Will the future of transportation be electric?

Electric car charging networks are complex

Question: Will the future of transportation be electric?
Position‹2 of 3›: Yes, the future is electric but limited
Argument: Electric car charging networks are complex

Although electric cars will be common in urban environments, it will be inconvenient to use them in rural areas, because they will lack a network of chargers.

The argument

Electric vehicles will likely play an increasingly important role in urban environments where large quantities of electricity are readily available. However, installing charging stations outside of cities and in more rural environments is challenging, and would require major infrastructure changes. Converting gas stations to charging stations would require changes in how electricity is distributed. Suddenly, gas stations would require far more power than they previously did. The same problem exists when considering installing charging stations in rural towns. A location would suddenly need more power, but there would be no infrastructure to accommodate that change in demand. Because of the challenges with installing charging stations outside of cities, it is unlikely electric vehicles will play a major role outside of urban environments.

Premises

[P1]Electric vehicles work best in urban environments where large quantities of electricity are already readily available. [P2] Building charging networks outside cities is hard: converting gas stations or adding rural stations would demand far more electrical power than existing infrastructure can supply, requiring major and costly upgrades. [C] Therefore the future is electric but limited — largely to urban environments where the grid can support it.

Counter-arguments

Infrastructure changes will be required to support the shift to electric vehicles, but many governments have committed to supporting cleaner forms of transportation. While there may be challenges, humans alter and create infrastructure constantly, and expanding car charging networks would just be another change.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Where electric vehicles work best today is a fact about the present network rather than about the technology. Urban driving suits shorter ranges and frequent stops, but the constraint named — available electricity — is not distinctively urban, since rural areas have transmission and increasingly generation of their own. The premise does not show that supply, rather than the placement of chargers, is the binding limit. [Rejecting P2] The comparison is with the wrong thing. A rural charging point need not replicate a petrol station's throughput, because most charging happens overnight where a vehicle is parked — easier at rural properties than in cities of flats. The demanding case is the motorway rapid charger, which is a specific and locatable upgrade rather than a general rewiring, and grids are built out incrementally as demand appears, which is how they absorbed earlier step-changes in domestic load. [Rejecting C] The conclusion converts a transitional cost into a permanent ceiling. That infrastructure is expensive and slow is an argument about the pace of adoption, not about where it must stop, and the premises supply nothing that would hold the boundary in place once the spending is made.