Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
greentechmedia.comI'd love to have an alternative to ChargePoint for charging my Tesla at airports. It takes multiple minutes of diddling around with their app to make their charger's relay contacts close. They have reviews within their app, wherein people report which of their chargers usually work, which sometimes work, and which never work. In no case is the actual power faulty -- it's their monetization strategy that fails to tough-luck.
Back in the early 80s, I spent part of a summer in a slate-roofed cottage in Wales. The cottage had a box in which you had to insert a coin to turn on the electricity. Like, if you wanted to cook or watch TV that night you had to insert a shilling coin and turn a knob and --- kerchunk --- you'd have electricity until you'd used up your 1d worth of kilowatt-hours and then --- kerchunk --- you were a savage again.
Somehow, paying for electricity at each act of consumption feels bad. Like paying for toilets.
Tesla got it right. I paid $100,000 for the car -- I want hassle-free electricity, thanks.
I use ChargePoint a lot. If the charger isn't broken, it takes significantly less time than dealing with a gas station. 9 times out of 10, I know ahead of time whether a charger is broken or busy.
As for their monetization strategy, I think chargers should require a maintenance contract and that that should be built into the kWh cost. Pay at the pump. I do not like to see free chargers because everyone uses them and no one maintains them because they're not getting paid for.
A buck an hour should be the minimum for 6kWh L2. $5/hr if you leave it 30 minutes past full.
As for the blockchain idea, this seems strange. Too much solution for not enough problem. I don't want to use some random person's L2 in a neighborhood. I could imagine an emergency thing but that's about it.
I don't have an electric car, but I was under the impression that filling a tank up took a significant amount of time?
s/tank/battery
You don't have to stand at the car while it charges so the time comparison should really just be how long it takes to plug in and pay. This assumes the charger is at a location you are already visiting. If we accept that assumption you also save the time you went out of your way to a gas station.
That is what I meant. The OP is at the airport and wants to set the car charging. This really doesn't take long at all if the charger is working.
If the charger isn't working that's because someone didn't fix it. That's usually because there isn't a maintenance contract and people didn't pay enough for said maintenance contract. When you buy gas there are use taxes for road maintenance. Kinda like that.
> it takes significantly less time than dealing with a gas station
Considering that most interactions at a gas station are over in 2 minutes, this seems to be a revolutionary fast charging technology!
You need to get to a gas station, where charging stations can be anywhere. If you have one at work and one at your house you will spend vastly less of your time filling up.
Those pay-as-you-use-it (prepayment) meters still exist!
The first house I rented as a student had one, in 2006. The landlord said the previous tenants had had trouble paying the bills, so the electricity company had insisted on the meter when reconnecting the supply. In reality, I think he'd asked for it to be installed to simplify his job.
Nowadays, the meters are topped up with a smart card, usually at a local newsagent or corner shop. I think we put £100 on it, then forgot about it for several months.
Info and a couple of pictures: https://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/guides/prepayment-me...
I'm not familiar with how billing for Tesla's chargers work, except that some of the high end models include free charging (or at least they used to). Are you saying the electricity should be free, or simply that you prefer to pay monthly based on usage?
This startup seems like a stepping stone to me. Eventually you should be able to define limits (max $/kWh, min charge rate, min time available, max distance) and the app should just show you available stations. Billing can happen automatically.
My Tesla is an early model, so charging at their stations is free. Paying a monthly usage bill would fine too. The bad thing is having to use a flaky UI every time I need to charge remotely (which is only every month or two). I think ChargePoint's fundamental problem is in order for their app to enable charging:
- the app must be installed and updated
- it must get an accurate location from GPS to look up the ID number of closest station (and often they're adjacent, so the next one is 12' away).
- my cellular data, and the base station's cellular data have to work
- all inside a concrete parking garage.
so it only works 3/4 of the time.
Why bother with the app? Just get a free tiny RFID card. It’s basically instant (although, you have to avoid losing the little card, I suppose).
Just get the RFID card and keep it in the car. Way less hassle than the app for unlocking the charger.
I read the article and no where does it make a case for why a blockchain makes any sense in the application. I read a comment by a person claiming to be associated with the project saying that "blockchain enabled" makes sense because the payment are p2p but that doesn't make sense either. Blockchains are good for pretty much one thing: a distributed ledger that parties can trust to be immutable. I can confidently say they're only inserting a blockchain here because it gets the idea more buzz.
Side note: I had no idea people paid so much to charge they're EVs. the article mentioned that a electric bill in Cali can be upwards of $1000/yr.
Edit for clarity: the $1000/yr figure is the marginal cost of charging the EV, not the entire bill
I fill up my Jeep about once a week. At an average cost of $25 to fill over the course of 52 weeks, that's $1,300.
