Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable.
Reusing the land of all gas stations for other things will be a good benefit of all this. Except for San Francisco, where they all will be preserved as historical landmarks.
> Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable.
...and the infrastructure to distribute the electricity.
Back of the napkin math with the mall of America: 5.6 million sq ft at ~14kWh/sq ft per year (rough average estimate of all retail buildings) [1] equates to about 78.4 million kWh/year or 784,000 100kWh Model S's charged to full or 7.84 million charged 10% assuming 100% efficiency. The Mall of America has about 40 million annual visitors so about a fifth would be able to charge their batteries 10% if the Mall doubled its (hypothetical) capacity, which would likely require at least some infrastructure upgrades since we're talking about ~10 MW of extra power - and that's averaged out 24/7/365, in actuality it'll be a much higher peak load since the mall isn't 24/7.
I'm not an expert but I doubt the property developer and power companies overbuilt by that much.
A rollout could be smaller in scope yet be useful. Most parking lots have at least one street light... start by connecting the existing grid/infrastructure that already is there powering the streetlight, upgrading if necessary, to a handful of nearby parking spots. Go from there.
Take a step back and think about the ridiculous infrastructure build to support gas powered cars. Imagine a time before gas stations; someone doing a back of the napkin math about a future of cars would have also been met with disbelief - developers will have to invest millions/billions of dollars and build hundreds of thousand of stores across the entire country to sell gas? And how will those stores get the gas to sell? Truck it in?? That's just ridiculous.
Every parking space doesn't need to have the capacity to fill up a Model S from 1% to 100% during a lunch break.
What us civilized people here in the EU do, is we have 11-22kW charging points in pretty much all malls and supermarkets. You drive there, plug in your car, swipe the RFID and go shopping. You come back and your car has charged a bit.
No, it's not at a 100%, but it still has more charge than it did when you came in.
And again, load-balancing electricity is REALLY old tech. It's completely trivial to balance the load among the whole field during Christmas shopping season with every charger occupied so that everyone gets some charge, but the transformers don't explode.
There will be gas stations for generations to come. If California can meet its sales ban for new ICE cars in 2035, which is a tall order, ICE cars will still be on the road. Contributing to this trend will be people keeping their cars for years; used cars which represent two thirds of car sales; and cars driven into California from other states. As an example, I have a 2007 Honda and it will be on the road until it falls apart or I die.
California successfully forced me to sell my 80’s sports car out of state by constantly tightening smog requirements to the point where they were far above what the car ever had to meet and banning non-CARB stamped aftermarket parts. I have no doubt that they would be able to squeeze perfectly working ICE cars out of the state with draconian rules.
There are two emission standards for California, state and federal. If the car was sold in a state that follows federal and it meets the emission standard for the model year, it can be registered in California. The state doesn't change smog requirements; older cars remain at their original specification.
Reusing the land of all gas stations for other things will be a good benefit of all this. Except for San Francisco, where they all will be preserved as historical landmarks.