I was talking with my car dealer as I wanted to buy an electric car. He was using the car for his own usage to get a good idea. The main thing that came out is that most available charging stations are 22kW max and very often they are shared using "smart charge", which basically means a lower duty cycle (/N). In practice it means it requires about 7 hours to charge the 50kW/h battery.
After this discussion, I asked my utility company, and it would cost around $20k to install a 22kW charging station in my home. And what the person told me over the phone was basically "the grid is not ready, we would need to upgrade hundred of meters of cable".
This is in Europe (Switzerland), but it shows how impractical super fast charging is with the current state of the grid and infrastructure (we can't start a turbine when you plug your car). I don't know if trying to make it work is possible. The current grid was built over decades. To me it seems way easier to use other form of energy transfer (hydrogen refill or battery swap).
Edit:
I'm at the limit of the current I can draw from the utility line (40A for my house) as I have a geothermal pump that can use up to 25A when running. Even if I put a smaller charging station, the utility will have to change my introduction box, and in all cases it is quite expensive. I asked for 22kW because we live in a remote location, and while not strictly necessary, it might become so in the future, for example if we have visitors with 3 cars, they might need recharge.
I used to work for Reykjavik Energy as a junior analyst about 12 years ago. One of my tasks was using their geo database to pull out cable and transformer data for every neighbourhood and use it to generate load models (using Siemens PSS mostly).
We knew the high voltage system (100kv+) was fine as there are quite a few big power hungry users on the network. We focused our research on the "neighbourhood transformers" - These are the transformers that take you from 11kv to 400v (3 phase, of which one leg is connected to a consumer fuseboard). They're generally sized so that each transformer can service a small neighborhood, but power can be routed through less efficient ways in case they break. We combined all the electrical data with traffic data to estimate when people finish work and would likely be plugging their cars in at home.
The conclusion we came to was that if only 15 percent of homes wanted fast charge ability (which at the time was a lot less than what testa offers today) the majority of the city's transformers would be over their current limit.
Iceland has a pretty decent and modern power infrastructure so this was a bit of a shock to everyone. I think my research was even presented to parliament :)
It seems more like convenience to me as long as you can charge overnight and have a high enough range per charge. There could be households with complex lifestyles that share one car though.
I would still worry about this indicator for capacity though, if 100% of people were heavily overlapping on 8 hour of charging at night that seems like hours of the same draw as 15% of people who all fast charge at the same time for some reason. Whole neighborhoods might be 100% electric within a couple years of no longer selling new ICE vehicles.
Happy to see that someone actually did make some accurate calculations and found out with actual data that - even in a country where the main distribution lines are just fine and the "local" transformers and lines are modern/recent - the "last km" is/will be an issue.
Now imagine what would be the results of similar analysis in European cities (relatively densely inhabited, with an aged/aging infrastructure, a number of limitations for new lines and what not).
I mean, if you live in a solo or bifamily (or even very small condo's) house somewhere outside the city, or in a village, there will probably be less issues with upgrading the lines and transformers (at a cost), but for medium or large condo's in or near the city centre it will be impossible to provide enough power even for 7kW chargers when there will be many of them.
AFAIK here (Italy) a typical "local" transformer 20,000 to 380 V or 10,000 to 380V, it depends on the specific areas, is usually within the 300/400 kW range and serves 50-100 houses/apartments, each one having 3-4.5-6 kW contracts, and it is already near 100% use.
When/if each house (or anyway a recharge column for 1 car each) will want (or need) some 7 kW available, even if only at night, the amount of 380V electricity will be at the very least twice the current one.
Very likely the current infrastructure can bear an increase of 5-10%, maybe 15%, and as said this with only "slow" chargers.
Ok, so there's a key point here, and that's that fast charging is not meant for the home!
You can fully charge an EV overnight on a 7KW charger. You don't need a fast charger at home.
The other thing is that home chargers are AC and the car converts the current. This means that there's a cap to how much power you can give it. For example, my car can only accept 11KW and that's pretty typical. So 22KW chargers are a waste at home today.
Maybe you'd need a fast charger at home if you never sleep. But the majority of people spend at least 7 hours at home. You'll always wake up to a fully charged car. Why do you need anything else?
Hell I park my car in an underground parking garage, and it's been a whole discussion about who wants to and how they want to install 7kW/11/kW chargers. In the meantime I just charge it on the wall plug now and then. Yeah sometimes my battery is not fully charged, but I hardly ever drive 450km in one go anyway.
A few years ago one of my neighbours asked for a socket in the underground car park.
I assume they paid the full cost themselves, although it probably wasn't that much -- the electrical supply to the building including the meters for each apartment are just behind his parking space. They installed a normal 16A 400V 3P+E plug (the big red one), which is an easy 11kW. There isn't any sort of 'car charger' on the wall, just this socket.
It's not an arrogant statement. A lot of people don't understand how electric cars work.
It's one of the biggest things holding them back. I still hear people saying "I don't want to spend 30 minutes recharging every week" when you don't need to. You can plug in a car overnight. But people struggle to understand that you can wake up every day with a "full tank" which is something a fossil fuel vehicle can't do. It requires thinking about your usage of a vehicle differently.
>Because he wants it. The same reason I have everything I listed.
I ask the question because, again, people don't understand how electric cars work. A lot of people think a 22KW charger at home will be like a 22KW DC charger.
It's an attempt to gauge the actual reasoning behind wanting it. If his reasoning is to be future proof, then that's fine, it's perfectly reasonable to want that. But if his reasoning is to charge at 22KW then it's just a misunderstanding and something we can help him understand.
Don't assume everyone asking questions is being naive or dismissive.
I don't think it's that people don't understand how electric cars work, because I don't think that gives people enough credit. I think it's more that BEV advocates misunderstand how other people buy vehicles, or rather, they might have different purchasing habits because they skew wealthy.
I don't buy a vehicle for the average use case -- I buy it for the edge cases. When I need to be able to move stuff or tow a trailer, I can. If I needed to cross the country tonight because of a family emergency, I could. I think this is a fairly common mindset for most people, because after a house, a car is the most expensive thing we'll ever own. The cost and continued upkeep mandates that a vehicle has utility beyond what a person needs on average.
You're right that most people don't need a 22kW charger for their car, and they can wake up with a full tank every morning, but most people are probably also averse to the idea that their car has a downtime of several hours when they might really need it. You aren't just paying for the privilege of going from A to B, because if that's all it were, you could just call a cab -- part of owning and paying the upkeep for a car is that you're able to go right now when you need to.
In all those use cases though you are anywhere but your home. So you would be using fast chargers provided in the same way gas stations are.
The situation you're describing is "I drive enough to drain my car completely, then take it home to recharge it, then immediately plan to do that again within 30 minutes of going home, and will never stop at a fast charger on that journey which can be completed within the 450km range of my battery".
It's conceivable, but so convoluted that it would never happen.
The situation I'm describing is any trip for which the potential of waiting an hour (or more, in many cases) at a fast charger is problematic. My car can be nearly empty in my driveway, and it costs me two minutes to fill it up. This means that if I needed to sprint to the state border before it closed (a real-life scenario for several of my coworkers during COVID), I could. Ditto for any other situation where you might be time pressed. A BEV is charged every time you take it out, but it also needs to be, because charging isn't a two minute thing. Like it or not, this affects its utility relative to a standard vehicle, in certain situations. Maybe it's a 1% kind of thing, but again, I'm not convinced that most of us buy cars for the average use case. If we did, SUVs wouldn't be the highest selling segment of the market.
>The cost and continued upkeep mandates that a vehicle has utility beyond what a person needs on average.
Exactly! I hate the 90% of drives are less than 50km argument which is always made about range issues. I don't want to buy another car for the 10%.
Also I take the train to work, I walk/cycle to the store. Almost all my driving is for hiking, climbing, skiing, or other vacations. I won't buy a car that has a max range with a new battery and no AC on that just barely gets me there and back.
