Comment Re: Is there power available along interstates? (Score 4, Insightful) 334
My wife drives a Tesla. This is in keeping with our experience on road trips. Most of the chargers we stop at are actually at gas stations. We spend roughly the same amount of time inside as we did with a gas car, hitting the restroom, grabbing food and drink, and generally walking around for a minute or two to get blood flowing. Admittedly, if our trips were on major, major highways on major travel weekends, these stations with ~8 chargers might not be able to handle a sudden influx, but they do ok with a constant stream of cars. And the chargers seem to be easy to build out, as another stop we often make is at a mall with ~20 chargers and not a significant amount more infrastructure space for transformers, etc. I'm really interested to see what happens when Buc-ee's starts putting in chargers at their mega travel stops.
I actually see another benefit of all these chargers going in: setting up infrastructure that encourages lots of local grid sized batteries for emergency power. The chargers need power infrastructure and network infrastructure to allow for payment, etc., so it's only a little extra work for someone to put in a battery that can be connected and controlled by/with a smart grid. The people owning the batteries can buy/sell to their hearts' content, and the local station makes a decent monthly lease for the space and keeping the area safe for the systems. Like you said, it's a lot easier than dealing with leaking underground tanks and needing to pay a person to be there 24/7 (or as much as they're open) in case they need to hit the emergency stop/fire suppression button.
