I don't live in America and haven't seen a Tesla charging station, so maybe some of these obvious ideas are already happening, but:
* You'll have at least 20 minutes of waiting for your car to charge, during which time Tesla could be selling you snacks and/or fast food. Filling stations in most countries already follow that proven business model.
* These charging stations have solar panels on the roof, so they presumably already have the necessary inverters and whatever other infrastructure to pump electricity back to the grid. Tesla could make some deals to put panels up on nearby buildings who could save on capital costs by just piggybacking off Tesla. They could become a power utility company over time.
* Teslas are quite expensive, so Tesla owners (and therefore drivers) are generally affluent, which are the kind of customers local businesses would want to attract. So having a charging station nearby could be something malls might even pay for or want to subsidise. Similarly the land around a supercharger station in what is otherwise "the middle of nowhere" could become significantly more valuable, so if Tesla purchases extra cheap land around stations placed along interstate highways they could stand to make quite a bit of money selling that to property developers afterwards.
I guess what I'm saying is if Tesla plays their cards right, then Tesla cars could be like giving away razor handles for cheap.
Variations on your second point are definitely in the plans. The Tesla charging stations are being put up in conjunction with Solar City, a solar panel leasing company, which was founded by Elon Musk's cousins.
Cumulative total energy delivered to date: 4.9 million kWh
That works out to about $250,000, or about $10 per Tesla Model S sold to date. Early days and all, but it looks like about $100† tacked on to the selling price of the car covers lifetime supercharger network power use. Capital expenditures to build them probably dwarf their electric bills.
I suspect the energy cost is a little higher than that because a commercial electricity customer (like Tesla) will often be subject to 'demand charges,' which are assessed based on the highest power used in a billing period. Since the point of a supercharger is to deliver a lot of power, the demand charge may be quite high.
I still agree with your conclusion though... Capital still dwarfs energy, even if they pay several times what you estimated.
Any battery has a hard time storing an amount of energy that costs the same as itself during its lifetime. This is opposite to combustion engines, which can pump infinite amounts of dollars through their cylinders.
Wow, I had no idea their network was already this good:
> The network is already robust enough to support long-distance drives on the most popular routes across America, wherever it be a cross country trip from Los Angeles to New York, an East Coast jaunt from Rhode Island to the southern tip of Florida, or an epic 12,000-mile journey to every corner of the United States.
I'm not sure if I've just been out of the loop, or if they aren't doing a good enough job pimping their supercharger network. This removes one of the perceived problems with electric cars - long road trips. Does anyone here have real world experience doing a long road trip with a Tesla S, using the supercharger network?
It looks like you can do cross country road trips if you take a specific route through the middle of the country. By the end of this year, it looks much better.
You would think they would be convincing magazine editors to doing a long-form 'we drove a tesla across the US' type article. I'd be very interested in reading something like that - what its really like to string together a long trip using supercharger stations.
I've done SF -> LA and SF -> Vegas without any issues.
The supercharger in Folsom enables Tahoe, and was one of the first to go in. But because of the cold and the elevation change, you have to stay there for more than 2 nights to make that one practical (or stay at the Ritz, which still seems to be the only hotel with >110v charging.)
Tesla is interesting, but there may be an upcoming battle between EV and fuel cells since it seems Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are supporting fuel cells instead of EV. But Tesla is not alone (Nissan, BMW) so this may be a battle that will split the industry. A big part of this fight will be infrastructure. Currently, gas powered cars have these advantages:
- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)
- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)
- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)
EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.
The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of advantages.
Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not be true.
The petrochemical industry would absolutely love for hydrogen fuel cells to become viable instead of EVs because they already have a massive amount of infrastructure and the easiest/cheapest way of getting hydrogen is to capture it from hydrocarbons.
Musk is right though, steam reforming hydrocarbons to generate hydrogen doesn't make any sense, nor does electrolysis. Using that amount of energy to generate a fuel so that you can fill up at the pump quickly is just plain nuts. We're better off using higher voltages, better batteries and super capacitors.
If you know, could you expand on the capital costs to convert a typical petrol station to, or augment it with, hydrogen capacity? I strongly suspect there's rather a lot of hardware (insulated tank and plumbing, major refrigeration, etc) required, and I suspect there are in some states at least rather restrictive (post-hindenburg) laws about hydrogen storage. Much higher costs than a Tesla superstation, no?
I own an RV with a propane tank, and propane storage and filling equipment is more complicated than the petrol equivalent, and a propane fill is always done by a trained person -- no self-serve allowed! Hydrogen would be many times more complex.