Sorry, but that makes no sense. You can also wake up to a car with no gas. So your dilemma will be to either get gas to your home (will likely require another vehicle) or to plug in (until you have range get to a fast charge- or just let it charge)
And yes, you can make that cross country trip in an EV. It will probably take longer (2-3 hours spent fast charging).
I did this last weekend, and it single handedly killed my desire to go all electric. I reserved two cars at two different rental agencies, showed up, and both said they had no cars. Another two didn't have the size I needed (+1 of ICE car capacity). The final one ended up costing $200/day, all after a few hours driving around town. This was just a random weekend. I can't imagine if there was any sort of desire to leave town, amongst the larger population. I'll be keeping my ICE car to go along with my electric, even if it just sits there, rusting. With that three day weekend excursion, I've paid for 13 months of my ICE car insurance.
>I don't buy a vehicle for the average use case -- I buy it for the edge cases. When I need to be able to move stuff or tow a trailer, I can. If I needed to cross the country tonight because of a family emergency, I could. I think this is a fairly common mindset for most people,
That really isn't the common mindset. If it was, everyone would be driving huge 7 seater trucks for the edge case where they need to haul some lumber with their 7 person family.
Most people buy a car for their typical needs. If they want to move a lot of stuff, they rent a van or a trailer.
If you needed to cross the country tonight because of a family emergency you could do that in any car, EV or fossil fuel. A modern EV might take you longer because of charging stops, but when you factor in scheduled breaks of a typical cross country drive, the charging times don't actually add up to a lot more at all.
>You're right that most people don't need a 22kW charger for their car, and they can wake up with a full tank every morning, but most people are probably also averse to the idea that their car has a downtime of several hours when they might really need it
If you need a full car then you drive to a fast charger and charge it. They exist for this exact purpose of needing a fast charge.
> That really isn't the common mindset. If it was, everyone would be driving huge 7 seater trucks for the edge case where they need to haul some lumber with their 7 person family.
> Most people buy a car for their typical needs. If they want to move a lot of stuff, they rent a van or a trailer.
The top three selling vehicles in the US are F-150, Ram 1500/2500/3500, and Chevrolet Silverado:
Do SUVs count? They're one of the top selling vehicle classes in most countries, and aside from BEVs, the only one seeing significant growth. China has seen higher adoption of SUVs over the last decade than the US.
I'm surprised to hear that the people going on 400km trips every month aren't the wealthy ones. I only drive 1000km per month. A 400km trip+return is 80% of my monthly commute meaning it would double my fuel expenses from roughly 120€ to 240€ per month.
Yeah no. GP is arguing that most people should not buy an electric car for a reason that's invalid for the 99th percentile of people, and saying that it's too expensive to install a solution that is not what you need to make an electric car viable.
I can go buy a $50k top of rack switch to route data between my WiFi APs, yes, and I might want to! But it's not valid to then go around telling people that they're not ready for multiple access points because the tech to link them costs $50k. And it's certainly not 'arrogant' to correct people of their misconceptions, because this is a huge EV misconception.
Please calm down. No one is attacking you. The point is, MOST people don't have a 3990X at home, because they don't need it, and MOST people won't have a fast charger at home, because they don't need it.
What you're describing is over consumption, and it's what got us in the mess we're in and trying to fix. Everyone have a legal right to buy more than they need because they want it, that doesn't mean they should.
Flying on vacation, buying new clothes from the other side of the world each month, replacing a fully working car with a new one, having the AC blasting in a poorly insulated house, etc, these things all have a cost to the system but people have started thinking of these excesses as rights.
> I may not "need" a 60 kW Kohler diesel generator, but I have it.
Those run about $20k don't they? If you'd come on here complaining that generator technology wasn't ready yet because you'd been quoted $20k for your 60kW Kohler, you'd probably get the same response: you don't really need it.
GP clearly doesn't want that 22kW charging station that much, because they've been told how much it costs (same as your generator) and they're unwilling to pay that.
The ability of getting everything one wants just because one can is not a good thing, in my view.
Also, how is this relevant to the point above? One point is it's too expensive - so even if he wants it he might not be able to get it in the current reality. The counterpoint is that you can charge your car with a slower charger.
It was luck, honestly. I got three WD Ultrastar Data60s from a friend whose company was upgrading to some even more ridiculous storage solution. They were letting them go for $10,000 each or so, populated with 14 TB drives, so I went for all three.
I fully expect that I won't have to upgrade storage for the rest of my life, because, honestly... I don't know where we go past 4K. 8K is just dumb for everyone unless you have a 200 foot screen that you sit 10 feet away from or so. As far as games go, yes, they're approaching 250 GB, but there does come a point where textures, models, and sound will become "good enough". I figure 1 TB games will be pretty much "the end", but then again... the first computer I got was 28 years ago and had a 540 MB hard drive, but in fairness, that seemed small even back then.
I guess some day someone will bitch that their computer only has 6 PB of storage...
I've only recently really started to bring my hardware back home and only have a few TB. I don't mind purchase price for hardware, but it's the power consumption that's an issue. Especially as our electricity has gone up 60% a few months ago, and likely going up again October.
My day job is scooping up film data, and if my last 15 years here has shown me anything were always going to need more disk. Staying at 4k the be lovely.
I happen to have 22kW at home (3x32A) but my TM3LR is only capable of 11kW (3x16A) but this means that no matter what my car can always be charged during the time I sleep. Most of the time in practice however I only charge during the hours electricity is really cheap as it's not too often I come in with a completely empty battery and need to drive full battery capacity next day (two days of ~500km each in a row).
I find fast charging is only needed for road trips and quite possibly for fleet operations (taxis, delivery vans etc). For a private car 11kW is plenty and less could be doable as well.
As for grid .. our grid here in Estonia has the opposite problems, most people want to start selling to the grid with solar panels. And grid people being really inflexible (in a charitable interpretation) or greedy (by wanting to people pay for all the work needed to modernize the aging grid) also want to charge ridiculous fees for any increases in capacity.
With lots of EV's I kinda understand that the grid may have more problems but with local generation the load on the grid goes down (as electricity needs to be transported much shorter distances, think: your neighbors). So my trust that 3x32A installation cost of $20k is justified is very low (unless this is a rural farm or something that really is far from nearest transformer).
Just last week someone was quoted 4 million euros to upgrade an existing connection to support a 15kW PV installation (rural, but most of the cost came apparently from needing to upgrade a 330kV transformer station).
Very few people are likely to have that sort of charger installed in their house. High speed charging makes sense though where it'll be heavily utilized, like at charging stations along major highways.
(I'm hoping eventually the highways will become the charging stations, probably with some kind of device that makes a physical connection to rails embedded in the road that supply power to moving vehicles, kind of like a big slot car. For that application, fast-charging batteries are great because it means you only have to electrify short sections of road at regular intervals, not the whole thing.)
$20k to install a 22kW charger!!!! i was quoted £1300 (uk) to have one fitted and i thought that was expensive!
to reply to another comment about why a 22kW is needed. if you're on a flexi tariff where energy price is super cheap from like 12-4am then having it fully charge in that time is needed to maximise the best price
In the UK you have the advantage of easy access to 3 phase electricity, most houses can simply pull 2 more wires from the mains and have it. Whereas in the likes of Ireland you need a special setup and massive extra cost to get 3 phase.
Having a 22kw charger at home is amazing especially for only £1300!
Hmm, fair enough, maybe it's only in large towns and cities. The pricing you got seems a bit suspect in that case because you would need 3 phase to run a 22kw charger and if you don't have easy access to 3 phase then the cost would be quite a bit higher as new wires would need to be added.
The charger alone would cost around 1000 (if not slightly more) so I can't imagine them doing the amount of required work for 300 pounds.
It's actually usually the other way around. In a rural location you are much more likely to have access to a 3-phase supply. Farms for example almost always have a 3 phase supply for running pumps, motors and heaters etc.
