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quickthrowmantoday at 2:42 PM4 repliesview on HN

A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions of vehicles every day going to come from?

100M vehicles times 10kW divided by one million is One Million Megawatts.

One Thousand Gigawatts. That’s five hundred 2GW power plants. Four thousand solar panels make 1MW, four million solar panels make 1GW, four billion solar panels make 1000 GW.

And that’s 40% of the fleet converted to EVs, and does not account for diesel semi-tractors being converted to EV.


Replies

wasabi991011today at 3:02 PM

> A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just chooses to spend it on other goals such as bombing Iran.

applfanboysbgontoday at 2:44 PM

> which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

That is not a tech problem, which is the claim I was replying to.

I saw your deleted comment about four charging stations costing $200,000 or so. Four petrol stations also cost that much. Nobody is saying infrastructure is free, but phasing out infrastructure is simply a matter of time and political will, not a fundamental tech problem.

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nullpoint420today at 3:39 PM

If they could find the power for the data centers, why can’t we find it for EVs?

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Forgeties79today at 2:46 PM

Norway is hardly alone. More and more countries are increasing EV purchases and decreasing ice purchases. We are clearly headed in that direction

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