"Electric car range anxiety to be cured by battery that charges in five minutes"

You can use batteries to charge batteries, as stupid as that seems.

The Times article would be considered click-bait, because articles about "fast batteries" have been around for decades. There will be an article, and... nothing happens. A reason to write articles like this, is some lab needs venture money, and once the venture money is all burned up, that's the last you hear of it. Rinse and repeat.

Paul

Hmmm. A lot hinges on what they mean by "charges in five minutes". If the battery is 95% charged, they can charge it to 96% in five minutes. But that doesn't tell you much. The important statistic is how long to charge from almost empty to almost full. In other words "every n miles, you need to factor in a 5-minute fuel stop".

My (diesel) car has a range of about 700 miles on a 60-litre tank. Diesel has an energy density of about 38 MJ/litre.

If (and this is a big assumption) an electric car needs about the same amount of energy to travel the same distance, then that's 60*38 = 2280 MJ (2.28 GJ). And that energy needs to be supplied in the stated 5 minutes (300 seconds).

OK, so the power needed is 2280/300 = 7.6 MW.

Ouch!! That's equivalent to the power used by 1000 electric showers.

But maybe that's not a fair comparison.

So we can reduce the figures - let's say that an EV needs about 1/3 of the energy of a diesel to take into account better efficiency.

And maybe we're happy to go back to the bad old days of a car with a range of maybe 300 miles.

So reduce the energy needed by a factor about about 6.

That's still a charging power consumption of about 1 MW. Can the electricity distribution system cope?

Suppose the charging process is 99% efficient - ie only 1% of the electricity is wasted as heat. That's still a power of 1/100 MW or 10 kW. So the batteries and the charger have got to dissipate waste heat equivalent to three 3-bar electric fires. Gulp!

Then there's the other little matter. If new gas boilers are going to outlawed, all the energy for people's central heating and hot water will need to come from electricity. Oh, but we're closing coal- and gas-fired power stations. Where the F do people think all this extra demand for electricity is going to come from? How much of the country will need to be covered in wind turbines?

Yes.

Yes and almost certainly no.

Yes.

Quite right - and I've pointed out all this before. Trouble is, there are twerps here who Can't Do Sums, so this analysis goes right over their heads, simple though it is.

All of it.

I mean when you run the numbers the whole thing is completely insane.

What is actually happening is that while windmills and solar panels take the headlines, behind the scenes massive work on SMR nuclear power is going on ready for the time the public realises 'renewables dont work'

As far as electric cars go, yes 5 minute charge is possible and with a typical battery in the 60-100kWh bracket that is around 0.72-1.2MW peak inflow required.

And that poses problems of an engineering sort. But those sorts of flows are not unusual in a typical electric train... Eurostar draws up to

Batteries are already equipped with fan cooling.

If you want to think about 'three 3 kw electric fires' instead think about a 300bhp car that runs at 25% efficiency - so 900bhp of HEAT is being dumped by that cars radiators. Around 675 kW. It's no big deal to dump 9kw. And extra fans could be built into the charge points

A bigger problem is the cable that plugs in. And safety. To get currents down to less than - say 100A - you need 10KV or better. having that sort of power handled by your typical Europhile ArtStudent? is a frightening prospect.

But, what it boils down to is a series of expensive engineering challenges that all have to be solved to make it all work.

I think in time they will be, but I wont hold my breath.

Nor will I expect it all to go smoothly without several serious and lethal accidents.

Nuclear electric *as far as is practicable* is probably tomorrows world.

BUT to eliminate fossil fuels almost entirely requires about a 3 times uplift in total grid capacity.

And at least 80GW of nuclear power.

And you don't build that out of wishful thinking

Renewables work.

But you have to maintain a "basket" of power supplies, a reliable baseline supply that meets all constraints, as well as a variable (but basically free) dynamic source.

You can't run a country with only windmills.

That's where all those "natural gas peaker plants" came from.

Power companies here, can tell you "current windmill percent" and "max possible windmill percent" - there is an apparent method for working out what the mix should be. Even your own power authority should be providing these numbers to the users, to give some idea how poorly managed it is.

Texas could have been well managed - it probably had sufficient infrastructure to "look good" when challenged, but the devil was in the details.

Nukes cost money to fuel. They burn more fuel the more you use them. Good nuke designs support continuous fueling, so the reactor continues to run, while fuel is loaded in deactivated zones of the reactor, then those sections are brought online again. A robot on the reactor, loads the fuel. If the reactor is switched off, some of the cost of operation is saved as the fuel isn't being burnt.

If you have a windless day, that's when the reliable baseline is switched on.