Yes we do. Well, theoretically anyway - you know those electricity poles with 4 cables above each other? That's 3 phase. Usually each house just gets one phase but I guess theoretically having 3 phase would just be a matter of connecting up the other wires too.
I'd be surprised if you could actually convince suppliers to do that for a house though, and definitely not for £1300.
This is the same the world over. Power is generated and distributed as 3 phase because it is better for the generators and it makes better use of the power cable since you don't require a neutral for a balanced 3 phase load.
$20k problably includes the cost of digging tranches and lay new cables. Here in France it's tops a few thousand euros if you want 36kVA, but that doesn't include civil engineering.
no, 22kW is 32A as we use three 240V (to neutral, so around 400V between phases) phases here. Most home here have 40A capacity (mine does).
You have to pay for the introduction box, which need to be changed in my case and is about 7000$ [1] and you have to may for each extra A capacity, which is 150$ per A. So 32*150 is 4800 + 7000. And that's only to change the capacity of what we call the "introduction". Then I have to change the cabling inside the house up to the breaker room and install a charging station. The whole thing is about 20k
You have 3x40A. Your biggest user is occasional 3x25A. So you have 3x15A available almost all the time. 3x16A is 11kW, you can tell your car or charger to go no more than 3x13A or 3x10A or whatever, this can even be automated by most charging stations. When you have your local EV meetup with 3 cars and all want to charge then either take turns or have all charge at 3x13 each and switch the heating off for that time.
I have this at home [0]. It plugs into a regular (red) 3x16A socket, has RCD protection built in and needs 0 installation cost and no nonsense about utility needing to come and do anything.
Surely you have one of those red 3x16A or 3x32A sockets in your garage/workshop wherever? If not your local electrician can put it in for xx instead of utility doing something unneeded for xxxx or xxxxx.
As I said I am at the limit already, I have my home lab and a small server farm for work, I also have a workshop. I already cannot put everything on, if I use the workshop, you cannot use the kitchen oven for example. I realize 11kW is enough for most usage, but in my case, even that requires changing infrastructure, which is expensive.
Most chargers have Dynamic Load Management readyness where they have a Modbus power meter at your main circuit breaker and makes sure the charger only uses available power. So you can switch on your oven and car will automatically back off.
For this kind of consumption tho I would consider installing solar panels if that is possible/feasible.
I have an 11A charger and some 5kW solar panel setup, and I am lucky enough that I'm able to charge during the day the trips I make early in the morning just with solar.
Yes . . . and no. In North America, homes are actually supplied with 240V. A split-phase system with a centre-tap transformer is then used to create two 120V "phases." So, your typical outlets will be on one of two 120V phases. However, there are usually a couple of 240V outlets as well for things like electric stoves, and clothes dryers. So, in short, single phase 240V is available in essentially every U.S. household.
The cars, themselves, usually require 3-phase 240V to do 22kW. You are highly unlikely to have access to that in a U.S. home.
That's only one of many, many issues electric cars "revolution" is going to face. Where do we get all the lithium, copper, cobalt to build electric cars? The reality check for EV will be very brutal, according to those stats [1] we would need:
"meeting UK electric car targets for 2050 would require production of just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production."
And this is only UK. In order to switch to EV we need revolution in battery production, we need revolution in electricity production and grid construction and I don't see any of this happening for now. I am tracking all news about "new, better battery" and typically it at the end of the news it turns out, that this new great battery weight is 2 tonnes or it can work in temperature range up to -200 degrees, etc.
> Where do we get all the lithium, copper, cobalt to build electric cars? The reality check for EV will be very brutal
We're doing the same thing as we did with ICE cars. We're ignoring all the drawbacks and telling ourselves we'll find hypothetical solutions sometimes in the future. We're basically green washing the entire auto industry: "shhh don't worry it's electric, now buy our $50k car and tell your friends you're saving the planet"
When the average driver does like 30km per day all you need is some kind of hybrid car with a small but efficient gas engine. 90% of your travel will be fully electric, the occasional road trip would use gas (which would be expensive but something the average user doesn't need more than a few times a year)
But I guess it's more marketable to sell AWD, 600+ HP, three tonnes lithium monsters than glorified priuses. This industry is fucked up and doesn't care one bit about sustainability.
A hybrid car is the worst of both worlds. Most people would always have been fine 99% of the time with a short range EV like a Nissan Leaf. But the human brain can't let go of the "what if" and long range EVs have proven necessary for large scale adoption.
Regardless, batteries are highly recyclable. Lithium is super plentiful. Cobalt reduction and eventual elimination is making progress. EVs are the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
It's the best of both world. No city pollution, 90% of usage is fully electric, small batteries, your "what if" problem disappear.
> batteries are highly recyclable
Yet only 5% of batteries are recycled world wide
> Lithium is super plentiful. Cobalt reduction and eventual elimination is making progress
I'd suggest you to look at the mining industry and come back to me with your sustainability talk.
> EVs are the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
Freon is the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
Leaded gas is the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
Leaded paint is the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
Asbestos is the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
Radium lipstick is the future and it will be great. Let go of your fear, it is not rational.
The future is the end of personal vehicles, a fleet of state/city owned and shared small sized electric vehicles would be a vision of the future I can get behind. Three tonnes of steel and 600kg of battery to move our fat asses 30km a day isn't a future I believe in, it's a waste of space, resource and energy. Nothing in the auto industry makes sense right now, making them electric just displace the problem slightly further from us.
Hybrids combine all the downsides of an ICE car (way more maintenance, destroying the earth) with all the downsided of an EV (solving battery sustainability, requiring us to embrace renewable energy and move off coal and gas).
Most Batteries not currently being recycled is a problem in the same way as most cars on the road still being ICE. Yeah it's an issue, but it's one which has obvious solutions.
Your litany of non-sequitors doesn't warrant a response.
Again, research about mining, transport, by-product storage, efficiency, &c. When you need XXg of rare earth and each gram requires you to extract a tonne of earth, to filter it with nasty af chemicals and store it in leaky trailing dams.
Solution to EV problems are always "you just need to do X", "we don't do it yet but I swear we'll do it later", "it's not technically feasible for now but we're working on it". It's either wishful thinking or complete delusion.
The only thing EVs do is put the pollution far away from you, on a global scale it's not much better for the planet, we're just going to consume the next resource until we hit a wall and realise all over again that we fucked up once more. And on top of that it perpetuates the hell that modern cities became thanks to personal vehicles
But sure it allows tech bros in Silicon Valley to drive $100k teslas with 600+ hp and pat themselves on the back about how much they're doing to save the planet.
The future is actually something akin to the eRockit which is a Pedelec turned into a small motorcycle. It has a max speed of 90km/h. I would rather commute with that than a car.
>We're doing the same thing as we did with ICE cars.
Are we? Despite all the spin that the green crowd like the put on things it's not like we actually had any idea back in the day about things like the impact CO2 emissions would have longterm. We had hints, people working on wildly different problems had data that contained the patterns that they needed to realize, but no one actually realized the scope of things with ICE cars for a long long time and while we've woken up to the problems with ICE vehicles now... fuel is hardly one of those problems and saying otherwise is just histrionics.
These are the same non-argument statements EV opponents bave been shoveling for decades.
Any large scale change is necessarily going to be an enormous undertaking. That's self evident.
Imagine telling someone in 2007 how many billions of iPhones and Android phones would be made and put into the hands of nearly every person on earth. They could have made exactly the same weak arguments you are making here of how it's not possible. But that's nonsense.
But I tend to think this can be solved by the market. Look at the extent we go to find oil at sea. If there is a market, the production will ramp up. What I would be curious is if there is a physical supply of those materials in such volumes.
This isn't an argument. You can't point to existing production in light of existing demand and say "this is insurmountable". You might as well be crying "we can't switch to electric cars! Where would we get all the electric cars from? Did you know that the current production of electric cars won't meet the demand if everyone switches?"
The question is whether the materials are fundamentally unavailable in the accessible environment.
