TonyWilliams said:
There really is no reason that you can't make it to Santa Ysabel from the coast, but the extremes of Oceanside and south of downtown might need a little charging enroute.
I'd love to meet there and have a real show of support for Don's Market. But let's take a careful look at feasibility. I know there's not much I can teach about charging logistics to the guy who wrote the range chart and drove to Canada, but here goes...
First there's DC QC availability. Sure the meet is 5 weeks away and the charger is expected to open in 2-3 weeks. But then San Diego's first QC has been expected to open in 2-3 weeks continuously for over a year now. Consider the possibility that in October 2013 we will still be expecting the first QC to open in another 2-3 weeks. There's also the possibility that it will open on schedule but the famous Blink firmware will break; and the possibility that the day before the meeting someone will drive up there and accidentally break the locking handle on the fragile Yazaki connector.
Next there's charging requirements. From the coast (I-5 & Hwy-56) to Don's Market is about 50 miles. At 60 mph that's 14.8 kWh. Add 3.8 kWh for ups and downs (mostly ups) and it's 17.6 kWh. If a full battery is 20.7 kWh and VLBW is 3.5 kWh that means 17.2 kWh which is too little for someone who's faint hearted or who thinks avoiding VLBW driving might help prevent premature battery degradation. Going home at 60 mph would take 10.8 kWh. If, given traffic conditions on that day, it felt safe to drive at 50 mph the trip would be easy: 15.6 kWh going and 8.9 kWh returning.
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Some people no doubt will want to drive on up to Julian after the meeting, and thus will need more charge. But then they'll be coming back down through Santa Ysabel late in the day after the Leaf crowd has dispersed so it should be easy to pick up a QC charge. And two partial QC charges with cooling time in between is probably better for the battery than a single full QC charge.
Figure that each car at the meeting will arrive around VLBW and will need about 10 kWh for the return trip. That's about 3 hours on an L2. From MNL reports I estimate a Chademo QC can deliver 10 kWh in 15 minutes, so the QC could refill 4 cars per hour. With the meeting scheduled for 10am - 1pm figure charging will be done 9am - 2pm. In 5 hours the QC could refill 20 cars, and 6 L2 stations could refill 10 cars. That's in ideal circumstances, probably with one or more people organizing the charging queue, and sharing the burden of that job so nobody should have to miss the whole meeting. One of the L2's might be broken, or it might be ICEd, or it might be posted for disabled access only and inaccessible to most of us. How many cars do we usually get at meetings? More than 30 I think. And how many do we expect at this meeting?
Next we need to check whether our show of support for Don's Market might inadvertently cause them headaches with demand charges. They might expect their demand charges will be okay added onto their existing load, figuring that occasionally the QC will draw 50 kW plus one or two of the L2's running at 3.8 kW, totaling 58 kW. But instead their QC will draw 50 kW continuously at the same time that each of their three L2's will draw 7.6 kW, totaling 73 kW. It probably won't be a problem, but I wouldn't want our gratitude to be the thing that makes Don's Market pull the plug on San Diego's only QC.
There are a lot of contingencies. I'd be willing to participate in, or even to organize, a phone tree (and/or email/SMS bulletin) to notify people of a warning, change of venue, or cancellation. E.g., if we learned at the last minute that the QC was down, or one of the L2 was down, or if we only had one L2 splitter instead of three. Or will we count on MNL being up and look for a confirmation posting Saturday morning that everything is a Go before setting out?
Might be able to use a Blink at CCSE but it would have to be available and someone would have to loan me their card (assuming they're all on accounts now...I can't link my card until my current agreement expires).
