hundred meters from the distribution transformer.

Here you /never/ see pole mounted transformers for
domestic properties.

So you have those low transformer buildings every few hundred meters
feeding the houses around it.

In Finland, you can get at least a 3x63 A 230/400 V up to 600 m from
the (ground or pole mounted) distribution transformer from most
electric companies.

In the US, due to lower voltage and hence large currents, a
distribution "pig" transformer only serves one or at most a few
houses.

That's silly. The size of a transfomer depends on KVAs, not voltage.

My house is 120-0-120. In other words, it is fed 240 volts.


and here we get 3*240V using only one extra wire


Residential three phase?

I even have three phases in my top floor city apartment, although it
currently just feeds the electric stove. In my country house, the
electric sauna, electric stove and a small water pump is all three
phase.

Are any of those loads actually 3-phase devices, or are they just
three single-phase loads? Controlling true three power takes more
switches or triacs than single phase, and there is no benefit for
resistive or small motor loads.

The largest single phase motors I have seen here are less than 2 kW,
everything larger are three phase. A typical example would be the heat
pump.

The nice features of 3p motors is that no starter capacitor is needed,
you can change the rotation direction by swapping two phases, you can
easily make a wye/delta soft starter etc.

Large resistive heaters are 3p, such as sauna or indirect electric
heaters. If the resistive elements are connected in wye, you could in
principle feed them with a single phase paralleling the hot ends of
the elements, but the neutral current may be too large. If the
resistive elements are connected in delta, paralleling the phase wires
doesn't obviously work. Connecting one phase wire to neutral, a
greatly reduced power would be available.


Are there 3-phase outlets?

There are often a single 3x16 A three phase socket close to the
distribution panel, thus in practice you would need a long 3p
extension cords for ad hoc 3p loads. Such might be used especially
during the of the house to run some high power tools or temporary
heaters.

I do not know if it is even legal today, but a few decades ago some
welding transformers had taps for 220 V and 380 V. If only 220 V 10 A
was available, the 220 V tap was used and you could nominally load
with 2.2 kW. However if 3x10 A 220/380 V was available, connect the
primary 380 V tap between two phase wires from a three phase feed,
thus nominally 3.8 kW would be available.

These days a 6 pulse rectifier fed from a 3p supply would be used and
then a DC/DC converter at a higher frequency to generate the actual
(DC) welding arc. Older welders complained that the new welding
transformer was too light like a toy and did not remain in place when
moving the thick welding cables. Extra weight was added to some models
so that they looked more professional .

I can't imagine that an electric stove has 3-phase heater elements.

Each element is single phase in domestic stoves.

One problem with ABCN (wye) 3-phase systems is neutral current. It is
zero in a well balanced system and no more than any leg current in a
badly balanced one... for sine wave loads. Nonlinear loads, particular
rectifiers followed by filter caps, can overload the neutral, because
the timing of the peak currents prevents cancellation. Fires have
resulted in buildings with a lot of computers, neutral wires getting
hot. Which is why we have PFC power supplies now.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2019-06-29, John Doe <always.look@message.header> wrote:

Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

For 115V you need wires 4 with times cross section to get the same
power loss as for and equivalent power load at 240V

I need a translation.

I'm talking about how much copper is needed to meet a fractional power
loss target in power distriution, somehow I seem to have substiuted
115 for 120

Ag assume a 1200W load,

At 120V that's 10A , and a 0.01 ohm resustiance in the wires dissipates 1W

At 240V that's 5A, and you can use thinner wires ( 0.04 ohms) and
still see 1W loss.


--
When I tried casting out nines I made a hash of it.

 

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 09:50:00 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 11:53:15 -0400, krw@notreal.com wrote:

On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 19:34:57 -0000 (UTC), John Doe
always.look@message.header> wrote:

Wait a minute... Just yesterday, Loony was bashing me for "knowing
nothing about electronics design". Now, Loony is bashing electronics
engineers...

What's so surprising? He's a coastal elite liberal-arts snowflake,
not an electronics engineer.