Also re standardization, there is a standard electrical plug use at all EV charge points, it fits my Toyota plug-in hybrid, a Nissan Leaf, or a Tesla. I am looking forward to stopping at a Tesla superstation with my Prius, I can probably get a full charge in 5-6 minutes...
A year ago I was thinking biofuels might be the way to go, I've since concluded that the capacity for production simply fails in any conceivable scenario to meet present levels of demand.
I do see liquid hydrocarbon fuels as attractive, though, based on energy density, flexibility, storage stability, and the very large level of installed base and technological familiarity in their use. For those reasons, the US Naval Research Lab's electricity-to-fuel synthesis relying on seawater for both hydrogen and CO, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, and producing fuel at a $3-6/gallon price estimate (I suspect that will go higher, and at present, crude oil price is about 70% of the final cost of gasoline at the pump), might allow for a continuation of fossil-fuel energy systems in a carbon-neutral and sustainable fashion.
I'm expecting CNG to become a lot more prevalent. Domestic supply is abundant and growing. Fleets and long haul trucks are increasingly converting. Natural gas utilities are pretty much everywhere, so the main thing that needs to be build out is the actual refueling stations. Standard refuling fittings are already defined.
How are fuel cell cars going to avoid these issues? They will be even less ubiquitous than solar charging stations, considering it will cost much more to build one.
Hydrogen will end up being barely cheaper than gas, too. And I don't think it will be that much more environmentally safe than gas. At least electric cars have the potential to be almost fully charged by solar power in the future.
Also, I expect hydrogen-based cars to be even more expensive than electric cars.
That's an interesting compare-and-contrast. I don't think the standardization thing is quite right, as the connector is pretty much standard aside from Tesla's, and it doesn't appear that adapters are hard to make (Teslas come with one). The fact that a Leaf can't connect to a supercharger is mainly because Tesla is trying to make them exclusive to move units. Charging stations that aren't actually owned by an electric car manufacturer will use the standard connector.
Ubiquity is being solved rapidly. Electric has a huge advantage here because the necessary infrastructure is almost zero. A charging station costs a couple thousand bucks, and plug it into the grid and you're ready to go. This isn't just theoretical. In my area (fairly affluent but not incredibly techy DC suburb) there are already a bunch of electric car charging stations available. The local Walgreens has one, for some incomprehensible reason. I've never seen it used, but it's there, ready and waiting.
I think recharge time is by far the biggest factor here. If recharging was fast, the rapidly growing network of chargers would make it practical to own an electric car with a Tesla-level range even for someone living in an apartment or similar. You'd have to recharge more often than you'd fill up with a gas car, but on the other hand you could just park in a recharging-equipped parking spot while you go out to a restaurant or go shopping, making it part of your regular routine.
In terms of practicality, it seems that the question is whether hydrogen can attain ubiquity before electric can attain fast recharging times. With only a couple dozen hydrogen stations in the US currently, and at $500,000+ for the necessary equipment, I doubt we'll see ubiquitous hydrogen anytime soon. With Tesla superchargers already providing an 80% charge in 40 minutes, I'd put my bet on fast battery charging winning the race.
So, just for the record, you're betting against Elon Musk himself on hydrogen fuel cells [1]. This is a guy who has stated, multiple times, that hydrogen fuel cells make no sense from first principles analysis, even considering the best case scenario. The efficiency of converting methane to hydrogen, transporting it to (non-existent) hydrogen fuel stations, and converting it to electricity in an inefficient fuel cell just doesn't make any sense. May as well just burn corn ethanol.
Also, just use common sense for a moment. Look how much flak Tesla is getting for their little battery fires. Do you have any idea what destruction compressed hydrogen gas is capable of causing? Not to mention all of the issues with storing hydrogen in the first place (hydrogen cracking).
I'm not a betting man, but I'll take any bets on hydrogen fuel cell cars becoming mainstream.
I notice the 100th station is in New Jersey, one of the two states that bans self-serve gas stations. I'm hoping Tesla owners don't have to ask an on-duty attendant to plug-in their vehicles there.
Even funnier is that they mention "New Jersey legislators" were at the opening; New Jersey being the most recent state to ban the sale of Teslas. Granted the aforementioned probably weren't on the side of Chris Crisco, but still.