I don't know what a headline looks like, but a well managed power utility has some common characteristics in terms of public disclosure. Usually you can find a plan, detailing when the system is going to enter a rough period (30% of nukes need to be replaced all at once). Something has to finance that, and as the Toshiba example shows, the companies doing the work need financial guarantees. Projects that fail half way through, can spell the end of the contractor doing the work. The various schemes to deflect the financing details, those have a price.

Like when a certain bridge was built here, and some nitwit borrowed Deutsch marks to finance it. Basically placing the citizens in debt, forever. (The toll charged to cross the bridge, pays for the interest on the loan. Seemingly no payment of principle.)

Poorly planned borrowing to finance projects, has at times, a very big cost. A lot of utility projects are loaded with very bad terms, in the financing. Like a "free" source of energy, where one of the terms of the financing, "gives" the free power for practically nothing, to a third party for 35 or 50 years. That's the kind of stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

Any energy source with astronomical financing, the citizens are going to take a screwing on it, one way or another.

Paul

The fact that your car can drive 700 miles without a fill-up does not mean that you can drive it that far without a break.

For me, a practical use case is to be able to drive 1-2 hours between breaks. I have a petrol car, but if I had an electric car, I'd just plug it in at each rest break.

But, they only have to do that level of charging for 5 minutes. So, that's not going to heat the car up appreciably? Perhaps the charging station will incorporate fans to help dissipate the heat? Current charging stations don't need that, as they are only charging at a fraction of the rate.

Have a separate fast charge connector under the vehicle, accessed automatically.

Have you never driven longer journeys "non-stop", with just pauses to visit the toilet and swap over drivers?

Manchester to Dover, across to Calais, along to just past St. Malo, a visit to a house, a visit to a "solicitor" to buy it, to a hardware shop for woodworm spray, to the house, back to Calais, across to Dover and back to Manchester. Three of us, over a weekend, so as not to lose time off work.

Also, "non-stop" Manchester to the south of France and Manchester to Nottingham to Stuttgart.

And a number of others.

Would you normally take a rest break for as long as it *really* takes to recharge a car - not the fairyland figure of 5 minutes.

You drove across the channel? No reason why your vehicle couldn't be charged during the crossing. Likewise at the house etc you were visiting. Electricity, unlike diesel or petrol, is available near everywhere.

If driving all day, I'll normally take a sensible lunch break. About an hour, or so. Same as when at work. A 1 hour re-charge is more within the bounds of possibility.

They are never going to provide charging on cross-channel ferries.

The house we were "visiting" (to buy) was not ours until we had done the paperwork, had only a 3kW supply limit, was at the time disconnected and we only stopped there long enough to look (bought as seen on the day) and again for an hour to spray woodworm killer.

Charging anywhere on route, would have delayed us considerably.

I've done 900 miles with just a driver switch and 1200 miles with a 45 minute break half way

Plus cross channel ferry of course

nah. I tend to do 4 hours a stint

I think people don't realise just how much heat you can simply blow away

- getting rid of 10KW is a piece of piss. Getting it out of the batteries while keeping them less than say 60C is more challenging BUT ...

...that's what a fast charge battery is all about - better heat dump capability You can build thin flat cells with air spaces between, fin them and fan blow them.

In model plane circles we can now safely *discharge* a lithium battery in 3 minutes or less. That's the same sort of power dissipation as charging it in 3 minutes or less. There are other reasons why we don't charge that fast however.

Fast charge cells would of course have internal voltage and temperature sensing built in, to tell the charge to slow down a bit, or if it didnt, to disconnect themselves from it - or such smarts might be built totally into the car itself.

This is a very soluble problem. At a weight and complexity cost. But do you want the 300 mile car that needs an hour to charge, or the 150 mile car that you can charge in 5 minutes?

Your Mileage May Vary...;-)

So for the one weekend in your life when you drive to France, buy a house, spray it with woodworm killer, and drive home again, you rent a petrol or diesel car.

Perhaps the other weekends in your life don't involve nonstop driving 1000+ miles and are not as action-packed?

Theo

and covered in mud...and subject to spray....I dont think so

there is a reason why fuel fillers are where they are

Why ever not? I'd say it was the perfect place for it

That's one reason why I liked the idea of plug-in hybrids. Best of both worlds.

Sufficient battery to cope with the average journey of 7 miles, and would have the necessary range for long journeys.

Plus not be as heavy as pure EVs so less carbon particulates from tyre wear.

Indeed you'd need to cover the connector. Probably with something cheap, disposable and biodegradable. A turnip, for example.

And as for those trailer connectors, they'll never work.