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How Does Tesla Build a Supercharger Charging Site?
cartechboy writes Tesla's Superchargers are the talk of the electric car community. These charging stations can take a Model S battery pack from nearly empty to about 150 miles of range in around 30 minutes. That's crazy fast, and it's nothing short of impressive. But what does it take to actually build a Tesla Supercharger site? Apparently a lot of digging. A massive trench is created to run high-capacity electric cables before the charging stations themselves are even installed. A diagram and photos of the Electric Conduit Construction build out have surfaced on the Internet. The conduits connect the charging stations to a power distribution center, which in turn is connected to a transformer that provides the power for charging cars. It took 11 days to install the six charging stalls in Goodland, Kansas. If you thought it was a quick process to build a Supercharger station, you were clearly wrong.
It's a friggin inconvenience to park at a gas station when you're car is outta juice, and they have to have an enterntainment park next to every one of them to keep you busy while you wait the "superfast" recharce of 30 minutes. They can't really exchance Li-ion batteries, like they can propane cylinders, because propane cylinders are relatively cheap, but with an electric vehicle Li-ion you're talking at least $20,000, so how you're gonna drop of your perfectly good $20,000 battery, and exchange it for someone else's crappy one, that's been abused, and it's only worth $1,500. That's a big deal, you can't swallow a cost like that like you can for propane exchange cylinders for instance.
The other big deal of EV's is the limited range, with huge batteries. The energy density of all batteries, including Li-ion is much smaller than fuels, by at least an order of magnitude - i.e. 0.3-1.0 MJ/kg for a battery, and 44 MJ/kg for gasoline and diesel including biodiesel, and something like 20 MJ/kg for Ethanol/Methanol/Liquid Ammonia. Nuclear powerplant generated liquid ammonia is the fuel of the future, because it's carbon neutral. It's the answer to the storage problems of the hydrogen economy - tag it on to nitrogen, and you got no hydrogen storage problem. I don't understand what's so complicated about this.