Cobalt is only 140,000 metric tonnes per year, compared to an estimated 7.1 million tons currently known in reserves (and is a recyclable material).[1]
China alone has 44 million tons of known neodymium. Global production was only 280,000 tons in 2021 but was an increase over 2018 which was 190,000.[2]
Copper has known global reserves of 870 million tons, with 28 million tons a year of demand [3].
Lithium is the only resource where there's potentially an issue - known reserves are about 14 million tons, and production in 2018 was 85,000 tons so we have about 165 years worth at present rates but obviously that would increase. [4]
But all these materials are recyclable - aggressively so. Once they enter the industrial chain they leave it very slowly.
But what's strangest is the context: in a world where computers were expensive, then got so cheap we have them everywhere due to production efficiencies, suddenly on this issue capitalism cannot possibly work. There will only be more expensive goods forever, competition doesn't happen, a "gold rush" to find large reserves of demanded materials could not possibly result in a production boom.
It's important to remember that EVs can be left charging unattended. This makes time requirements very different than filling up with gas.
If you park your car at home, leave it charging overnight. It doesn't matter if it will take 4, 8 or 12 hours — you have the whole night. Also it's unlikely that you will run it down to 0% every day, so you just need to top it up.
If you have a parking with chargers at work, you can plug it there. That's 8 hours when the car is sitting idle and could be charging. Or at a supermarket — plug it in when you're shopping. Even with a relatively slow charger you'll likely return home with more battery than you've left with. This is called destination charging, and these chargers are designed to top up your car while you're parked there for longer periods anyway.
Really fast charging is needed on road trips, but there you will want at least 100kW. For daily home use charging speed literally doesn't matter.
You don't need 22kW charger if your car has 50kWh battery. Those cars usually have 11 kW on-board AC charger anyway. In fact, for daily driving, 3 kW overnight charging at your home should be plenty - you would be able to charge up 30 kWh in 10 hours.
22 kW chargers are for cars with ludicrously large battery, like Tesla Model X which has 100 kWh battery.
I have owned an EV for 8 years. It cost $300 to buy and install my EVSE ("charge station") because I already had a 240v plug in my garage. If a 240v line had to be run from my breaker box to my garage it would have been about $2k. But it also wouldn't have been necessary, as 110v charge speed would have been fine. Also that $300 got reimbursed via tax credit.
Stop pushing FUD. This is total nonsense. EV ownership is awesome and has been for years. The only issue is that people living in apartments or condos without a garage usually can't charge at home. These places need to start adding charging infrastructure to parking spaces.
Where I am in California, "super off peak" window is only 6 hours. Energy cost is double outside of that, in the regular "off peak", then quadruple outside of that. This would barely cover the average commute. With housing prices skyrocketing, especially those close to the cities, I think we'll see commutes increasing.
I have a Renault Zoe and I charge mostly outside on 22kW charger. The Zoe 2021 has a 42kW/h battery and it take ~2h to fully charge. I don't understand how you get to the 7h figure ?
There are plenty of super fast charging stations (DC) in switzerland (Gofast for example).
You don't need 22kW at home. 7kW is plenty enough for a night charge.
I have 3x25A fuses at 230V (which is normal here, you either have 3x20 or 3x25 typically) so I could probably run a 22kW charger. But I couldn't run it and run much other stuff at the same time!
I guess the solution is to have something store the capacity, i.e. a second battery. If one really needs to charge at home very quickly (e.g. you are a taxi driver or have some other specific reason) and you can't overload the grid, then the solution must be to slowly charge a battery at home when the car is used, just like most EV owners slowly charge the car over night. Then the home battery can be quickly emptied into the car for a fast charge. In the end, it's just like having 2EVs where one is charging while the other isn't. And of course, buying a 100kWh wall battery is going to also set you back a large part of the cost of a second car too, just like your $20k for a better electricity connection. BUT - the dual battery solution doesn't have the tragedy of the commons issue where not everyone can do it.
I doubt more than a single digit % would ever consider needing fast charge at home though.
Yeah, also it is quite a surprise for most people, how ridiculous inefficient ICE engines are.
Most of the chemic energy just goes into the air as heat.
That only worked, because oil was (and still is relativly) so cheap.
The 80 amp charger that allows backfeeding to run the house will charge the lightning in 8 hours, the included 32 amp charger that plugs into a dryer outlet will do it in 19 hours, still less than a day.
There are no loads in your house that will pull 80 amps continuous for 8 hours which is why it can run an average house for days while only taking 8 hours to charge. Your average house has 200 amp service which is normally enough to support the additional charge load.
> Lets turn this around a bit... To charge your vehicle, it requires multiple days of typical household energy usage.
> This doesn't make sense.
Sure it does: you do not actually use a lot of electricity in your house on average. By far the biggest user after you get a Lightning would be charging the lightning.
Your home electrical connection's total capacity is already over-sized relative to your average usage.
You can also have a large battery buffer supporting standard chargers. Or battery integrated chargers are also interesting because they're fast to deploy and cheap to install (though the individual units are more expensive due to the battery):
If you have the space, you could install close to 20kW of solar PV for $20,000. On a sunny day this would help power a 22kW charging station, and even on a cloudy day you'd probably get around 2kW for trickle charging.
Well, I looked at our current use of the cars. I live in a remote area and car is my only option. Also the area is mountainous and after doing some testing and having the car for a week, I have about 100km autonomy with 50kW/h battery when driving around, after that at around 10%, the car turns on low power mode and is very slow (I'd say dangerous) to drive.
On a typical day, my wife does about 40km, so everything is fine, but twice a week I have to go to the music school with my kids and it's 60km away (120km round trip), so I have to be sure to be on a full charge before leaving as I cannot charge the car there, and the time I have to charge the car before leaving is about 2h.
And this is for one car, I also have a car for my business. I didn't plan to switch to electric yet, but I know I'll have too, thus the 22kW charging station to have some margin to be able to charge them both.
Also, the utility have to upgrade the cables even for 11kW, and the price isn't very different.
That car is probably very inefficient as it's not very aerodynamic. If you need that van, you probably need the 75kWh version.
If you don't have many kids, you should probably look at cars that are only electric and designed for it: Tesla, Polestar, VW ID.3/4, Skoda Enyaq, Volva XC40 Recharge, ... You'll get better regenerative break which means that you'll recharge your battery when going downhill and better efficiency.
Without any changes to your home, you can charge your car at 3.6kW and there might be public chargers at 11kW around where you live and shop. I've spent a few weeks with a Tesla Model 3 SR+ (50kW battery) in the mountains of the Val d'Anniviers (Valais) where I couldn't charge at the chalet and I didn't have any issue to drive around and find chargers.
EVs should overperform in comparison with ICE at high altitudes and in hilly regions, due to less efficient burning and the ability to regen.
Remote areas with unpredictable usage is probably their weak spot, but a hybrid should still be a solid option for the same reasons EVs work well in the mountains.
> EVs should overperform in comparison with ICE at high altitudes and in hilly regions, due to less efficient burning and the ability to regen.
How about super inefficient work on low revolutions per second mode which is typical for going uphill? And can you really produce any significant measure of energy using recuperation?
Yes, in stop and go traffic and/or undulating terrain, regen can be a big factor in EVs much higher efficiency than ICE, more than overcoming any loss due to extra weight.
Try a more efficient car with a larger battery. You can get EVs with well over 400 km range now. Even my 2015 Model S 70D (70 kWh, four wheel drive) has 330 km range. And it doesn't get dangerously slow at 10% charge.
This is why a solution like using Hydrogen makes a lot more sense than using pure EVs - even if the efficiencies are lower than in battery driven vehicles.
The speed you quote for a shared 22KW with multiple cars charging is the same as a standard home 7KW charger (e.g. 60Kwh car charging to full from 0 while you sleep for 8 hours, or 2 of those cars charging from 20-80%). But no one drives that many miles per day consistently.
