At the moment I would not buy an electric car because of their price, poor range, short battery life (8 years) and unlikely to be warm inside during the winter. But maybe I could have an electric car with a Lithium ion phosphate battery like this:
I do wonder what home supply you had in mind you'd need to charge 40 kilowatt hour batteries in 10 minutes?
Is every house going to get it's 240kW supply? Were you thinking 3 phase
415V at 200A per phase or single phase at 240V at a mere 1,000A?
No, I think the idea is that petrol stations get repurposed as charging points, making the process of refuelling much the same as it is at the moment.
Ah, my mistake. I'm still wondering how this might be achieved. There are a few 2MW gensets on the market. Could cater for 8 charging points?
Perhaps I need to buy futures in copper.
The battery would make the whole idea of an electric car much more pratical. If you have off street parking at home you could charge the car slowly overnight. If you have to park on the street you could visit a local charging point and wait jiust a bit longer than it takes to fill a car with petrol or diesel.
Perhaps some people need to do the f****ng sums. If you're going to an "electric station" to get your car "refilled" with volts, you're not gonna put up with it taking 10 minutes. 5 at the outside. A 40kWH charge in 5 mins is 12 x 40kWH per hour, or 480kW. And if my local Morrison's station is anything to go by, there could be 12 at it at once. So, allowing for time to pay, say
400kW continuous at peak time, or 4.8, say 5MW. Just for one "electric station".Oh, and 480kW. That's your choice of 480V at 1000 amps or 1kV at 480 amps. Either way, not a cable you want to be handling even assuming you can lift it.
And it gets worse: Assume 99% efiiciency in the process. That means you're looking at getting rid of 5kW of heat generated by the charging process. That's 60kW for the whole station at peak times. Good luck with that.
I rather like Tesla's idea, I think now abandoned, where you swap batteries. You could even choose a capacity for your next journey to keep rental costs down.
There have been many proposed batteries that have come to nothing. Before Lithium chemistries were all the rage Sodium Sulphur was the in-thing.
Nio (Chinese) is to produce a car that has 1000km range and swappable battery. Park in the bay, choose size of battery wanted, the rest is automatic. Bit like the loo which can wipe your arse or change your tampon - be careful what you choose 'don't press /that/ butto.. aaaarrrgh!!!'
Bad day?
I don't think this would be for your local Morrisons, because many of the people doing shopping runs would be slow-charging at home or on-street. This would be targeted at long distance drivers who need a quick fill up - motorway services, truck drivers, etc. In particular for trucking you can get away with a smaller battery (ie more payload) if you can fill up regularly and rapidly.
If you're using it only on larger sites it simplifies things because you can spread the costs by building on a bigger scale.
There are already robotic charging stations, and I assume that might be needed here. For example a charging connector on the bottom of the car where, once the negotiation and optical alignment is complete, an arm comes out of a panel in the ground.
You can also do robotic to conventional 'fuel flap' charging sockets, but the mechanism is more complex. A car might provide both - fuel flap for the humans, port underneath for the robots.
Depending on where the heat is generated (conversion electronics rather than cabling?) you could maybe run a small heat/steam engine? Either way, 60kW isn't actually that much - it's roughly the output of a petrol car engine, which is easily cooled (even when not moving).
However a bigger challenge is how to supply that power from the grid, which won't like such huge demand spikes. I presume it would need a local battery that is slow-charged (in MW) from the grid and then provides the current spikes when charging vehicles. It also might have its own solar/wind/etc generation to reduce grid demand and also transmission losses.
Various things that aren't quite here yet, but I'm sure could be engineered if the demand was there.
Theo
I really can't see the problem of providing on street chargers for every single parking bay on the street. After all we now have phones in our houses, where once you used a phone box.
Um, you know what Lithium iron phosphate is ?
That's the battery in the fairy lights in the garden. Scaled up in size.
The reason those batteries are in Model 3 cars manufactured in China, it's part of a Chinese mandate. There isn't an infinite supply of Cobalt, so some of the battery demand will be satisfied with Lithium iron phosphate. The Model 3 cars with that battery type in place, are for domestic consumption in China at the moment. Presumably, this was the pill Musk had to swallow when getting permission to build a plant there.
Cubic volume wise, Lithium iron phosphate has half the range of Lithium Cobalt.
Are you celebrating yet ?
Yes, universities release press releases all the time, but many of the chemistry advances sink without a bubble appearing on the surface.
Lithium iron phosphate can still catch fire, but it's more abuse-tolerant than the cobalt ones. I don't know about charge cycles. Remember, that in a car application, any sort of fast charging algorithm, pushes the batteries to the wall. Anecdotal evidence from owners is, the more times you use the "max rate" fast charger, the more the car smart charging algorithm prevents you from using it the next time. To meet warranty life, the smart charger "backs off and takes longer", so that the pack will meet warranty life and not need free replacement by the manufacturer.
And I don't really know how many cycles you get from a fairy lamp when pushed. Fairy lamps get microamps from their little solar cell, and they never stop charging (there's no charge controller needed because they will put up with charging abuse such as trying to fill them when they're full).
But if you're a determined twit, Lithium iron phosphate will eventually catch fire, as it has a thermal runaway condition just like Lithium Cobalt does. All the Lithiums do, because... Lithium. The Lithium iron phosphate needs just as careful attention to charge termination as Lithium Cobalt. While the fairy lamp can overcharge with glee (at microamps of current), a car sized battery would not put up with pushing 300kW into it when it's full full full. Now it wants to catch fire.
Paul
A lot longer because you would still have the delays of queuing, paying, plugging in, unplugging.
Bill
No comparison cost-wise.
Bill
There is a way to charge BEV cars without "hose pipes".
But, it means you could install those pads in the street and charge the cars with them. And with no cables or pedestals next to the parking spot, there are fewer materials to vandalise. (Damaged charging infrastructure and out-of-commission chargers are more common than they should be.)
And it doesn't solve the problem of power distribution. There still has to be a jolly great transformer somewhere to power it. And as infrastructure costs go, those aren't cheap. It can take as long as two years, to wind and assemble a custom transformer.
But with a method like that, with overnight parking you might get away with a 7KW feed per pad. There's no particular need for
345KW in those parking spots.If you can afford a Porsche Taycan, I don't see a reason you can't afford a custom charging station for your drive. You could run six of those off one windmill. And be finished 22.5 minutes later. And this example, is a way for Porsche to demo fast charging, without worrying about electric company infrastructure at P.R. events.
Isn't the idea that you have a separate charging battery at home which is charged in slow time but when attached to the car discharged in a short time?
So, you deliver fuel to petrol stations, run generators on it, then charge cars ... why not put the fuel direct into cars?
Nah, the obvious answer is a kind of overhead wire on all major roads to keep it charged up and then it can run on battery in the country. grin. Brian
Some of the more crowded streets around here are terraces and have cars parked up and down both sides of the road after which there is one car's width left. I don't see them charging on the street. There aren't "parking bays".
So with my Morrisons example, waste heat goes up to 600kW. All within the forecourt.
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