“Tesla claims that they will cost almost nothing to operate, since the power will come from solar panels.”
Thanks, I caught that in something that I read earlier.
Those charging stations are kind of spooky. I wonder just how safe they’ll be. So you’re a rich guy and sitting in your car for 30 minutes with a 2” firehose tightly secured to it...and only rich guys will be at these charging stations. You’re the only one there, maybe for the day.
Maybe he’ll have an infrastructure or something, like a gas station, but it seems overkill considering the number of potential customers in one day (maybe 3, on a good day). Or maybe he’ll integrate it into one of those “dirty” gas stations - which would be cute, as the rich guy sits there and stews for 30 minutes, while us lower-crust people, pull-in, fill up for 5 minutes, and are on our way.
The math on the solar panels is interesting too. He better not have too many customers, or he’ll need a farm, rather than a handful of them. He basically needs the amount of panel area to make a house energy-neutral, for each customer per day, by my calculations (with customer being defined as someone charging for 30 minutes). In other words, if he served just one customer in a day, he would need one house worth’s of panels...two customers, then 2 houses. If really intends to have 2 to 6 customers there at any one time, during the day, then you’re talking about some very, very, large areas - and don’t even get me started on the batteries. My advice: look around when you pass by one of these charging stations and see if there aren’t some big power lines (not huge, but big) that just happen to be in the neighborhood.
He claims that at times he’ll have a surplus to “sell” to the grid. But he’s made a lot of claims and people are questioning his ability to deliver - they believe he will be pulling off the grid (another expense) when he doesn’t have enough “juice,” instead of contributing.