Most normal people can survive with a standard plug, even the 7KW is a luxury to let you think less about it and to help the grid by charging faster when the grid is off peak, enabling faster rollout of cheap renewables.
As I said in another comment, I don't absolutely need 22kW now. But I am at the limit of the capacity of my current line, so in all scenarios, I would need to invest quite a bit.
I know many homes with three adults (one driving parent, two kids) who have cars. 22kW isn't enough to charge three cars + home. It's not that crazy, considering the average home has 1.9 cars.
OK! Here comes a car with, say, 80 kWh battery. It's not entirely empty, so to reach 98%, it can take 60 kWh. It does so in 5 minutes.
This means that it gulps 60 kWh in 5 minutes; since 1 hour = 12 * 5 minutes, the power transmitted is 60 * 12 = 720 kW.
This is a scale of a neighborhood; a typical detached house is allocated 20 kW. And this is just one car.
Now let's imagine optimistically that the efficiency of the process is 99%, and a mere 1% is dissipated as heat. 7.2 kW take a serious cooling system to dissipate.
So no, I don't think it's fit for cars. For phones and drones, maybe, using a special actively cooled charging station.
First, ultra fast charging is really relevant only for intermediate stops on long-distance travel. There you have dedicated charging stations which are directly connected to high voltage lines which can deliver 10-100 MW. Modern charging stations already deliver up to 350kw, doubling that power wouldn't be sci-fi.
But the peak charging rate is only one parameter and it isn't necessary to reach that in day to day usage. The biggest problem with current batteries is, that the maximum charge rate is good already, but only available while the battery is below 50% charge. So it isn't necessary to raise the maximum charge speed much, if this speed can be maintained for longer time. A battery which can take like 200-300kW till over 80% charge would be a winner and mostly "solve" recharging during trips.
> ”Modern charging stations already deliver up to 350kw, doubling that power wouldn't be sci-fi.”
Not at all. In fact, MCS (Megawatt charging system) is already in development for charging heavy commercial vehicles. It’s designed to scale to charging rates as high as 3.75 MW!
Most batteries also degrade faster when charged at high rates. So at home, when you have the luxury of charging overnight, it’s better to charge slower.
Right. And if you have batteries, which could take 700kW peak, but are only charged with 350kW peak, it is no longer "fast charging" in the sense of impact onto the battery.
But the big future is anyway to have the car plugged into a modest outlet when parking during the day so they can take up any excess solar power available on the grid and possibly even partially power your home over night.
> Modern charging stations already deliver up to 350kw
Peak under optimal conditions ? Seeing how most stations fail to deliver on max charging claims I'd be sceptical we can realistically go so high without "lab like" conditions - available in 2 places in the world at 2 times so they can claim the number.
Well, I was referring to the charging infrastructure and all current Tesla superchargers installed can deliver up to 250kW and Ionity here in Germany always installs 350kW chargers - that the battery of current cars cannot accept that for long or at all is exactly the topic why this new battery technology might be a big improvement.
The average power consumed by an electric car doing average miles is a few hundred watts. It's well within the capacity of the grid to supply. The issue you're highlighting is that fast charging makes the power usage very bursty with high peaks.
So why not smooth it out? Put another battery in the charger which slowly replenishes. Then the grid doesn't see the bursty load you're talking about.
I've never seen an empty gas station during the day in my city.
You can't have batteries to charge batteries, then you'd need batteries to charge the batteries charging the batteries. All of that because we simultaneously decided that nuclear was bad and all we need is windmills, which are like the worst thing to power a fully electric world with high demand peaks, and to move from gas to electric cars
Adding batteries won't solve any problem. Gas allowed us to live unsustainably and made it easy to do so. Wanting to replicate that with electricity/batteries is plain stupid.
If everyone needs three tonnes of steel and their own body weight in rare earth material to cover 30km per day on average we're totally fucked from the get go
Locally, the same 90%. It's no use sharing a car with someone who needs to commute somewhere else at the same time, you need to share it with non-conflicting use.
Another battery is another 10-15% loss of efficiency, which makes charging 10-15% more expensive. Far better in most situations to distribute the spike it to the grid.
Likely we'll see such a system with electric motorcycles (and similar categories) first, which is like a "small scale" version due to the smaller battery capacity & size.
It doesnt need to completely disconnect from the grid, just smooth the load as much as is economicallly useful. A load that is already statistically smoothed by multiple cars charging at once, arriving and leaving at different, but statistically predictable, times.
And people are already attaching batteries to the grid to earn money by smootging supply and demand, it just makes sense to locate those near to demand so they can share cables. Then to the grid the car charger station looks like a consistent energy user that can flex a little to help the grid (possibly even feeding back during peaks), rather than a random one.
Nobody needs to charge their car at home in five minutes. You charge your car at home over night. The typical driver drives less than 100km a day, so needs less than 20kWh per day. The car is parked over night for around ten hours, so it takes about as much power as a kettle to charge it. Fast charging is for long highway trips where dedicated infrastructure can be constructed.
You math it a little confusing when it come to the cooling required. You scale up the power draw to an hour, but then take your cooling based on that. But each individual battery still only needs to dissipate the heat produced during its charge - so in your example, with 60kWh and 99% efficiency, the energy to dissipate is 0.6kWh per charge, over the duration of 5 minutes. Which sounds much more manageable than the 7.2kWh you end up with (which would be for 12 charges over the course of an hour).
0.6kWh / 5min * 60min/1h is still 7.2kW. It only needs to handle those 7.2kW of heat loss for five minutes, not continuously, but the power doesn't change.
The power doesn’t change, but you get 12 systems that each need to dissipate 600Wh instead of a single system that needs to dissipate 7200Wh. You can for example partially buffer the heat if you know that you only need to handle that load for a few minutes. It’s much harder to sustain the same energy dissipation for an hour.
Apples and oranges. At the temperature difference between the coolant of combustion engine to the environment heat dissipation is much faster than at the temperature difference between the coolant that is acceptable for batteries to the environment.
And the surface area of a battery pack is orders of magnitude larger than that of an ICE, which greatly helps the thermal transfer.
For a different comparison, 7.2kW is roughly equivalent to 20x 3090 GPUs. The area of a battery pack is (much) larger than the size of 20x GA102 dies. We've got a lot lot of experience extracting large amounts of heat from very tiny spaces. It's an engineering challenge, sure, but it's very well within our means.
I don't see the charge rate as a problem. [The new MCS standard for trucks will charge at around 3 MW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System), so clearly it is entirely possible to deal with even larger cooling needs than a 720kW system would entail.
There are already superchargers with multiple chargers that can in total handle way more than 720 kW.
The biggest issue when there are many super fast chargers operating at 1000v will be handling voltage spikes in the power grid.
The key here is the charge curve. We currently have 350kW chargers but most cars can only take advantage of that for ~10 minutes before dropping. This is why most EVs take an hour to charge to 100%. By the time they get to that 98% value the charge rate has slowed to 10s of kW.
If you could do 98% of the charge at 350kW, that'd be ~15 minutes to hit 98% at 350kW. Today, it takes around 30 minutes for most vehicles to go from 0->80%.
And the same tradeoffs would still apply, you'd still probably want to time your stops to charge from 10-20% to 70-80% when on a long trip to minimise total travel time and slow charge to 100 before you leave and after you arrive.
It would just be even faster than today. Which is why I'm suspicious of any announcement that talks about the unrealistic 0-100% use case. If that is the metric they are chasing they're probably not going to help the average road tripper much compared with more focused engineering for the real use cases.
Something as simple as multiple cables that mean cars can charge without waiting for the others to finish and their owners return, or smarter navs, or cheaper/bigger batteries, building more chargers etc. is likely to have more impact than a magic new battery chemistry, though every different aspect helps.
Wouldn't be possible to have very large capacitors that act like a buffer? Maybe charge the capacitor for an hour and when a fast charging car arrives, simply use the stored energy in the capacitor?
