Posted on 06/12/2024 12:12:43 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Just before 2 a.m. on a chilly April night in Seattle, a Chevrolet Silverado pickup stopped at an electric vehicle charging station on the edge of a shopping center parking lot.
Two men, one with a light strapped to his head, got out. A security camera recorded them pulling out bolt cutters. One man snipped several charging cables; the other loaded them into the truck. In under 2½ minutes, they were gone.
The scene that night has become part of a troubling pattern across the country: Thieves have been targeting EV charging stations, intent on stealing the cables, which contain copper wiring. The price of copper is near a record high on global markets, which means criminals stand to collect rising sums of cash from selling the material.
The stolen cables often disable entire stations, forcing EV owners on the road to search desperately for a working charger. For the owners, the predicament can be exasperating and stressful.
Broken-down chargers have emerged as the latest obstacle for U.S. automakers in their strenuous effort to convert more Americans to EVs despite widespread public anxiety about a scarcity of charging stations. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they believe EVs take too long to charge or don’t know of any charging stations nearby. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
EVs should only be allowed on golf courses. That would solve a lot of problems. Currently, anyone who purchases an EV should be required to have a mental exam.
I have been to a scrap yard in Idaho that had a vacuum machine that took apart catalytic convertors.
It cut them apart. Separated the components and vacuumed up the dust. It deposited the rare earth elements into bags inside 55 gallon drums.
I asked the value of a full barrel. He stated around $12,000.
I looked around the warehouse we were in. He said there was 24/7 human monitored CC cameras watching every inch of the building.
He also has a machine that strips the casings off of Romex wire. It then cuts them up into little pieces and blows them into bins. They get a couple maxi truck loads a month of this scrap copper. Each truck has 64000 lbs of copper on it. Do the math.
Their most recent addition is recycling tires. Apparently, there is demand for the shredded tires after the steel belts are removed. It is added to asphalt and there are companies that making bricks and rubber matting out of it.
My company buys from one called Rubberific. Lowes sells some of their products.
One well run and staffed multi-pump gas station can serve thousands of cars a day. The best of charging stations can only serve a tiny fraction of that.
Don't know; have not been in one since the males-in-the-ladies-room fiasco years ago.
How can you “handle a worst-case hurricane”? There is no predicting wind speeds of the worst possible hurricane, not even by those of Hurricane Patricia (215 mph).
Only reason I saw them is that I was going to another store in the same shopping plaza. The chargers were well away from the store but they had big Target signs on them.
Can anybody imagine the size of the generators needed to provide emergency power for these changing stations? Must have to be the size of a large house. Many gas stations in the Charleston, SC area have emergency generators thanks to Hurricane Hugo. You can see the generators if you look hard enough.
I’ve heard that as of late, there’s been a lot of recovery of coinage from landfills. Lots of pennies but probably many fewer quarters. An 8 oz. measuring cup full of pennies is a lot heavier than half a pound!
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