Comment Re:How Will the Electrical Power Grid be Upgraded? (Score 1) 294
I think that individual charging infrastructure can only take us so far here. At some point we need to make the jump to having traction power broadly available, similar to how we have grown to expect parking to be broadly available so each dwelling doesn't need to include its own car storage facilities.
The current commonly-deployed charging tech is a little too simplistic for this: it's literally just a funny-shaped normal electrical plug with some passive signalling.
With some extensions to that system, it could be possible for a chargeable device such as car to be associated with a power company account in similar vein to how your house has a power company account, and then the power company could provide charging stations anywhere they have power distribution infrastructure (that is, most places) where anyone with an account can plug in and have the power they consume billed back to their account. For example, there is already tech available for using existing power lines as a carrier for data, which could allow account negotiation to be overlayed on the existing conductors in the SAE J1772 standard, so that physical compatibility with existing charging infrastructure is preserved.
I'm not naive to some very real concerns about an approach like that. For example, it gives the power company access to some data about your movements, if you are routinely plugging in your car to charge everywhere you go. That concern already somewhat applies to the various competing public charging companies, but at least there are enough of those that in principle your data ends up distributed across them all. This is not a trivial concern by any means, though existing precedent of cellular device usage seems to suggest that the average citizen isn't super concerned about it, and there are enough average citizens to make a significant dent in the use of in-vehicle fossil fuel burning.