Supercaps aren't really anywhere near high-end batteries in specific energy or density. Additionally, capacitors have a linear voltage curve which makes it impractical to use their full stored energy. You could try and work around a lot of the problems by jacking up the voltage very high, but supercaps break down at a relatively low voltage, and have poor self-discharge. It seems like you would need an absurdly large capacitor bank to store enough energy to make it worthwhile, and it would be incredibly inefficient.
You could use batteries as the buffer, though. Most batteries support higher discharge rates than charge rates, which is nice for longevity. You would need a battery pack the same capacity as the car's in order for it to really make sense. You would also probably use lower density cells too, since they don't need to move. They wouldn't fit into the user terminal, so you'd probably locate them in a nearby shack, and run very thick cables. If you had more than one charger, you would probably have an even larger shack. Before you get to millions of battery cells to manage, you might step back and realize that something like a giant flywheel would make more sense, and then you're only one or two steps away from building a power plant.
Hmm, kind of sounds like the battery replacing solution but instead of physically replacing the batteries, you simply move the energy from the buffer batteries to the consumer batteries.
You can build battery towers or underground battery storages depending on the physical constraints maybe? If its feasible, it can also be beneficial from renewable energy standpoint as they also need the storage.
One thought I have is that current battery technology depends on one nasty, rare chemical or another. It's difficult to extract from the Earth, possibly at the expense of human rights in some parts of the world. It's difficult to recycle also, to the point that it seems like a lot of companies are probably just quietly stacking up piles in warehouses to possibly but probably never deal with.
There are obvious benefits for convenient portable consumer devices, though. The benefits seem to outweigh the downsides, and all things considered, there's not much raw materials per-capita.
Electric vehicles are cool and fun to drive, but the benefits seem less obvious. Gas powered cars work very well, and if you look at the entire carbon cycle, it seems like they actually aren't all that bad relative to EVs. A lot of raw nasty materials to build EVs, by many orders of magnitude per-capita.
Going to batteries for wide-scale energy storage, for a vast EV charging network, just seems like a massive waste of resources. I'd rather those precious raw materials be used to build smart phones, sonic toothbrushes, and revolutionary new stuff like delivery drones, for an indefinite amount of time until a better battery technology can be developed.
> ”Now let's imagine optimistically that the efficiency of the process is 99%, and a mere 1% is dissipated as heat. 7.2 kW take a serious cooling system to dissipate.”
Much of that heat is dissipated by the charger unit, not the car. The charger has massive heat sinks and fans etc, so not really a big deal!
The rest is just warming up the battery, which is a big heavy block which can store a lot of heat. This can be dissipated over time, which is actually very useful in winter! (heat pump scavenges battery heat to warm cabin, etc)
Are there any other reasons to use this battery tech beyond rapid charging time? Does it have more charge cycles than other Li batteries when charged at a more reasonable rate? Is it denser or does it have better discharge characteristics(i.e. lower internal resistance)?
Looks like they used a pretty standard lithium ion chemistry with high silicon anodes.
This is where the industry is currently going with state of the art lithium batteries. They've just been slower about increasing the silicon due to fears of what other tradeoffs will arise.
Upon further reflection, I think the answer to this problem is to simply coordinate charging 'slots' on a sub-grid(not sure what you call a local delivery circuit with a certain capacity). It should be possible to request charging time slots from a local power company server and negotiate when your vehicle can charge with millisecond accuracy. Doing so also might help the power company supply that power more effectively/efficiently. Sure, this means in peak times you may not get the charging rate you want, because you have to wait for the network to be available, but in off-peak times you get the fast charging rate you're capable of.
It's chicken and egg. It will come, our grids are not ready, but perhaps these batteries can also discharge fast and you can charge your home battery during the day, charge your car when you come home, charge it through induction as your drive over a special track of highway. Many things are possible in the future, but we have to grow into it. In any case, this super fast charging is mostly relevant (as said in this thread) road side, where you can have special equipment. At home you can mostly charge over night.
If external cooling becomes the solution (which makes a lot of sense) then I think it's more likely that a car will be provided with a water supply during charging - a water connection near (but not too near!) the electric plug would let the charger pump water through the battery pack and suck a bunch of heat from the car, without a complex battery removal workflow, and without the heavy cooling mechanism having to drive around with the car.
If this were to happen (and I don't think it will), then you'd want that water connector to be part of the charging cable to avoid a two step hookup. That requires a new charging cable standard (which is why I don't think it'll happen).
Also, water kinda sucks to deal with for something like this. What if, for example, the water flowing in isn't pure? What if it's hard water? Your battery cooling tubes could need flushing and might start growing nasty fungus and such.
ICE cars have to dissipate more than 100 kW of thermal energy and do so quite fine. The 7.2 kW are easy to cool in comparison. Of course that requires substantial fans as the cars are not moving while charging, but that is why they can get quite loud while charging :)
This company seems like the real deal, and it seems like they have managed to actually start manufacturing cells. What they haven't done, is create batteries which are likely to be used in electric vehicles which carry people yet. The web site [0] has data sheets for 4 sizes of cells, from "eyewear" to "smartphone/laptop". While they claim energy densities that are much higher than conventional cells, none of these are as big as 18650, 2170, or 4680.
There's reference to higher capacity cells in this presentation [1], but they are sited as design targets, which I take to mean: they only exist on paper. They also try to sell 100% packing density since they are prismatic instead of the conventional cylindrical cells. In one of their videos they say that they get less than 2% swelling after 500 charge cycles. So how does one get 100% packing density if the cells even only swell to 2%?
After many years of experience, I do not trust any battery vendor's mechanical specs. Inevitably "<2%" will be a lot higher than that. Battery companies can't even get the static cell size correct with proper tolerances, let alone truthfully report the swelling.
The 3 cofounders spent ~20 years at IBM San Jose before going on to other things. There are also a lot of very senior people from the auto industry and other top tier tech companies like Cypress. Enovix has 94 patents (+63 pending), 14 years of R&D and $254M in funding to get to this point. Their videos have much more detail. [2]
According to their CEO, the first shipping product is in wearables (watches). From what they are saying about volumes and ramp plan, I wonder if they might be working with Apple. They're also working with AR companies, developing products specifically for them.
In the long video, this question gets asked. They kinda punt and say it's the same as for other li-ion batteries. To me that means barely anything is happening yet.
Going on nine_k's answer, at 600V you'd also need a charging cable to handle 1200A. That's so thick (~50mm) a 3m cable's going to weigh 52KG. I'm sure somebody will jump in and suggest an alternative. Let's just put 10kV through the car. Then it's only 72A. Nothing bad happens at 10kV.
Burst-chargers are silly. They might work, they might not, but either way they present such immediate problems for mass deployment that they should be considered a distraction.
What we need today is "little" 10-15KWh replaceable battery pods. We're still talking up to 80KG, but something to get you 50 miles. These could be cycled out, cool-charged and essentially offer unlimited range to anyone without adding significant delay.
You could also lower the onboard cost of new cars by reducing the standard battery size. I want a Tesla, but I need about 20 miles range for 99% of the time. Buying a 15KW battery and hiring the extra would be a better solution for me.
Existing fast chargers can do 600A, the main trick is they water-cool the cable, which substantially reduces the amount of copper you need. They're about as difficult to handle as a gas pump nozzle. Somehow shifting 80kg batteries in and out of your car seems a lot harder to manage.
You need scale. Swap stations need to exist every 20 miles on major roads (like combustible fuels) and for that you need customers.
How many EVs were there in 2007-2013?
Today's problems are charge speed, range and cost. Swappable batteries would solve all three, without needing lN2-cooled charging cables, needing to dissipate 7.2KW of deep internal heat, at standstill, no less.
Whatever the physical realities or economics, we should be mandating a common power input framework so that this is possible for today's cars tomorrow.
