I recently read through this and was just curious what others thought the pitfalls or unforseen issues might be with quickly or steadily transitioning to such in a fairly environmentally friendly manner.
Hate the title name, but I think I have to use the article title as the title.
Doping is a common term in electronics, it’s just that the article is on Top Gear so they didn’t explain it well.
The author of this article, smh…
Give him a break, he’s less than a year old! 2 years if you count gpt3.
Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.
A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.
It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.
Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.
Taking this at face value, I note two things:
- This shit would overload our current electricity grid fast!
- This is a terrifying ammount of power going into the car.
As for point 1, the power has to come from somewhere, and our current power grid is already having problems keeping up with current charging currents, and if a battery like this will be able to get charged 80% in 9 min, to use it you have to have a power source to supply that ammount of power in that time.
This could possibly be mitigated somewhat with huge batteries at the charge station that get charged slowly over time and that is then used to boost the charging of the car, but this would need specialized maintenance and commes with big potential risks.
As for point 2, the huge ammounts of power being delivered to the car will require a perfect connection between the power source and the car, it will require heavy insulation in and around the car, I wouldn’t want to be within 10 meters of the car while charging due to potential risk of arc flash.
It’s not such as impressive amount of power compared to existing installations. Say 75 kWh battery. 80% of that would be 60 kWh, charged over 9 minutes. That’s a 400 kW charger. Meanwhile 300 kW are reasonable common and there are a few 500 kW chargers out there. A 500 kW charger would charge the car to 80% in 7 minutes.
Thanks for giving me actual numbers, that makes it sound less insane.
80 % in 9 minutes is only 5 C, not really something that amazing.
It’s still faster than most lithium batteries can charge. They still have a long ways to go to reach the charge rate of super capacitors though.
Most lithium batteries are real, however, and not a stupid lab thing that only performs in one category and no other, while an are needed in the real world.
I’d be afraid of wearing out a battery super fast. Outside of super long trips that require recharging to arrive, I’d much rather leave a car plugged in overnight rather than need to pay to replace batteries. Also, like @stoy@lemmy.zip said, it’s a lot of power at once that could get dangerous if something goes wrong or overload grids if lots of people start fast charging their cars.
Though of course I’m sure it’s a great achievement and hopefully the research is useful.
the power grid should either cope or be destroyed. We cannot let some beaurocrats hold back progress just because they think that utilities should be “reliable” and “safe”.
You from Texas?
on of the other states that has a weir d power grid (several citys and villages have their own)
