How long will the lines be at EV charging stations?
The EV "revolution" may prompt a "transition" back to ICE vehicles.
The United States consumes 135 billion gallons of gasoline every year according the the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Gas tanks are rarely empty when refilled and the average gas tank holds 13 to 16 gallons of gasoline. Assuming every “fill up” averages 10 gallons, Americans refilled their gasoline tanks 13.5 billion times last year. There are 168,000 gas stations in the United States so the typical gas refueling station refills about 13.5 billion divided by 168,000 = ~80,000 tanks refilled a year or 220 a day.
It only takes a couple of minutes to refuel the gas tank on an internal combustion engined (ICE) vehicle. Recharging an EV to go the equivalent distance of 10 gallons of gasoline is a more complex problem but certainly takes a bit longer. Let’s explore that.
The average fuel efficiency of an ICE vehicle in U.S.A. in 2021 was 36 miles per gallon so a 10 gallon refill was good for 360 miles. The average electricity consumption per 100 miles in an EV is 34.6 KwH so a 100 KwH battery (typical in a Tesla Model S, larger than most EV’s) recharge (at 20% battery life remaining) will take the driver 80/34.6 x 100 = 231 miles. An EV will need a recharge about 50% more often than an ICE vehicle so trips to the charging station if all Americans drove EV’s would amount to about 20 billion visits. If all 168,000 gas stations installed 10 EV chargers there would be 2,000,000,000 / 168,000 = ~12,000 visits per charger per year or 33 visits per charger per day if cars only recharged at “charging stations”. 330 visits per day to the charging station is one visit every 4.4 minutes on average with a standard deviation of 2.1 minutes so one can say for that 5% of the arrivals (95% of events fall within two standard deviations from the mean in a Poisson distribution) there will be a full 8.6 minutes between any vehicle showing up or over one hour a day when at least some of the chargers will be idle. On the other tail of that distribution there will be similar 8.6 minute periods when vehicles will be arriving every twelve seconds so the ten stations will have 43 vehicles arriving to be charged. Might get a bit congested when each recharge takes as long as 30 minutes if the chargers are level 3 capability.
Of course, most EV owners will charge at home, at least to the extent they can do so. Re-charging an EV at home can take up to 40 hours and since we have been working with an entire fleet of EV’s in this article and their aggregate charging needs, charging at home can only relieve the need for charging stations by about 20% (assumes car is at home and available for charging 8 hours a day seven days a week).
Assume half of the charging needs can be accomplished by charging at home. Every charger at one of the 168,000 charging stations will still see charging demand of around 16 vehicles a day. A level 3 charger can charge an EV in about 30-40 minutes. Every charger at every charging station would be in use 8 to 10 hours a day.
How long does that mean lines to recharge will become? That takes a bit of statistical analysis. Fortunately that work has been done, although the authors used 400,000 charging stations for their real life analysis. The answer is long, long lines at recharging stations. The authors found long periods every day when the chargers were not in use meaning more congestion in the busy periods. This picture may become common.
My simplistic analysis simply looked at the implied population of vehicles and number of charging stations at former gasoline stations assuming 10 chargers per station. But as the linked article points out, based on real time real life experience, people connect to chargers for short periods of time (often when there is plenty of charge left on their batteries) and the random desire or need to charge leaves most chargers underutilized for many hours of the day (typically overnight). The result is that for vehicles on the road needing to recharge enroute, line ups to recharge will be very long indeed. Expect to spend an hour or two of every 250 miles of driving time looking for, waiting in line for, connecting to a charger and waiting for the recharge to reach a point where you can drive on to the next location where you might feel the urge re-charge. Driving 250 miles will typically take 8 hours (whether all at once or in a number of sorties) or so depending on traffic and spending one or two of every 8 hours drumming your fingers at EV charging stations isn’t likely to be a popular pastime for individuals or impress their employers. Most of us have better things to do.
Technical barriers (a lot of implications for the grid) to the EV “revolution” will be resolved but people’s lack of organization, undisciplined behaviour and intolerance for inordinate wastes of time will not go away. I think EV’s are a terrific technology and most drivers will want one once they have a chance to drive one. They are quiet, fast, have breathtaking acceleration and the Tesla models are beautifully designed. Over time, they will become mainstream.
But the rush of left wing politicians to try and force a square peg into a round hole will frustrate many and the dream of having “only EV’s” permitted to be sold in some jurisdictions after 2030 or 2035 (left wing mandates) is a dream. The EV experience when legislators mandate all vehicles are EV’s is more likely to see a change in government than any measurable change in people’s driving habits. Many people, me included, simply prefer an ICE vehicle like my Benz
.
How long will the lines be at EV charging stations?
Freeland’s budget is mostly about
Climate . Should have been about how to grow the economy out of this mess . But they had to compete with Biden to ESG ourselves to the promised land .
A Tweet
“ The Biden plan had estimated the energy and climate aspects of the IRA would cost U.S. taxpayers US$390 billion in subsidies and tax benefits over 10 years. But according to new Goldman Sachs analysis triples the energy/climate tab to US$1.2 trillion, the result in part because of a failure to account for US$379 billion in tax credits for electric vehicles and EV infrastructure.”