I don't think the main battery pack needs to be swappable, but there needs to be a common standard for a secondary battery pack (like boosting a car to start it today). There's lots of space in the frunk of an electric car for the owner to drop in a portable battery back when the extra range is needed. Alcan (the aluminimum manufacturer) demonstrated a non-rechargable (but recyclable) aluminium-air battery a few years back that could be swapped and provide 1000 km of range. The lack of a "jerry can" solution for electric cars today seems... shortsighted.
The really good thing about electric cars is that once the platform is in place it becomes almost trivial to use alternative sources of electricity to provide the power the car needs or charge the battery. Methanol fuel cell are finally on the market and while currently expensive, can be refueled with the same convenience as existing fossil fuel based ICEs. The future of electric cars is indeed a promising one.
As pointed out on the recent Technology Connections YouTube video, EV charging cables are often liquid cooled so they can push extra current through a relatively lightweight cable. (I thought that was a pretty cool innovation.)
You don't need to charge it at its maximum rate. Even making full use of existing 350 and 400 kW chargers will be useful. The current CCS specification goes to 500 kW.
Well, just barely. They claim to have made some samples.[1] Read their SEC filing for Q1 2022.
They already went public via an SPAC reverse merger, with a nominal value around $1 billion.
The biggest concern is in the "Risks" section: "Our roadmap to improve our energy density requires us to implement higher energy density materials for both cathodes and anodes." That's a fundamental problem, and the story of too many wannabe battery makers. It would be much better if the SEC filing said they had a working prototype which met the announced specs, and the big risk was scaling up the manufacturing of the prototype.
Happily, you are misunderstanding their filing. They do have working prototypes which meet the announced specs.
They also have a plan to push beyond the current (and very impressive) 900 Wh/L energy density.[1] It is those future-looking plans which may (or may not) require higher energy density materials on the anode and cathode.
From PDF, page 10, note "Assumed 100% packing efficiency for pouch or prismatic vs 90.7% packing efficiency for cylindrical form factor". Some of the improved energy density seems to come from rectangular cells packed with no space for coolant flow.
The one picture of an actual battery shows it sitting on a huge heat sink.
That's good news, pending actual pricing when commercially available.
But the real meat of the EV revolution will probably be high density LFP (300-400 range cars) and next-gen sodium ion (200-300 mile cars) which require no nickel or cobalt, or for sodium ion, not even lithium.
This is based on production densities that are supposed to be available in production late this year (LFP) or next year (sodium ion)
Improvements in any sector or aspect is a good thing though. There will be cells needed in dozens of applications, from container ship to bicycle.
Edit: I reached the posting limit, so here is more on the higher density LFP/sodium ion:
So my napkin math says that the densities listed should enable a 400 mile Tesla model S type car (especially since LFP doesn't need as much cooling and has higher density cell-to-pack), and sodium ion should do about 70% of that, or a 275 mile model S large car. Napkin math is derived from looking at current pack densities in Tesla cars and comparing that with 90% of the cell densities in the above articles (which these should be able to achieve in pack density with cell-to-pack and that these chemistries don't need as much active cooling systems). The current model S from googling seems to be at 186 wh/kg at pack level. 90% CTP 230wh/kg LFP should be 205+ wh/kg!!!
That may also enable large scale 50-70 mile range PHEVs, and even cheaper EV bikes/scooters/lawnmowers/etc. LFP also has better capacity retention,cycle endurance, and temperature endurance typically.
But the Sodium Ion might be the real revolution from a city car perspective for places like China/India where you'd need a billion or more clean city cars. A cheap 100-150 mile sodium ion car is just what these markets need.
I can see sodium ion being the right pick for urban ebike rental. It only needs the range to go one way if it's part of a fleet and has the charge infrastructure built out; the rest is a matter of getting enough AV brains in there to minimize issues surrounding safety, parking, self-charging and availability. Once you add that, the bikes become way more appetizing for consumer use and you can expect usage to explode. Several companies are already working on the AV features - and cost is mostly bottlenecked on the batteries.
Those seem to indicate 6,000 to 8,000 cycles. But will have to see what the actual numbers are from production, like any battery technology. But I trust numbers from things that are "1 year from production" far better than the "prototype with production in 5-10 years" like solid state batteries seem stuck in.
And we need the scaling NOW. Actually we needed it 10-30 years ago. I wonder if, like solar cells, if we had good government research and subsidies in the 1960s where we would be with solar cells, wind, and battery. Especially wind, it's not like wind farms needed nanotech-scale chemistry and manufacturing.
I don't know the EV battery space well. What is the capacity of the battery they are referring to and how does it compare to, say, the capacity of a Tesla Model S? Just trying to put this 5 minutes to 80% charge in context. As a headline, it sounds incredible. If I could charge my car to 80% in 5 minutes, I would buy an EV tomorrow, seriously.
The capacity of an individual cell doesn't really matter, because you can linearly scale up the energy capacity and power. If you can charge a single cell to 80% in 5 minutes, then you can do the same for many cells simultaneously, as long as your power source doesn't become the bottleneck. From the perspective of battery technology, what matters is energy density, power density, and of course manufacturing cost.
But for what it's worth, the linked presentation[1] includes some test results from 2.7Ah cells, which is about the same as the capacity of a common 16850 cylindrical cell.
That's just called Mechanical Engineering. All machines involve compromises. An internal combustion engine needs oodles of these kinds of compromises. It's idiotic thermal efficiency itself is a big expense if you think about it.
To an 80% charge, all modern cars with super fast charging (Tesla Model 3/Y, Ioniq 5, etc) can do it in around 15-20 minutes assuming you're connected to the fastest charger available.
The double time to full (vs. just to 80%) is pretty comparable to other batteries though, where that remaining 20% takes almost as long as the first 80%.
So, it's a lot faster. That said, I'd be interested in lifespan. They claim 'high cycle life' but don't actually put any figures around that.
The article states that the capacity figure is just a 'goal', not something they've actually achieved... if I'm reading it right, so it's a bit meaningless at the moment.
"Enovix, based in Fremont, California, announced that it demonstrated in electric vehicle (EV) battery cells the ability to charge from 0% to 80% state-of-charge in as little as 5.2 minutes and to achieve a greater than 98% charge capacity in under 10 minutes. The cells also surpassed 1,000 cycles while retaining 93% of their capacity."
They claim is went past 1000 cycles with 93% capacity remaining.
Yep. I used to fly electric rc planes back when NiCads were the best battery available. Most of the cells we used were rated for a 0.1C charge and a 14 hour recharge at that rate. If you bought the right brand and model cells, it was possible to recharge them at 10C and fully charge them from total empty in just over 8 minutes. (Usually about 7 minutes with the low voltage cutoff in the speed controllers I used.)
You'd get noticeable degradation in a pack after 50 or so cycles, and some would become unusable at 100 cycles. (Which was a decent tradeoff, since a catastrophic battery destroying crash was reasonably likely to occur well within 100 flights, at least with the sort of plane and flying me and my friends engaged in...)
For a while I was flying 7 cell Sanyo AR 500mAhr packs and since I owned 3 of them I'd charge them at about 14C (7A, the highest my charger would go) which would let me relaunch every 5 mins (I'd get maybe 3.5mins of mostly full power flying time from a pack, so I'd basically fly until I got bored of landing/swapping-batteries/relaunching, or I'd crashed and broken it again.)
Kids these days with their LiPo packs and brushless motors don't know how good they have it <shakes fist at cloud>
>What is the capacity of the battery they are referring to and how does it compare to, say, the capacity of a Tesla Model S?
They are talking in terms of an individual cell that is roughly 3x30mm and saying it would have about 2x the storable energy density per cubic centimeter.
I don’t know how it compares. The source I could find lists 380Wh/kg for Tesla batteries. This article claims up to 550Wh/liter. Also sometimes they discuss the energy density of a single cell and sometimes of the whole battery.
Haha touché. I meant to say that the speed of charging is one aspect of switching to a FEV that might make me think twice about buying one, but if I could charge my car in five minutes, it'd be a much, much easier decision.
