One of the sillier commercials for a cell phone I have seen in recent memory is some guy shaking his head in sadness that his phone is out of battery and a kindly person places her phone on his to give him a boost. They were able to use the Qi wireless charging capability to share energy with each other.

This looked like a solution without a problem. If you are going to be that despondent without your phone, you bring one of those little charging packs, you bring a power cord, you are not shaking your head like you unwittingly got placed into an episode of "Alone" and have been dropped into Alaska with nothing but a neck gaiter and a frying pan. You are prepared.

Cars are a different matter. If you know someone who owns an electric car, and you do if you have enough money to run in that social circle, you know they started off unable to stop talking about it - Tesla owners are the vegans of the automobile community that way - but then adjust their lives to their cars. They have to plan any trip around the car. That is the opposite of the freedom that automobiles brought. If "range anxiety" is not already in the works for DSM-6, it will be.

That may improve using the electrical equivalent of Napster - peer to peer charging.  Scholars used the open-source Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) to compares cars that only recharged at limited electric stations versus peer-to-peer charging. The result was positive, especially when coupled with multi-level batteries. The authors use the example of cache memory and DDRAM in a PC, and that is a good analogy. The fast batteries would be used for mobile charging while the slower, higher capacity batteries would be used when plugged in.


(a) P2C2 enabled charge sharing among BEVs and MoCS-based charge distribution for charging on-the-go. (b) A MoCS leader escorting/recharging a BEV platoon. Credit: Chackraborty et al.

It sounds great but it has limitations. If I am seeing every solar customer allowed to sell electricity back to a utility at full price and pass the cost along to poor people, and every automobile CEO get subsidies to make electric cars, and every panel company get paid to sell panels, why would I create a mobile charging station using my investor money? The downside to government subsidy and mandate fetishes is that politicians claim the miracle of capitalism will take over - and it never does.

Without more government involvement, it relies on people opting into a network system that can detect how much charge you have and how much charge someone else has and take yours. If you used a charging station at your house you know how expensive and time-consuming it is. Do you want to reward someone who was in a hurry - and nearly all of the time people who are just disorganized end up running off in a rush - and pay a higher utility bill? The solution is a bidding system for people with excess charge. Want the juice? Pay for it. As long as a state like California doesn't do to electric vehicle charging what they did to Uber and regulate it into oblivion, everyone wins.