No surprise, but apparently, you haven't used expedia or hotels.com lately.
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While cars froze in Chicago, I used hotel charging for a trouble-free 2-week road trip in snowy Utah without superchargers
- Thread starter bradtem
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Hotels.com has had it for quite some time. (There are really only 3 companies behind most of the OTA brands out there, and Expedia's a different network.)
I have used both recently, but to book, not to search. I tried hotels.com's EV search when it came out a couple of years ago and found it inadequate. It didn't know about a lot of hotels that had charging. I haven't re-evaluated it in a while, though. No system however lets you book a hotel with *available* charging, which was the context of the message you are quoting. All of them can only find hotels that have some charging. While that's a start, I was saying that someday we want to reserve charging and search for availability. You may have missed that part.
For now, I am forced to go to plugshare. Its listings on charging are the most comprehensive and they tend to have the price and quality of the chargers, which are fairly important. I mean there's a big difference between chargers that rarely work and those that are always available, and a big difference between free to guests and $30, which was the difference in the first example of Springdale UT in the article.
I don't hold much hope on that for the OTAs since it's still hard to search including the price of parking, in spite of that being a very common desire. (When you are coming into a downtown area with a car, it's not unusual for parking to cost a decent fraction of a room night, and you mostly know you are going to need it, though you also want to be told that parking is free on Sundays on the street and you don't need to pay the hotel $25 for it. Sadly few travel apps work for the user so they don't tend to reveal that.)
Update: A quick test of Springdale shows hotels.com only showing 5 hotels with charging: The Marriot Springhill, the Flanigans, the Pioneer, The Hilton Cliffrose and the Cable Mountain. In fact on plugshare it shows 13 hotels, including those 5, plus the campground and visitor center. (There are some RV parks which also could do the job, probably.) That's a huge difference (though a couple may be closed) and suggests the OTAs still don't cut it. Though some day they might.
Hotels.com also doesn't show the Best Western in Springdale, Duke's in Hanksville or The Aarchway in Moab or, the Legacy in Price, which are the hotels I stayed at and where I charged. It did know about Ruby's at Bryce and the Linq in Las Vegas where I stayed, and the Hyatt at SLC at a much higher price than I paid, but that was it. Checking a number of the other hotels I have charged at in hotels.com shows their database is very poor quality, and I am correct not to search with them. (In general, I find google is best for search, other than the fact it shows fake results from bad OTAs and aggregators which you must learn to ignore, but it is much faster than any other, easiest to use, and lets you look across all the major OTAs and direct sites which can save good money.)
In future, please don't talk about me. Discuss the topics I bring up to your heart's content, but never refer to what another poster is or does if you can avoid it.
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EV charging is still a mess. Until we have some type standardization it will be difficult to implement a business. even the way to measure for it change depending on which state you are. Tesla experience is good for the most part, but the pricing is all over the place. I remember driving through Indiana is way cheaper than Chicago not sure why. (this was in 2021 so dont scream at me) charging on downtown Chicago was over $25 in Indiana in the highway was $7.
Dont get me wrong I know gas prices varies by place also. but the way they measure the gas does not.
Dont get me wrong I know gas prices varies by place also. but the way they measure the gas does not.
I presume you are referring to the fact some stations price by the kWh, and some price by the minute, or have varying per-minute prices based on charge power to simulate charging by the kWh.
That's a messy story. Some places make it illegal to sell electrical energy by the kWh unless you have government certified power meters with very high accuracy, or in effect only the power utility can do it. In other areas, it's the fact that chargers really sell a service, not a commodity, and the most expensive thing you consume is time at their charger, and so they want to charge you by time, not kWh, even though customers want to pay for what they are left with at the end, which is kWh in battery. But customers also understand the same kWh can cost 50 cents if they come at 150kW and 20 cents if they come at 7kW, so they understand that most of the price is for service, not energy.
It's compounded by the fact that EV charging isn't really a business for anybody, and while some companies are trying to make it a business, they are failing badly (look at the stock prices and profits of all the charging companies.) Some realize this (Chargepoint does not sell energy, they sell hardware and manage it for the local site which sells the energy, they know not to get into the energy selling business.) Their stock is in the toilet, too. And it's all perverted by huge subsidies. I have a number of articles about this. Only Tesla seems to really understand what it is doing, and they mostly built out charging to sell cars, not energy, though they are slowing moving to doing a bit of the latter.