So within ~20 months it'll be possible to drive almost anywhere in the USA in a Tesla S, and back to a Supercharger charging station? That's pretty impressive! As demand for vehicle based electricity use increases the demand for new electricity generation capacity will increase. All this in a protracted economic depression. Interesting times.
I wonder if using the supercharger deteriorates the battery more than a more gentle charge (I am warned about this for fast charging my Leaf). Find it interesting that they ask that question on the supercharger FAQ but don't answer it:
"How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery?
Supercharging does not alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much as they like."
Charging the battery fast isn't necessarily so bad in and of itself, but fast charging tends to generate a lot of heat, and high heat is bad for lithium ion longevity. The Model S has a battery cooling system built into the car which kicks on when needed, so this is not such a big issue.
The Leaf doesn't have any battery chillers though, so fast charging may indeed be bad for it. Also, even though most DC fast chargers only put out 50kW (as opposed to 120kW for Superchargers), if you consider how much smaller the Leaf pack is, you're actually charging the battery faster than a Supercharger can charge a Tesla.
I am not a battery scientist, but from everything I've read, using the supercharger should have no effect on battery life long-term. So long as it's kept within certain charge and temperature ranges, the only thing that counts down the lifetime of the battery cells are actual charge cycles, which you can pretty conveniently measure in miles of normal driving use (expected up to 30% loss after 100K miles, and the 5+ year old Roadsters actually averaged just 15% loss after 100K miles with older battery tech). The supercharger doesn't do anything that would reduce that life expectancy; it communicates with the battery about its health and charging speed begins to slow progressively after about 50%.
[+] [-] lerouxb|12 years ago|reply
* You'll have at least 20 minutes of waiting for your car to charge, during which time Tesla could be selling you snacks and/or fast food. Filling stations in most countries already follow that proven business model.
* These charging stations have solar panels on the roof, so they presumably already have the necessary inverters and whatever other infrastructure to pump electricity back to the grid. Tesla could make some deals to put panels up on nearby buildings who could save on capital costs by just piggybacking off Tesla. They could become a power utility company over time.
* Teslas are quite expensive, so Tesla owners (and therefore drivers) are generally affluent, which are the kind of customers local businesses would want to attract. So having a charging station nearby could be something malls might even pay for or want to subsidise. Similarly the land around a supercharger station in what is otherwise "the middle of nowhere" could become significantly more valuable, so if Tesla purchases extra cheap land around stations placed along interstate highways they could stand to make quite a bit of money selling that to property developers afterwards.
I guess what I'm saying is if Tesla plays their cards right, then Tesla cars could be like giving away razor handles for cheap.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jws|12 years ago|reply
That works out to about $250,000, or about $10 per Tesla Model S sold to date. Early days and all, but it looks like about $100† tacked on to the selling price of the car covers lifetime supercharger network power use. Capital expenditures to build them probably dwarf their electric bills.
␄
† To the limits of Fermi Estimation
[+] [-] fancyketchup|12 years ago|reply
I still agree with your conclusion though... Capital still dwarfs energy, even if they pay several times what you estimated.
[+] [-] tdiggity|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hengheng|12 years ago|reply
It's an insanely smart offering.
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
It's a lot lower than I would guess.
[+] [-] clamprecht|12 years ago|reply
> The network is already robust enough to support long-distance drives on the most popular routes across America, wherever it be a cross country trip from Los Angeles to New York, an East Coast jaunt from Rhode Island to the southern tip of Florida, or an epic 12,000-mile journey to every corner of the United States.
I'm not sure if I've just been out of the loop, or if they aren't doing a good enough job pimping their supercharger network. This removes one of the perceived problems with electric cars - long road trips. Does anyone here have real world experience doing a long road trip with a Tesla S, using the supercharger network?
[+] [-] Nogwater|12 years ago|reply
It looks like you can do cross country road trips if you take a specific route through the middle of the country. By the end of this year, it looks much better.
[+] [-] brc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuhood|12 years ago|reply
The supercharger in Folsom enables Tahoe, and was one of the first to go in. But because of the cold and the elevation change, you have to stay there for more than 2 nights to make that one practical (or stay at the Ritz, which still seems to be the only hotel with >110v charging.)
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
I'd love to see their method of analysis on this...
[+] [-] cpprototypes|12 years ago|reply
- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)
- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)
- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)
EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.
The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of advantages.
Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not be true.
[+] [-] Patrick_Devine|12 years ago|reply
Musk is right though, steam reforming hydrocarbons to generate hydrogen doesn't make any sense, nor does electrolysis. Using that amount of energy to generate a fuel so that you can fill up at the pump quickly is just plain nuts. We're better off using higher voltages, better batteries and super capacitors.
