Charging station

The NYTimes:

In an effort to spur lackluster sales of electric cars, California, New York and six other states said on Thursday that they would work jointly to adopt a range of measures, including encouraging more charging stations and changing building codes, to make it easier to own an electric car.

The goal, they said, was to achieve sales of at least 3.3 million vehicles that did not have any emissions by 2025.

The states, which represent more than a quarter of the national car market, said they would seek to develop charging stations that all took the same form of payment, simplify rules for installing chargers and set building codes and other regulations to require the stations at workplaces, multifamily residences and at other places.

Charging stations, charging stations, charging stations.

Related articles

• Coalition of States Seeks to Spur Use of Electric Cars (nytimes.com)
• Eight U.S. states band together to promote clean cars (reuters.com)
• Eight governors make zero-emission car pledge (usatoday.com)
• 8 States Vow 3.3M Zero-Emission Vehicles by 2025 – ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
• 8 states sign deal to boost electric-car sales (sfgate.com)
• California joins initiative to put 3.3 electric vehicles on the road (techi.com)
• Oregon one of eight states aiming to put 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles on the road (oregonlive.com)
• California joins seven other states to put 3.3 million zero emission vehicles on road by 2025 (mercurynews.com)

Great find from @mgillet onTwitter. This appears to be a Tesla dashboard at the headquarters showing significant growth in charging over the past few months.   More importantly, we some highly anticipated charging stations ‘coming soon’.  Probably most exciting for Tesla is the Oregon and northern California stations that will close the I5 corridor meaning the West Coast will be covered.  Also two stations on the California/Arizona border will allow trips to/from Phoenix and LA/San Diego.

You’ll notice that two stations, one in Colorado and one in Texas, are lit up even though Tesla hasn’t pushed to the  Supercharger Station website Map, below.

Texans will get two more Supercharger stations in Eastern Texas linking them to Arkansas and Louisiana. East coasters will get a couple in Northern New Jersey as well as Virginia and North Carolina allowing folks in Vermont/New Hampshire to travel to the Carolinas and vice versa.

Some fun facts:

• Fremont (Tesla Factory) and Hawthorn in SoCal seem to be far and away the busiest Superchargers with Gilroy coming in third over the last 30 days.
• Unsurprisingly, most people put 20-40kWh into their Teslas during a stop.
• 1576 cars visited superchargers in the last week
• Almost 4 million miles have been charged at Supercharging stations…
• That equates to 14,000 MWh…
• Which has saved nearly 160,000 gallons of gas.

Compare with the current map as of today, 10/21/2013:

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In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Tesla CTO JB Straubel says that battery charging technology is going to get even quicker than it is now.

“It’s not going to happen in a year from now. It’s going to be hard. But I think we can get down to five to 10 minutes,” Straubel said in an interview with MIT Technology Review. He noted that the current superchargers, which deliver 120 kilowatts of electricity, “seemed pretty crazy even 10 years ago.” Conventional public charging stations deliver well under 10 kilowatts.

Tesla has already reduced its Supercharger times in half going from 40 minutes to 20 minutes for a half charge. A few more ‘half times over the next few years and we’ll be there. One of the barriers of this type of charging is heat so this might involve external or internal cooling for battery charging.

One challenge of fast charging is that delivering power to a battery very rapidly can cause it to overheat. To avoid damaging the battery, the outside charger needs to communicate with the electronics that monitor the state of the batteries, including their voltage and temperature, and quickly adjust charging rates accordingly. “To do that kind of charging, everything has to be designed and working in perfect synchrony,” Straubel says.

Achieving five-minute charges will require not only further improving the charging system, but also improving the interface with the electrical grid. As it is, only some places on the grid can handle 120-kilowatt charging. Drawing large amounts of power from the grid also incurs demand charges from the utility, increasing the cost of the system.

But Straubel says that Tesla plans to get around these problems by equipping supercharging stations with solar panels and batteries.

The rest of the interview is here and worth a read.
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