I discounted reserving chargers as another of your wild fantasies. Good luck to you.
I doubt that it is intentional, it is more likely corp. Mgmt folks who know little or nothing about EVs and charging, the old "less is more" mentality, who see articles saying that the EV market is increasing and if they put in some L2 destination charging they can increase their room bookings x%.
Understanding it from a users perspective takes more time and effort, and if they're not an EV owner they don't really care too much. Their goal is to increase room bookings not to provide optimal EV charging capabilities. It's a "sweetener" to get us to book their hotel rather than their competitors.
Yeah, I had a wiring issue in my house after a storm recently, and the electrician charged $225 just for the house visit and 1 hour troubleshooting. He was a really nice guy, only charged me $300 for about 2.5 hours of troubleshooting. No hardware was required, and he fixed the problem, a floating neutral line.
We talked about EVs and he brought up an interesting point. He wasn't anti-EV but his point was that today, about 10% of of owners drive some type of plug-in EV, either a BEV or PHEV. If/when that increases to say 50% or higher, can the infrastructure support that amount of home charging?
Obviously some neighborhoods would have higher or lower percentages of EVs. Would significant upgrades be needed to the distribution network, or rationing or scheduling who can L2 charge on any given day/time? And when we get to that point, will L2 home chargers regularly sustain higher currents exasperating the issue?
My home charger typically draws 40A for a rate of 9 kWh, no big deal from my 100A service panel. But if you were to double that in the future my panel and service would need to be upgraded. No idea how many of my neighbors have BEVs or PHEVs, but I haven't seen many/any driving around the neighborhood.
15-25 years from now when EV ownership theoretically could be 50-60% or more, "the power grid" will have needed to be increased significantly I think to handle it, in existing neighborhoods. New subdivisions will hopefully be planned to account for the future power requirements and be built accordingly, but existing neighborhoods will need to be upgraded.
SCGaskill:
Last year around 1.2 million EVs were purchased in the USA and added to the grid. The vast majority are charged primarily at home.
It was also the hottest year on record.
Total US electricity demand went down. Yes, you read that right. While we had all sorts of reasons to use more electricity we used less, because other things got more efficient.
Today, EVs tend to charge at night if they are at homes. The grid is at 1/3rd to 1/2 load at this time, so it has lots of spare capacity. Air conditioners aren't running, nor is much else. (As more people move to electric heat this will increase load at night.)
Cars parked in the daytime (homes and offices) will mostly get power from solar. If the solar is on residential rooftops it doesn't go through the grid (or just goes through the local grid.)
Cars and EVSEs can be smart so they only offer the car capacity that is available. If everything turns on at once, the cars reduce their charging, so they don't overload the grid, should that ever be a risk
On Hotels:
It is correct that many hotels really don't understand EV charging or just follow policies from people who don't drive EVs. EV drivers have to put out the message about what we want, so that as the market grows, they get it. Today, I fear I am pretty unusual, the way I read plugshare about hotels to make sure they have done it OK. It is much easier to use a binary flag in hotels.com, though it tells you only about the existence of the stalls, and has fewer than half the hotels with charging out there in its database. We want a merger of plugshare and sites like hotels.com, where you can judge the quality of the charging and the price and how reliably we will be able to use it -- in particular with the ability to reserve it or guarantee it.
Today there are two situations. In one case, if you fail to get a charge at the hotel, you just drive off to a fast charger. That costs you money and time, and is better done in the evening than the morning, but it will get you on your trip. You'll be annoyed at the hotel, perhaps very annoyed, but you might also just take it in stride, viewing the hotel charging as "nice to have," but when absent you just fast charged like you would have had to otherwise.
The other situation has you depending on the charging to get on your way. Where in the worst case you might be stranded, or perhaps have to now go very far out of your way (backtracking even) or sit at a public level 2 for a couple of hours to get on your way. Then you want a guarantee. The good news is that in a few years, there should be enough fast charging out there that this risk will get very low.