Fast charging is really only relevant in two scenarios:
1) You want to travel further in one go than the cars range
2) You do not have access to at home charging
For those who can charge at home, fast charging is really only needed for longer road trips. Current new cars like the Kia EV6 can fast charge at around 200 kW reliably, that means 20%-80% in around 15 minutes. For the vast majority of people this will be fast enough to be comfortable.
This generation of EVs are already very mature technology. Couple one with a 22kW home charger and you'll have very comfortable and stress free traveling.
Having easy access to a charger helps a lot too. It takes only a few seconds (with practice) to plug at home or work, and you always have a charged battery. During longer trips you may have to pee or buy a coffee, and you are likely going to stop a bit more than 5 minutes. But I agree that a 5 minutes fast charging session would be nice and help people transition to EV a lot.
To use this without overloading the grid one could pair this with a station with properties: high capacity, high discharge, slow charge, low density. Is there such tech? Capacitors would work I guess, but are probably too expensive at the needed scale.
And it won't matter because no matter how fancy the tech you need an industrial base to actually manufacture the damn things.
Myopic energy policies and economically destructive actions taken over the past 2 years will ensure that we're going to have severe de-industrialisation for the foreseeable future which will make much of this high level tech unattainable.
They wanted us to have 21st century energy but forgot that we actually need to bootstrap it upon 20th century energy.
These infrastructure problems are shaping up to be another way for the divide between upper and lower class to widen, and another crucible to cook the middle class in.
As the price of having your own backup power comes down, the willingness of people in power to spend political capital on fixing infrastructure starts to slide. Never mind the “fuck you, I’ve got mine” crowd. With solar panels, a big enough battery pack, and grid power that’s available at least 95% of the time, you can fast charge your vehicle even as the power grid slowly rots around you.
Also, we need to finish the transformation before running out of coveniently/cheaply available non-renewable resources. Given how slow such large long-term changes take, starting early isn't such a bad idea.
I personnally don't care for charging time, efficiency is the single most important thing for me. Plus if you get an Aptera, it's always charging a little. Charging become less of a problem if you are producing electricity.
> Lahiri will speak at the 12th International Advanced Automotive Battery Conference (AABC) Europe in Mainz, Germany. His presentation at 11:20 a.m. CEST (5:00 a.m. EST) titled “Silicon-Anode Lithium-Ion Batteries for EV Applications,” will provide an update on the company’s EV program.
OT: Funny how they mention an exact time for the presentation at the conference without adding a date. The conference https://www.advancedautobat.com/europe is 13 - 15 June. Small PR failure.
If a station has a lengthy peak period of use, then perhaps the batteries would need to be huge.
The number of discharge cycles required for the batteries also matters, as does the conversion losses (charge, discharge). Replacing batteries after end-of-life could be a significant expense. I am guessing the savings from off-peak charging cover that expense given that some charging stations have storage batteries, but at a guess the cost implies ≈10% systemic ecological cost on top of the power charged to the vehicle.
I don't know much about the technology - the lack of larger installations is a red flag. Anyway, I tried to calculate with the numbers from the document above with the following assumptions:
10 charging stations, 6 cars per hour per station, 100 kWh per car. That makes 6 MW peak consumption for the whole "gas" station. A capacitor storing 6 MWh (60 cars served, no incoming electricity) would need to have 120 m³ of storage. Google says that a gas station storage size is between 30 000 and 40 000 gallons (110 000 - 150 000 l) so that seems comparable. Another way to look at it - 200 m³ of storage is a building of 10 x 10 x 2 m, without the need to manipulate flammable liquids.
Not sure about the investment costs (the doc says 5 000 cycles but no cost estimate), how long the peaks are and other aspects of running a gas station. Still, it seems the order of magnitude is about right.
That would be a silly way to approach it. You would be paying $40k+ per month in just demand charges some places. A much better idea is to have battery packs you can charge at constant slower rates and feed the charging station at higher burst rates. Tesla and Electrify America already do this.
Or swappable batteries if we standardize on a few sizes. You can then charge those slowly.
However that brings problems with quality control - a worn battery costs less than the new one. Maybe a model where the customer doesn't own the battery?
That's the other thing that people forget when talking about this. To put 100kWh of capacity into a battery within one minute, you'd need to have a charger capable of delivering 6 megawatts. That's the output of a small hydroelectric power plant.
I also would love to see the cables and cooling solution used for such a charger.
If you have a battery on hand ready to suck down that power in EVs, all you have to do is contact whoever managed such a feat to provide your charging facility with the battery cache.
And you don't have to recharge your cache off the grid/solar/wind/whatever at the same rate you charge the cars of waiting customers. You just need space for a big enough pile of batteries.
Last I checked gas stations were rather bursty around rush-hours. Worst case the charge rate degrades after exhausting the cache. There will always be lulls between the thundering herds to allow filling it all back up.
Is it really all that impossible to imagine? Maybe the gas stations of the future are battery towers.
6 megawatts is 60 amps on a 100 kV line or 300 amps on a 20 kV local distribution line. Don't need a thick wire to do that, train overhead lines carry more power than that.
doesn't have to have that much instantaneous system wide capacity: could be giant super caps, secondary batteries etc(charged overnight or during peak solar times depending on where you are) - or it might share the peak capacity across the whole system (some smarts limiting things if everyone in a larger area charges at the same time - though that also means upping the delivery to individual sites)
> The cells also surpassed 1,000 cycles while retaining 93% of their capacity.
Doesn't anybody think that best ever possible equivalent of 1000 cycles achivable only in lab condition (for example charging and discharging 5000 times from 40% to 60% only in ideal temperature) is a huge waste of non-recyclable cells? 93% will be totally impossible for any human use.
Even if it's 99% efficient(which would be incredible), if you're recharging 100kWh of capacity in a minute, that's using 6MW. So your 1% of inefficiency is still 60kW of heat that you need to do something with. And 60kW of heat is a crazy amount.
Right, but that's the thing about efficiency, it's relative.
Another poster made some napkin calculations, even with a 99% effective process, meaning 1% energy lost to the environment, he calculated several kW of heat you need get out of your system.
Even if you have 99% efficiency, which in reality is mostly unachievable, that's still a huge loss of energy if the energy you're handling is high enough.
As owner of an EV since 2019, I have never wanted that sort of thing. Maybe a 32 amp charger instead of a flimsy extension cord (that I cap to 5 amps).
But in any case, my car starts charging in the evening, and I have enough charge for my next day by early morning.
Not really for cars at least. That's right up there with NCA and NMC chemistries and those seem to do just fine for 200k miles. LFP can do 3000+ cycles with the trade offs being lower energy and power density. Which is why it's usually relegated to models with lower range and power, or vehicles that have the capacity for larger packs like buses.
I charge my ~100 mile range EV about twice a week, so 1000 cycles would last me 10 years, and then I'd still have 93% of the original range - that 7% drop could be hidden by the battery management system so I wouldn't see any drop in range.
The question is: how much of rare earth elements are needed to build such a battery? While enhancing charging time for some, what about the countries extracting those elements and the impact on their environment?
After this discussion, I asked my utility company, and it would cost around $20k to install a 22kW charging station in my home. And what the person told me over the phone was basically "the grid is not ready, we would need to upgrade hundred of meters of cable".
This is in Europe (Switzerland), but it shows how impractical super fast charging is with the current state of the grid and infrastructure (we can't start a turbine when you plug your car). I don't know if trying to make it work is possible. The current grid was built over decades. To me it seems way easier to use other form of energy transfer (hydrogen refill or battery swap).
Edit:
I'm at the limit of the current I can draw from the utility line (40A for my house) as I have a geothermal pump that can use up to 25A when running. Even if I put a smaller charging station, the utility will have to change my introduction box, and in all cases it is quite expensive. I asked for 22kW because we live in a remote location, and while not strictly necessary, it might become so in the future, for example if we have visitors with 3 cars, they might need recharge.