It's very useful for big brother Zuckerberg though.

Some people are working as hard as they can to increase it though.

I'm sure there's enough dermatologists and pharmaceutical engineers to give their informed opinion on such a topic, instead of having economists speaking as everythingologists on every damn subject…

(I know why they do that, the author is merely a polical activist, but I wish editors would just close the door to such pieces).

The thing is: with 5min charging, it reduces the amount of situations where there's a queue at all.

> That way you can churn through the peak with N charges (say 07-09)

Again, 9 batteries is just an hour worth of energy if car are lining up. The goal of such battery is just to smooth the demand spikes, not to get though peak hour.

> The balance is to have N charges (say 3, 5 or 7) in the battery.

I suspect this will depend a lot on the expected usage of the charging station (an maybe adapted later on if the usage doesn't match their expectations), as I said above it's going to be a full time job.

Directional anti-tank mines are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine

But it's not a realistic assumption, at the very least the driver has to park, get out of their car, plug the car, spend some time on the payment interface, then unplug the car and leave.

So even in the maximum theoretical scenario where drivers are lining up at the charging station, your charger isn't going above 80% utilization. Using a single car battery, you can save 20% in terms of connection to the grid (you “just” need a 800kW connection instead of a 1MW one), and you aren't nearly as much of a nuisance to the grid as if you were having constant ups and down of 1MW.

In practice there will a be a trade off between how much you save in connection infrastructure to the grid and how much you spend on batteries, and this calculation will depends a lot on the usage pattern.

Setting the actual parameters for such systems is an engineering job, I just wanted to illustrate that the goal isn't going to have the charging station off the grid during peak hours thanks to the batteries, and more about managing the burden you put on the grid.

I don't think that's what they'll do. Charging off peak means being able to store the entirety of the energy demand for the power station in a battery, which is going to be very expensive (assuming 20 cars charge during peak hours every day, that'd mean having to swallow the cost of 20 cars worth of battery per charging station. Good luck getting a good ROI with that).

Instead I think they'll just use the battery so that they never drain the full power of a charge when a car is charging. Drawing a megawatt of current 5% of the time is putting lots of pressure on the local grid, and it can be mitigated by having a battery with the capacity of a car battery that you charge slowly during the whole day (including during peak hour) and discharge fast when a car is charging (for instance, if in average you have 2 cars charging for 5 minutes every hour, you can draw 166kW continuously instead of having bursts of 1MW consumption).

(The only person I know that still used «briques» in these decades were my grand parents born in the 1920th)

This. In particular the chemical/pharmaceutical industry (which is still a major Swiss industry today) got bootstrapped in great part by French and German chemists moving to Switzerland where they could make chemicals that was patented elsewhere but not in Switzerland due to looser industrial property laws at the time.

It's literally Noah Smith, what did you expect?

So much misconception in such a short sentence…

First of all France only had an “Emperor” for a few decades (10 years for Napoléon 1er, 17 for Napoléon III).

Then, Paris wasn't even the King's main residence for a good part of French Monarchy (the Loire valley (hence the list of famous castles here) and Versailles both aren't Paris).

Centralization around Paris built up progressively, but it's really the French revolution (which came with the suppression of the old regional Parliaments) which made modern France the way it is. And the US is the only place where you can claim that 200 years of history counts as “always”.

As I said in a comment sibling to yours, this has nothing to do with political organization, it's a consequence of demography: French people just stopped having babies one century before other European countries (and two centuries before the rest of the world).

France used to be “the China of Europe” (which is why we kept being at war with the whole continent at once). Had France followed their neighbors' demographic, it would be home to more than 200 million people today.

The demographic collapse of France in the 19th century, while Germany kept growing, alone explains the French defeat in 1870 (and then the two world wars).

More data on that piece of history, and a hypothesis to explain it, here: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust/