Austria Converts Phone Booths To EV Chargers 161
separsons writes "Telekom Austria, a telecommunications company, aims to convert obsolete public phone booths into electric vehicle recharging stations. The company unveiled its first station yesterday in Vienna and hopes to create 29 more stations by the end of the year. The stations may not be super popular now, but they should be soon; Austria's motor vehicle association says the country will likely have 405,000 electric vehicles on the road by the year 2020."
One question (Score:2, Insightful)
What's a phone booth?
Re:why, at that rate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, at that rate, they'll be able to simultaneously recharge 0.06% of the electric cars in the country!
And with the usual 30 milliamp analog phone line current, it will only take about a dozen years to recharge each car.
Phone booths in my country have lights for nighttime use so I suppose they have mains supply as well.
Re:bikes, not cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well the title does say Electric Vehicle Chargers
electric device outlets please (Score:1, Insightful)
Outlets to recharge a laptop or cell phone would be great too. Sometimes phone calls are *long*.
"Yes honey, I'm at the beach. Miss you!"
I imagine near the phone booth you could string out some cable to have outlets near park benches, and some wifi in the area would be nice. :)
*waves crashing*
Re:why, at that rate... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Terrible idea. (Score:1, Insightful)
Only if Austria has phone booths in the Zoo enclosures
Re:Something is wrong here... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a customer of Telekom Austria, I can assure you that nothing about that company is quick and efficient. They're the former state-run monopoly.
People love to say this scornfully, but they seem not to realise that if "Telekom $SOME_COUNTRY" _wasn't_ a "former state-run monopoly" then if they didn't live within a hundred metres of their nearest neighbour they wouldn't even _have_ a phone service, and the mere idea of a practically free phone standing on the street would be absolutely laughable.
Re:Something is wrong here... (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but the deduction "formerly state-run" -> "extremely inefficient" shouldn't be as unfailing as it is.
Though it has become better, Telekom Austria no longer sends three technicians to install a cable (two watching, one working).
Re:Department of Redundancy Department (Score:2, Insightful)
This is Slashdot. Some people would make a serious complaint if that was left out.
Re:why, at that rate... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I can do arithmetic too. 15 minutes charging a day * 405,000 vehicles = 101250 hours of charging a day, or 4218 charging stations. Except that number is a complete fantasy: the usage won't be spread neatly over 24 hours. There will be sharp peaks morning, mid-day and afternoon, plus concentrated demand in areas with a lot of rich ecoloons who think electricity is "clean" because the gas, oil and coal plants making it are located out in the sticks.
Even with the best charge rates and distance-per-charge figures, we're looking at needing ten times as many EV charging stations as we currently have fossil fuel stations.
About emissions displacement (Score:4, Insightful)
areas with a lot of rich ecoloons who think electricity is "clean" because the gas, oil and coal plants making it are located out in the sticks.
The advantage of such "emissions displacement" is that it's a lot easier to clean the emissions from one big stationary engine than thousands of mobile engines.
Ahnold (Score:3, Insightful)