Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), the largest battery manufacturer in the world with a 38% share of the global market, has just announced some fairly significant breakthroughs in battery tech that aren't just theoretical; they're already hitting the market.
  • ExLisperAEnglish
    1·
    11 hours ago

    I see couple other problems:

    • you need to put some of the chargers in the middle of nowhere (next to a highway, hundredths of km from big cities. in Spain for example there’s a lot of depopulated areas). Building all the infrastructure to get the power there will be very expensive
    • even in cities changing the grid like that can be very difficult. My office wanted to put 10 slow (20kW) chargers in the office and it took a year for the power company to make the necessary changes.
    • at a gas station it’s hard to break the gasoline supply. Individual pumps can break but the supply is very robust. If anything at the 1MW charger breaks (lines, transformer, converter) the entire things goes out of service and will take hours/days to fix. Building those charges to be as reliable as gas stations will be difficult and expensive.

    The charging times are not about how long do you have to wait while your car is charging but how many cars can you charge at peak hours. Last Easter in Spain there were huge lines to the charges because everyone was driving at the same time and there were simply not enough chargers. 5 min vs 10 min charging means the line is moving twice as fast.

    • BussyCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      For low travel areas slower charging and batteries make a lot more sense as the investment in ultra fast charging is not viable and I don’t see that changing

      I think regulatory inertia Is always going to be a problem but if we are regularly adding charging stations it will get faster as power companies have an incentive to build them and you get staff trained up on them

      Gas stations can still have single point failures for example if their underground tank gets contaminated or damaged and they don’t have a back up and electric doesn’t need to have single point failures you can run them in parallel with breakers able to isolate portions of the system and have redundant transformers

      EV works best if most people charge at home/work and people only charge in public if they don’t have the ability to do it at home or they are on a long drive. So you don’t need to meet the same cars per hour as gas stations.

      I don’t see a world where fast charging is as cheap as slower charging just due to increased losses and more expensive equipment so I believe having 10 500kw chargers would be a better investment than 6 1MW chargers even though technically the MW chargers have a larger throughput they are more expensive to produce/run and have more issues if for example 8 people arrive at once

      • ExLisperAEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        Agree with everything (especially the 10 x 500kW > 6 x 1MW part), I’m not saying building out the infrastructure will not happen, I’m just saying that it will be difficult and what I see in real world is far from the ideal you’re describing. On any longer travel I have to pass through low travel areas. Entering cities to charge is impractical because getting in and out can take 0.5-1h. The chargers are still unreliable so planning a longer route is not easy. I have to carefully check the chargers maps, looking at the distances between each charger and possible backups. 99% of people are not going to do this. Until a big. reliable network of fast chargers exists they will just stick to gasoline cars (or protest if you force them to switch). And building such networks is a slow and expensive.