In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Thu, 9 Mar 2023 17:51:31 -0500: Hi, [snip] >I think it is not practical to equip most parking places in an office >parking lot with chargers or simple "dischargers." I think the cost of this >would far exceed the benefits from distributed generation. But I could be >wrong!
I think you might be. While true that they would occasionally be damaged, I suspect that the use obtained from them while undamaged would exceed the cost of repair by a large margin, especially if mounted retractably, like the cord in your vacuum cleaner. And of course they can be mounted on steel poles surrounded by a guard rail, as you mentioned. Roughly comparable with the trolley bays seen in the parking lots of supermarkets. They can also be placed in a long narrow central island/peninsular with parking bays fronting onto the sides of the island, and bumper blocks in each parking bay to stop the car wheels from going any further. Most of the wiring would be under the island. As the world shifts to electric cars, such an arrangement is likely to become more common, regardless of whether or not they are bi-directional. > >Another problem may arise. I hope that self-driving cars become common. I >hope that self driving taxi services become common. So that many people >take a Uber-like taxi-like self-driving car to the office, and the car then >drives off to pick up another passenger. This will reduce the need for >parking spaces. It should be cheaper for the passenger, since it shares the >cost of the vehicle, insurance and maintenance. Plus you don't have to pay >the driver. If I could summon a self-driving taxi quickly, I would not own >a car. Since this reduces the number of parking spaces and parked cars, it >reduces the total capacity of distributed generation by EVs. I think we may have to wait a bit longer for this. Governments are going to be rather hesitant about self driving cars with no driver at all behind the wheel. Cloud storage:- Unsafe, Slow, Expensive ...pick any three.