Of course I don't have the added bonus of being able to charge from solar power, but at least that shows that the cost of electricity isn't prohibitive versus the cost of gasoline.
As a fellow Jeep owner (2004 TJ, {waves - lol}), I was sitting here wondering how you "fill up" a Jeep with only $25.00 (@ approx $2.00 per gallon - that'd be 12.5 gallons of gas per fill up). So I googled things - found this:
http://www.jeepforum.com/forum/f9/gas-tank-size-249444/
Of course, that whole discussion just throws a bunch of wrenches into the works; maybe you do have the 15 gallon tank on a older model (newer JKs have much larger tanks supposedly)? And apparently there's still more in the tank even once the light comes on (a few gallons reserve)?
I've never "buried the needle" on my Jeep yet, so I have no idea what size tank I have.
Yeah that's kinda what I meant. I don't burn a whole tank each week but I roughly fill it up weekly. Besides it was meant to be more a comparison of marginal rather tha absolute cost.
2015 Patriot (fist bump), if that makes a difference in the calculation.
> Of course I don't have the added bonus of being able to charge from solar power
Ugh, you also don't have the added bonus with an EV to just fill up when necessary.
> the article mentioned that a electric bill in Cali can be upwards of $1000/yr.
I live in Phoenix, AZ - my electric bill is rarely ever under $100.00 per month; in the summertime it can edge upwards to close to $400.00 a month.
I don't have an electric car, either.
/two A/C units on a 2000 sf house will do that, tho...
Cryptocurrency enthusiast here.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense that people are doing that makes other people think the entire cryptocurrency community is a joke. Obviously there is no benefit to having this on a blockchain here. You can just pay the charging station.
I made a comment the other day that there is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and people who want to blockchain-all-the-things. It was heavily downvoted and I suspect people didn't believe me, so I'm going to keep repeating it until people believe me :)
Don't write off cryptocurrency just because of nonsense like this. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero (and a small handful of other coins) are genuinely worthwhile projects.
> I made a comment the other day that there is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and people who want to blockchain-all-the-things. It was heavily downvoted and I suspect people didn't believe me, so I'm going to keep repeating it until people believe me :)
Probably because:
1. you're making a historically false claim. Pushing "blockchain" to business is quite well documented (Digital Gold, contemporary press) as being something that was pushed by the Bitcoin fans at the time - late 2014, when the bitcoin price was cratering - as a way to keep interest up.
2. the claims for "Blockchain" (and even the further euphemism, "Digital Ledger Technology") are blatantly the most fantastic claims for Bitcoin, with only the buzzword changed.
3. the bitcoin blog press can't get enough of these "blockchain" initiatives. Clearly their readers think it's all much the same thing.
Edit: I was mistaken
If it's literally just "use cryptocurrency to pay for car charging", I don't think that counts as "blockchain-enabled" any more than, say, accepting Visa payments makes you "database-enabled".
(I've read it now)
EDIT: Not that the misleading headline makes it a worse project. I actually think "use cryptocurrency to pay for anything" is a good project. But it's not blockchain-enabled. And that's a good thing.
... uses the Share&Charge platform developed by MotionWerk. Share&Charge harnesses the Ethereum blockchain to track the charging transactions and exchange payment between customer and host.
Money can be cashed-in to your Share&Charge wallet by using credit card, PayPal...
In addition to the Blockchain technology we developed our Share&Charge App, which builds the point of intersection between the users and the Blockchain.
https://blog.slock.it/share-charge-launches-its-app-on-board...
At the moment, this token cannot be traded and is reserved for use exclusively within the Share&Charge project, however, an e-money license being sought by the payment provider xtech of the project could see its use extended to it to other fields.
As far as I can tell, the only thing blockchainy about this is "Share&Charge and Slock.it are working hard in surfacing the blockchain aspects of the application for our more technical users. For example, we hope to eventually be able to load separately generated private keys within the apps."
That's all?
> Obviously there is no benefit to having this on a blockchain here.
- Minuscule transaction fees as opposed to 3% banking fees.
- Less necessary server infrastructure to manage identity/payments
Would these not be benefits or am I missing something?
Those are properties of using cryptocurrency for payment, they're not properties of putting car charging on a blockchain.
I think that's what this project does, and the headline is simply misleading. It's not really "blockchain-enabled", it just uses Ethereum for payment.
When I read the headline, I immediately thought that it meant I could pay for charging with Bitcoin and/or Ethereum.
What else can be inferred from the headline? What would it mean to "put car charging on a blockchain"? Can you explain for the rest of us ?