Isn't he a coder?

Script kiddie, at best.

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2019-06-29, Tom Del Rosso <fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

Since a lot of the enviro-left live in cities where they park on the
street you'd think they would have thought about the impossibility of
charging "at home." Imagine what would happen if there were charging
stations all along the sidewalk, aside from being ugly. Pay with a
credit card and plug in, then the next guy parks in between stations
that are in use, so he unplugs you and connects himself. Extension cords
would have become available by then.

The next guy would be out of luck, I'm sure it can be arranged that either
the cable would refuse to disconnect or that the charger would refuse to
charge his car.

--
When I tried casting out nines I made a hash of it.

 

[John Doe]

krw@notreal.com wrote:

John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
krw@notreal.com wrote:
John Doe <always.look@message.header> wrote:

Wait a minute... Just yesterday, Loony was bashing me for
"knowing nothing about electronics design". Now, Loony is
bashing electronics engineers...

What's so surprising? He's a coastal elite liberal-arts
snowflake, not an electronics engineer.

Isn't he a coder?

Script kiddie, at best.

I use voice for dictation and automation in Windows 10. I'm not a
programmer, but I can do things few Windows 10 users can do thanks to
voice-activated scripting. It's always ready for application to anything
repetitive in Windows, systemwide. Using voice allows a practically
infinite number of activators. Some such users have 1000+ Windows
scripts.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 19:50:31 -0400, krw@notreal.com wrote:

On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 08:13:49 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 07:51:03 -0700 (PDT), trader4@optonline.net wrote:

On Tuesday, June 25, 2019 at 10:50:32 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, June 25, 2019 at 10:47:16 PM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 6/24/19 3:52 PM, omnilobe@gmail.com wrote:
A battery exchange station will replace the gas station.
It is faster to remove a battery block and put a fresh
block in than it is to fill a tank with gasoline. It is
safer than a self-driving auto-pilot tesla.


The flat packs weigh the better part of a 1000 lbs and fill most of the
negative space under the floor of the car how do you propose to swap
them out rapidly? they're part of the structure of the car

Tesla was working on this approach. I believe it was fairly recently (last four years maybe) they decided to drop the idea.

I would assume this was for something like taxis or other use where you need to keep the vehicle on the road most of the time. It's really not that big of a deal for a standard use vehicle even on trips.


See what you say when you have a family emergency and need to travel 400
miles and your car is near empty Even to go on a ski trip from NYC to VT
it's absurd. It's already a five or six hour trip and who wants to
make it even longer? I'm not going to plan my life around my car's
limitations.




Does it get cold in the winter in Vermont? E cars don't like cold.

No, never. It's always 75F and sunny in Vermont, except on the ski
slopes. All lefties should move there now! It's one place their
politics can't destroy.

We need to invent a car that runs on wood, or maple syrup.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 11:15:24 -0700 (PDT), keith wright
<keith@kjwdesigns.com> wrote:

On Saturday, 29 June 2019 10:15:42 UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
...
Pay with a credit card and plug in, then the next guy parks in between stations that are in use, so he unplugs you and connects himself. Extension cords would have become available by then.

The paying-for-charging negotiation would be electronic, between the car and the charger. Next guy might unplug you and connect himself, but he'd pay for the current.

Currently only Tesla uses authentication between the car and charging station for billing purposes.

The high-speed DC charging standard implemented on all EVs that support it has a communication channel provided for car to charger negotiation for such purposes - only needs appropriate software, no physical changes required to existing designs.

An electronically controlled mechanical lock on the charging plug/socket wouldn't be impractical.

Most EVs already do that and lock the charging plug in place when the car doors are locked..

...

I can imagine that some social interaction might happen when EVs
outnumber charging stations and some people hog the charging slot and
linger over a long lunch.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 10:26:46 -0000 (UTC), John Doe
<always.look@message.header> wrote:

>But of course electric cars are viable. Depends on the need.

Sure, I had a 1:32 scale set when I was a kid.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's just a troll...