The battery on your electric vehicle (EV) is almost empty, but there’s a station up the road. You roll up to it, park and get out of the car, tap to secure payment for the charging process, unhook the charging cable and plug it in. As it’s being juiced up, you walk into the convenience store to grab some refreshments, use the washroom, and by the time you’re out seven to eight minutes later, the battery is fully charged, ready for you to be on your way again.
Sounds peachy, but it’s not going to happen, not exactly in that same manner. While Level 3 DC fast charging (DCFC) is making serious inroads in terms of power (350 kW to 400 kW) and speeds (up to 80% SOC in under 20 mins, in some cases), the reality is that getting an EV’s battery to full will never be as fast as the refuelling process that motorists are used to now, according to Johan Hellsing of China Euro Vehicle Technology (CEVT).
The principal expert, Motion & Energy at the innovation centre for the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group believes that there are quite a few hurdles in getting charging times down to a few minutes (on average, the time needed to refuel and pay for conventional fuels such as petrol and diesel is around seven minutes), and questions the need for that kind of absolute speed.
“My personal opinion is that I don’t think we are very close (to that). It’s still a challenge we still need to work on, but to reach similar levels of say, refueling a car, I don’t think we will ever come there. It will be difficult and too costly,” he told paultan.org during a recent media interview.
“The mindset is of course that you would like to charge as fast as you can refuel, and there are some battery technologies that might reach something like 10 mins to full charge, but it will come at a cost. There may be cases where it won’t be possible to load the grid with that power in a short time, so you need to have some local storage, which means additional cost,” he added.
Hellsing said that the advantages of charging very fast are getting smaller, especially in the urban environment, where most normally charge the car overnight via normal charging. For long-distance excursions, the 15 to 20 minute timeframe that some manufacturers are working at would be very workable, because it would also give the driver a chance to stretch his/her legs.
“If you’re doing a really long trip and need to charge in between, probably that’s a good time for a break as well,” he said. Still, you never know – at the rate technology is developing, you might eventually be able to one day replicate the speed of a regular refueling experience, but in much cleaner fashion.
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Or is that too pessimistic?
With Mahle and Allotrope ultrafast charging technology, a BMW iX 71kwh battery would only take 4 minutes to fully charged up and good to go for another 425km.
I say the technology is here today but these folks are not giving it out to society and would rather drip feed us something they developed 5-10 years ago. Similarly to Toyota which got them sued by pressure groups.
As opposed to previous story and other EV Battery developments e.g. sodium etc
https://paultan.org/2021/09/23/mahle-and-allotrope-reveal-ultra-fast-charging-for-e-bikes-90-second-charge-time-100000-charge-cycles/
This guy surname is badass…
As he pointed out, it is more to do with cost more than anything, at least from his company’s POV. I mean, we can see how slow the infra is being implemented here. To be fair, we are well-known slow adopters.
Maybe once the cost-benefit improves, esp. if proven by a rival company, his tune will change.
He has a great name though; maybe off-hours he hunts Vampires.
The problem is the last 20% to full charge. If we just accept 80% as full capacity, charging times are ok.
Charging up to 80% full capacity may also likely prolong the battery lifespan.
It’s like comparing a rambutan to a durian.
using current to rearrange polarity inside a chemical medium ain’t so simple process compares to refuelling fix amount of combustible liquid into storage tank
Too bad nobody has made the ‘scientific breakthrough’ in figuring how to make ‘liquid electricity’. Alternatively, there’s the hydrogen fuel cell EV which can be fully refueled in roughly 5 minutes.
300kW to 400kW is ALOT of power. In a typical building the largest item that consumes this much power is a chiller. Individual items such as pumps, cooling tower, lifts, escalator fans do not consume such a large amount of power.
A typical petrol station uses 100A 3 phase meter. To have even one 300kW DC fast charger you might need to upgrade the upstream supply chain. Not many petrol stations can totally convert to fast charging station like a Tesla supercharger station unless TNB is willing to forgo the steep contribution fee to pull in an 11kV supply. Even more if require HDD. If there is no juice in the region TNB may even need a whole new PPU. Also need to have a new consumer side facility with tranformers, swtichgears etc to step down from 11kV to 415V for these superchargers.
Everyone talking about DC fast chargers like Tesla superchargers but no one really have an idea on how to bring in the huge incoming power supply to the DC fast charger.
I don’t think people can’t accept the charge time of 30 min to juice up from 10% – 80% which can give a least 300km drive range. Driving 300km will likely take 2.5 hours drive and absolutely right to stop by for a 30 min resting time at R&R. A toilet plus a teh tarik break will easily pass the 30 min time. By then the battery will likely can give another 300km drive. In China people are driving EV cars to travel more than 1000km and stop by to charge without complain. Why should we complain that the 30 min is feeling like taking a year long period.
Again the best place to charge EV car is at home which can give 100% charge. With helps from solar panel (if affordable) the cost of driving EV is extremely low. Worry of battery life cycle? The solution is solid state battery which will going to reveal soon and the battery life cycle easily pass 1 million kilometers still retain 90% of capacity.