The bit that might take it further is
> the blockchain verifies how much the driver owes
Maybe there's something here where it's pulling external data (e.g. set price/unit or a trusted source that says how much was taken) to decide the price?
Think through the 3% bit a little bit. Do you think that the banks charge 3% because their settlement software is that much less efficient than a blockchain?
Of course not. You're paying for customer service, marketing, fraud protection & settlement, and a host of other things with that 3%. It's not 3% because that's what it costs to run a computer to figure out payment processing, it's 3% because that's what the banks can charge to run their business. In effect most people pay 2% or less because of credit card points, so really it's just a forced discount on retailers. Again, because the banks can.
As someone associated with this project, I can inform you that the reason the words "blockchain enabled" are used is because the Share and Charge platform enables peer-to-peer payments between car charger and private (not commercial) charging pole owner via the blockchain. As it happens however, as this is a pilot in a new country (US) with new compliance requirements, there are no actual cash payments taking place for now. And as for the electricity cost of Proof of Work, we're actually looking to move to a special purpose chain using Proof of Authority in the near future.
Perfect! Put a few tons of carbon in the air pointlessly calculating hashes to mine *coins, and then use those e-coins to charge your electric car.
This uses Ethereum so when they eventually move to proof-of-stake I'll mostly retract my scorn, but for now I stand by this being counterproductive and dumb.
"Put a few tons of carbon in the air pointlessly calculating hashes to mine coins"
It's not pointless. Have you read the arguments in http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/ ? It's not Ethereum-specific but the same logic applies. I feel I post that link too frequently, but people get too often mentally blocked on one technical detail (hashing) and fail to think about the big picture (renewables, jobs created, real utility of cryptos, etc). If cars with internal combustion engines were introduced today, would HNers complain its a dumb tech because it wastes 97% of the fuel's energy?[1]
[1] 90% wasted moving 1.5 tons of metal and only 150 kg of useful cargo/passengers, and remaining 7% wasted mostly as heat/friction.
I'd like to ask more about Proof of Stake's flaws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism
These problems seem fairly significant and unresolved. Thoughts?
Statistical simulations have shown that simultaneous forging on several chains is possible, even profitable. But Proof of Stake advocates believe most described attack scenarios are impossible or so unpredictable that they are only theoretical.
Any system that will eventually attain a $1T market cap probably can't have theoretical issues like this.
AFAIK Ethereum plans to resolve this "nothing at stake" issue by using security deposits. If someone submits a proof that a miner was staking on multiple chains, the miner loses their security deposit.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
That said, this all looks hard to get right...
> Venture capitalists invested more than $1 billion into at least 729 Bitcoin companies which created thousands of jobs.
... for return to date of zero. This is literally broken-windows economics.
Returns are irrelevant in the context of this argument. Jobs that provide real utility (not "breaking windows and repairing them") were created, and that's enough to justify the energy spent mining. Furthermore, an average investment takes years to generate returns. It's too early to call such investments worthless.
Thanks for writing this. I've been looking for a decent article to send people who argue that mining is a waste of energy, and this is that.
Measuring the actual carbon produced by butcoin mining is hard, miners inevitably co-located with cheap sources of power where renewable power is oversupplied.
Compare that to say air travel
It's like the exact opposite of a carbon credit!
Bank of America also puts carbon in the air in order to make your debit card work. Those offices cost a lot of money, resources, and carbon in order to keep the lights on and make those databases work.
How are crypto-currencies any different than that?
This conversation has been done a million times, and I don't feel like going through the motions again when it's so easy to look up.
The fact is it is different
(1) fundamentally, because BoA would use 0 electricity if it could, while it will ALWAYS be worthwhile to spend a certain fraction of Bitcoin's transaction volume on electricity in order to capture transaction fees, and that will ALWAYS involve pointless hashes. GPU /ASIC efficiency gains will only drive more miners to mine.
(2) obviously, just look at the comment chains on previous posts for numbers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751971); bitcoin burns a stupid amount of electricity to process a minute fraction of BoA's volume
Crypto currencies would absolutely use zero electricity if they could too.
There are efforts RIGHT NOW to solve this problem. So just like how BOA wastes electricity right now, and is trying to reduce its electricity use, so too are cryptocurrencies.
For example, one way to do it is to power the blockchain via "wasted" electricity from other sources, that was going to do nothing anyway. For example, a heater literally sends electricity through wires, and "wastes" that energy to create heat. One could imagine a heater that uses the electricity/heat from mining for "free".
Or even at a more basic level, imagine a electric dam, that produces so much power during certain times in the day, that it has to sell it for negative prices on the market. Thats Free energy right there!