I've done it though, counted on hotel charging without which I would have had to effectively lose a lot of my trip. I've never been in a situation where I would be totally stranded, because there's always level 1 to be found somehow which can pick up 50 miles overnight, or there's some level 2 somewhere around -- there's almost no place without an RV park and those can fill you up overnight with 50a and give you 100 miles with TT-30, and they or public level 2 can get you 50 miles in under 2 hours, which is a royal pain but not the end of the world. And then there is AAA/roadside assist if you manage to pull of getting totally stranded. I've never done that but last month I did for the first time worry I might need to when the only fast charger between Death Valley and Las Vegas wouldn't charge me and the car said I would be at 1% without it.
Last year around 1.2 million EVs were purchased in the USA and added to the grid. The vast majority are charged primarily at home.
It was also the hottest year on record.
Total US electricity demand went down. Yes, you read that right. While we had all sorts of reasons to use more electricity we used less, because other things got more efficient.
Today, EVs tend to charge at night if they are at homes. The grid is at 1/3rd to 1/2 load at this time, so it has lots of spare capacity. Air conditioners aren't running, nor is much else. (As more people move to electric heat this will increase load at night.)
Cars parked in the daytime (homes and offices) will mostly get power from solar. If the solar is on residential rooftops it doesn't go through the grid (or just goes through the local grid.)
Cars and EVSEs can be smart so they only offer the car capacity that is available. If everything turns on at once, the cars reduce their charging, so they don't overload the grid, should that ever be a risk
On Hotels:
It is correct that many hotels really don't understand EV charging or just follow policies from people who don't drive EVs. EV drivers have to put out the message about what we want, so that as the market grows, they get it. Today, I fear I am pretty unusual, the way I read plugshare about hotels to make sure they have done it OK. It is much easier to use a binary flag in hotels.com, though it tells you only about the existence of the stalls, and has fewer than half the hotels with charging out there in its database. We want a merger of plugshare and sites like hotels.com, where you can judge the quality of the charging and the price and how reliably we will be able to use it -- in particular with the ability to reserve it or guarantee it.
Today there are two situations. In one case, if you fail to get a charge at the hotel, you just drive off to a fast charger. That costs you money and time, and is better done in the evening than the morning, but it will get you on your trip. You'll be annoyed at the hotel, perhaps very annoyed, but you might also just take it in stride, viewing the hotel charging as "nice to have," but when absent you just fast charged like you would have had to otherwise.
The other situation has you depending on the charging to get on your way. Where in the worst case you might be stranded, or perhaps have to now go very far out of your way (backtracking even) or sit at a public level 2 for a couple of hours to get on your way. Then you want a guarantee. The good news is that in a few years, there should be enough fast charging out there that this risk will get very low.
I've done it though, counted on hotel charging without which I would have had to effectively lose a lot of my trip. I've never been in a situation where I would be totally stranded, because there's always level 1 to be found somehow which can pick up 50 miles overnight, or there's some level 2 somewhere around -- there's almost no place without an RV park and those can fill you up overnight with 50a and give you 100 miles with TT-30, and they or public level 2 can get you 50 miles in under 2 hours, which is a royal pain but not the end of the world. And then there is AAA/roadside assist if you manage to pull of getting totally stranded. I've never done that but last month I did for the first time worry I might need to when the only fast charger between Death Valley and Las Vegas wouldn't charge me and the car said I would be at 1% without it.
This is already being defined and studied extensively, and the general answer is, yes, it's some increase, but not all that much and easily manageable.
"According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the typical American drives their car about 13,500 miles per year. A typical EV would require about 3,857 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. For 26.4 million EVs, that’s over 101 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year or about 2.5% of what the U.S. grid produced in 2020. Although it’s a small percentage, it’s much more than what we’re currently asking of the electrical grid."
Can the Power Grid Handle Electric Cars? — EV Connect
The power grid can handle the coming surge in electric vehicles, but utility companies must prepare for it now. Here are three things utilities can do today.
www.evconnect.com
The other aspect is that charging EVs is mostly a flexible load. It can be managed and shifted for the most part to when it is lesser impact. This can be from pricing motivations mostly, as utilities give some discounts for shifting usage to times when demands are lower. There are also charging systems that can respond to changes in demand. Those just haven't gotten widespread adoption yet, but are available. So there is time to adapt and adjust over the next few decades.
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