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gwbas1c • today at 2:53 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

I briefly worked with some people trying to "solve" this in the US. There's two major obstacles:

1: The power company is slow as molasses making new connections.

2: The networking protocols used for billing are "creative" and unreliable. This is why many EV charging stations don't work or don't take credit cards. (Basically, the protocol has too many options and spends far too much effort on pointless certificate exchanges.)

Building on that...

> I don't see why every parking space, street, public and private can't have a power socket.

Because if everybody plugs in at roughly the same time (think of everyone arriving home from work in the evening,) load will go much higher than the electrical service can handle. No modern apartment building or parking garage simply has enough wiring and transformers to handle all that: It requires the chargers to coordinate among themselves to artificially slow themselves down to keep the load low enough so it doesn't trip a breaker somewhere.