A New Way of Assessing SpC Density & Determining Needed Build-out
No April Fool's here. The only thing foolish is my thinking I could learn a non-Excel spreadsheet's quirks on an otherwise nice sunny day.
Preamble: Most comments along the lines of "Here is Why Tesla Needs Concentrate SpC Construction in (_____
fill in the blank____), where, curiously enough, that blank almost invariably happens to be the poster's locale. Someone in SoCal may argue that SpC crowding demonstrates the need for more chargers to accommodate existing vehicles. Someone in Alaska, usually me, may argue that one reason we have so few Teslas is because the company hasn't given us
any love....one can't even get
to...or
out of... Alaska in any reasonable fashion.
This work ===>confined solely to the US: sorry, RestOfWorld!<=== approaches the exercise differently. In the accompanying spreadsheet, I have provided on a state-by-state basis
- the number of non-local miles of roadways
- the number of vehicle-miles traveled annually
- the number of vehicle-miles traveled per capita
and then applied the density of Superchargers in each state against those data. Finally, I compared each state's numbers against the benchmark of California.
- All data is from USDOT 2013 information
- I excised all roads defined by DOT as "local non-arterial" to best approximate longer-distance travel. There is no known way, however, to similarly delete such miles traveled. I believe this to be immaterial when making a state-to-state comparison.
- SpC numbers are from supercharge.info, and the numbers given agglomerate all open, under construction and permitted sites as of 1 April 2017 as of this post's creation. Data may be updated as future SpCs open.
- I tried to work in the V-MT per cap information, but somewhere bogged down and the results became non-sensical, so I've omitted showing them
In the accompanying spreadsheet, California's data is emboldened and partially shaded. Where another state's data approaches or exceeds California's - at spreadsheet's creation, that limit is at 80% - those figures also are shaded.
Comments welcome. Now I need to go out and do some real work. And all I've been able to do is embed a snapshot - don't see how to upload the spreadsheet itself. Makes for
small print!