Another example is Proof of Space algorithms. The way it works is instead of using GPU heavy hashing algorithms, you use "Space" intensive hashing algorithms.
The reason why you do this is because there is a TON of extra hard disk space that is just lying around doing nothing. We could take that extra space for "free" and use it to secure a blockchain (while allowing the user to reclaim the space at any time with no effort), and it would cost very little electricity.
> For example, a heater literally sends electricity through wires, and "wastes" that energy to create heat. One could imagine a heater that uses the electricity/heat from mining for "free".
Right, but once people do that, mining becomes more efficient. If mining becomes more efficient, more people start mining, then the difficulty adjusts, and then you're back at the beginning.
It's not a bad thing: efficiency gains are good. But they don't reduce the total energy expenditure, because they incentivise increased mining.
No, mining does not become more efficient. It make it unprofitable for people to mine bitcoin, because they are competing with people who are using free electricity.
The only people who would be mining are the ones who are spending 0$ on electricity, because the electricity would otherwise be wasted.
By heater, I meant literally a heater in someone's house.
The idea is that the only electricity that would be spent on the blockchain is electricity that was going to be sent down the drain anyway.
I meant "mining becomes more efficient" in the sense that using it as a heater is an efficiency gain over not using it as a heater. I didn't mean to imply that legacy non-heater miners also become more efficient.
Intuitively, you're right. However, I read an article (can't find it now, still looking) that presented a convincing case that if there is $X up for grabs for doing a certain amount of work (mining), then the amount of work that is done increases until $X is being spent on the work. So if you're getting heating out of it as well, X increases, but that just means more mining is done until it's no longer marginally profitable.
But intuitively you're right. So I don't quite know where the mistake lies.
> It's not a bad thing: efficiency gains are good. But they don't reduce the total energy expenditure, because they incentivise increased mining.
I think it's a stretch to say the two are perfectly linked.
If you dropped someone's electricity price in half, would they buy twice the equipment to mine? If you dropped it to 1%, would they buy 100x as much equipment?
That's not exactly the question. It's more like if you dropped the price of electricity to 1% would 100x as many people participate. The answer to that is generally yes.
Would they? There are still significant fixed costs for a risky reward. A quick way of looking at the extreme end is: does everyone with free electricity do it?
Crypto currencies will never be as energy efficient as a traditional financial network with trusted players because of the need to calculate pointless hashes (or other variants of proof of work) in order to resolve trust and consensus issues.
For BoA (or other financial institutions), simply sending a message through the trusted financial network saying "I pay you $5" is sufficient. Whereas for BitCoin (or other crypt currencies), a difficult hash has to be calculated that takes many orders of magnitude more energy.
Bank of America processes orders of magnitude more transactions per ton of CO2 emissions.
LOL, that's an interesting new metric for financial transactions - I like it! I sure hope Vitalik et. al. can pull off Casper as advertised.
But why is there a blockchain?
Why not just charge people?
Crytocurrencies both have large advantages AND disadvantages.
The advantage is that it is a decentralized, censorship resist currency. But if you don't care about the decentralized part of it, then there is no point. Just use a credit card.
Because it seems these days projects tend to attract funds just because of mentioning the word 'blockchain'.
I need to pitch to YC my idea of a blockchain-enabled, cloud-hosted deep-learning platform based on TensorFlow.
/probably needs more buzzwords //probably has been done ///probably already funded by YC...meh
It doesn't use a blockchain, the headline is misleading.
It's just car charging where you pay using Ethereum.
And the credit card charges. I am sure people driving uber would not mind keeping the 3% to themselves.
Are we still pretending transactions are free and instant like crypto enthusiasts used to claim 2-3 years ago?
Outside of the mess that is Bitcoin they are much cheaper than what credit/debit cards charge. More advanced coins like Ethereum take under a minute for an appropriate number of confirmations.
OT, can anyone explain this idiom to me?
> The peer-to-peer concept relies on blockchain, one of today's hottest trends [...]
Note the missing article. Not "relies on the blockchain" or "relies on a blockchain" but "relies on blockchain" as if that were some kind of new elemental resource like water or electricity.
I've noticed that expression in quite a few articles. DOes anyone know where it comes from?
It's the 100% certain tell of a bad article. Worse if they capitalise it.
That was my suspicion. Reminds me of "one internet please"...
Christ. This is one of those titles I read and go "am I the crazy one or are they? .....ok, it's them."
https://blog.slock.it/share-charge-smart-contracts-the-techn... has some details on how Share&Charge uses Ethereum blockchain as a transaction layer
Brought to you by Slock.it, the company that built the DAO, what could possibly go wrong.
"If bitcoin is digital gold then Ethereum is digital oil" analogy taken too seriously.