You know, I have a smartphone that recharges in just a few minutes. I have a charger in my office so I can charge my phone if there ever comes a time that I would need to charge during the day. I use my phone a lot for business as well as for pleasure, so it makes sense that I have a charger available during the day just in case my battery ever runs out. I like the convenience of charging my phone late at night at home when I am ready for night-night. The next morning it is ready for me with a full charge.
There have been days at work where I have used my phone almost all day long. It's just the nature of my work. Some days I will use my phone a lot and others hardly at all. I remember once having my battery die on me. I used my phone so much that it ran out of juice. I remember parking the phone on the charger and going to get something to eat. By the time I got back, it was ready to go again. I think about that day often. What an improvement from the first battery powered cell phones. I can't imagine what I would have done if I would have had to wait 8 hours or more to get back to using my phone, like the old days. It would have really hurt my business.
You know, if the newer fast charging batteries hadn't come out, I would have never switched from my gasoline powered phone. You see with my gasoline powered phone, I didn't have the option of filling her up at home. It might have been an inconvenience to go to the gas station, but it was near my work. Sure, I had to pay more for gasoline than for electricity, but that was the price you paid for being able to fill it up whenever you needed to. If I needed to use my phone a lot, I could always quickly drive to that nearby gas station, fill her up, and I was back in business. Yes, it was noisy, smelly, needed tune-ups, lube jobs and didn't last as long as my phone does now, but it was always available when I needed to use it. There was no 8 hour wait time, and the heavy lead acid batteries of my old Motorola brick phone only lasted a few years or so.
Then came the fast charging electric powered smartphones with advanced battery technology. It's the peace of mind that fast charging delivers to a buyer like me that helped me make the switch. Come to think of it this is the same story with my electric vehicle, or EV like I like to call it.
Fast charging gives EV purchasers the peace of mind that if they by chance go too far or too hard or too fast and use up most of their battery’s charge, they can always get to a quick charge "station" and get back on the road. It's not that they would ever need it. They can charge at night from home. It's just important that it is available. Fast charging is a selling point that will help EVs compete with gasoline automobiles on a one to one basis.
As afraid as I am of adding to peak electric demand on the grid, petroleum is our biggest polluter today and has to be dealt with.
LET’S GET THE BIGGEST POLLUTER OFF THE ROAD. Then we can collectively work on closing all the coal, natural gas and biomass power plants by replacing them with clean generated power such as, wind, solar, geothermal, and more. We can now use batteries to iron out their on and off again nature, on when the sun shines and wind blows, and off at night or when there is no wind. Also, distributed energy is going to be the future, just you wait and see. As you well know, WE ARE BATHED IN ENERGY EVERY DAY! Energy is all around us always. We just need to be smart about capturing it for our personal use. We don’t need huge power utilities to make and control the energy we need and use.