[+] [-] coryrc|12 years ago|reply
EV charging stations are ubiquitous. Fuel cell fillers are outrageously expensive.
All US cars can charge with J1772. CHadEMO and SuperChargers have the same power output, so adapters will be possible and reasonable.
Oh, and hydrogen-fueled cars are far less efficient wells-to-wheels than electrically-fueled. We can't afford to be paying more for fuel.
[+] [-] fernly|12 years ago|reply
I own an RV with a propane tank, and propane storage and filling equipment is more complicated than the petrol equivalent, and a propane fill is always done by a trained person -- no self-serve allowed! Hydrogen would be many times more complex.
Also re standardization, there is a standard electrical plug use at all EV charge points, it fits my Toyota plug-in hybrid, a Nissan Leaf, or a Tesla. I am looking forward to stopping at a Tesla superstation with my Prius, I can probably get a full charge in 5-6 minutes...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
A year ago I was thinking biofuels might be the way to go, I've since concluded that the capacity for production simply fails in any conceivable scenario to meet present levels of demand.
I do see liquid hydrocarbon fuels as attractive, though, based on energy density, flexibility, storage stability, and the very large level of installed base and technological familiarity in their use. For those reasons, the US Naval Research Lab's electricity-to-fuel synthesis relying on seawater for both hydrogen and CO, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, and producing fuel at a $3-6/gallon price estimate (I suspect that will go higher, and at present, crude oil price is about 70% of the final cost of gasoline at the pump), might allow for a continuation of fossil-fuel energy systems in a carbon-neutral and sustainable fashion.
Not cheap by a long shot, but plausible.
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|12 years ago|reply
Hydrogen will end up being barely cheaper than gas, too. And I don't think it will be that much more environmentally safe than gas. At least electric cars have the potential to be almost fully charged by solar power in the future.
Also, I expect hydrogen-based cars to be even more expensive than electric cars.
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
Ubiquity is being solved rapidly. Electric has a huge advantage here because the necessary infrastructure is almost zero. A charging station costs a couple thousand bucks, and plug it into the grid and you're ready to go. This isn't just theoretical. In my area (fairly affluent but not incredibly techy DC suburb) there are already a bunch of electric car charging stations available. The local Walgreens has one, for some incomprehensible reason. I've never seen it used, but it's there, ready and waiting.
I think recharge time is by far the biggest factor here. If recharging was fast, the rapidly growing network of chargers would make it practical to own an electric car with a Tesla-level range even for someone living in an apartment or similar. You'd have to recharge more often than you'd fill up with a gas car, but on the other hand you could just park in a recharging-equipped parking spot while you go out to a restaurant or go shopping, making it part of your regular routine.
In terms of practicality, it seems that the question is whether hydrogen can attain ubiquity before electric can attain fast recharging times. With only a couple dozen hydrogen stations in the US currently, and at $500,000+ for the necessary equipment, I doubt we'll see ubiquitous hydrogen anytime soon. With Tesla superchargers already providing an 80% charge in 40 minutes, I'd put my bet on fast battery charging winning the race.
[+] [-] FD3SA|12 years ago|reply
Also, just use common sense for a moment. Look how much flak Tesla is getting for their little battery fires. Do you have any idea what destruction compressed hydrogen gas is capable of causing? Not to mention all of the issues with storing hydrogen in the first place (hydrogen cracking).
I'm not a betting man, but I'll take any bets on hydrogen fuel cell cars becoming mainstream.
1. http://youtu.be/MmQb94EF1UY?t=29m40s
[+] [-] gojomo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dirlewanger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjg_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtaylor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sengstrom|12 years ago|reply
"How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery? Supercharging does not alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much as they like."
[+] [-] NickM|12 years ago|reply
The Leaf doesn't have any battery chillers though, so fast charging may indeed be bad for it. Also, even though most DC fast chargers only put out 50kW (as opposed to 120kW for Superchargers), if you consider how much smaller the Leaf pack is, you're actually charging the battery faster than a Supercharger can charge a Tesla.
That said, this study seems to indicate that fast charging isn't all that bad for Leafs anyway: http://insideevs.com/idaho-national-laboratory-dc-quick-char...
[+] [-] dangrossman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njloof|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maratd|12 years ago|reply
Sure you can. Just go to their website.
[+] [-] gcoguiec|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krschultz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkz|12 years ago|reply