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New '5-minute charge' BEV batteries.


Alan de Enfield

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44 minutes ago, IanD said:

There's a lot of analysis being done on this, and it's not as big a problem as it appears at first.

 

This isn't like petrol stations where most people drive in with an almost empty tank once a week and leave with a full one, most charging will be done more slowly and in small dribs and drabs. A lot of cars will be charged more slowly overnight when there's plenty of spare grid (and power generation) capacity. Others will be charged slowly during the daytime when plugged in either at work or places like supermarkets (or sat on the driveway at home).

 

Only a small fraction of the total power demand will come from "filling stations" with fast chargers, and yes these will be a challenge to connect to the grid since they'll draw maybe 1MW-10MW depending on size. Demand levelling can use capacity from plugged-in charged cars so their batteries act as energy reservoirs -- the grid will pay you more per kWh to do this (because demand will be higher), then you can recharge when the cost is lower.

 

Don't get me wrong, this is something that's going to need a lot of work, it's by no means trivial, it's a huge challenge. But it will happen, because it has to happen to get CO2 emissions down. And the good news is we (on a canal forum) don't have to solve the problems ourselves, because the enormous car industry will do it ?

For once I have to agree with Ian.

This issue of range anxiety is one being pushed by peeps who dont have a clue ....ie dont own a BEV.

I have no range anxiety with mine. It has a range of 350 miles in summer and 250 miles in winter. Most days when we drive we do less than 100 miles. Therefore no problem wotsoever. Pop it on charge overnight  (30 sec job) and full in the morning (well 80% anyway). On those few days when we do longer trips and we have done 3 to Jockland since taking delivery of ours, there are plenty of superchargers on the motorway. These put in circa 150 miles of range (summer performance) in 20 mins so only just over half as slow as these 'new ones' in the article. We tend to stop for a coffee every 2 hours so a lecky top up is easy.....even easier as there is always somewhere to park!

OK, what happens if a charger is broken....well we just go on to the next one...but its never happened.....and you can see from the in car display how many are using the chargers you are heading for. Do I get worried? Not really. I joined the AA so know i can get to where I am going if I couldnt recharge.

I would guess within a year, the big garages from BP and Shell will have fast chargers similar to the Tesla ones as that is their future.

Teslas are expensive but price will come down. The bonus is that I am paying around 2/3rds less for my 'fuel'...circa £20 a month rather than £60 for our normal motoring.

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4 minutes ago, Dr Bob said:

For once I have to agree with Ian.

This issue of range anxiety is one being pushed by peeps who dont have a clue ....ie dont own a BEV.

I have no range anxiety with mine. It has a range of 350 miles in summer and 250 miles in winter. Most days when we drive we do less than 100 miles. Therefore no problem wotsoever. Pop it on charge overnight  (30 sec job) and full in the morning (well 80% anyway). On those few days when we do longer trips and we have done 3 to Jockland since taking delivery of ours, there are plenty of superchargers on the motorway. These put in circa 150 miles of range (summer performance) in 20 mins so only just over half as slow as these 'new ones' in the article. We tend to stop for a coffee every 2 hours so a lecky top up is easy.....even easier as there is always somewhere to park!

OK, what happens if a charger is broken....well we just go on to the next one...but its never happened.....and you can see from the in car display how many are using the chargers you are heading for. Do I get worried? Not really. I joined the AA so know i can get to where I am going if I couldnt recharge.

I would guess within a year, the big garages from BP and Shell will have fast chargers similar to the Tesla ones as that is their future.

Teslas are expensive but price will come down. The bonus is that I am paying around 2/3rds less for my 'fuel'...circa £20 a month rather than £60 for our normal motoring.

Do you keep any records to show what fraction of your annual energy use is from "traditional" charging stations (like petrol stations, including superchargers) and what is from "slow top-up" chargers (home, work, supermarket, car-park)?

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We keep meticulous records for our vehicles and the results are quite enlightening. As said elsewhere we rarely use public charging points because our EV has a built-in petrol generator. Over the last two years and approximately 30,000 miles our running cost (including all electricity for charging, petrol, road tax and maintenance) has averaged a fraction over 7p a mile. Our previous best with a diesel BMW was almost twice as much. That said the advantage isn't really about financial costs it is about cutting emissions and this is achieved in two ways:

  • The electricity that we charge the car with is supplied by Pure Planet - a company that claims to have its energy 100% from non carbon sources;
  • The petrol generator runs at optimum load at pre-set rpm and at pre-determined temperature so produces fewer pollutants than if it were required to drive the wheels.
Edited by NB Alnwick
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27 minutes ago, NB Alnwick said:

We keep meticulous records for our vehicles and the results are quite enlightening. As said elsewhere we rarely use public charging points because our EV has a built-in petrol generator. Over the last two years and approximately 30,000 miles our running cost (including all electricity for charging, petrol, road tax and maintenance) has averaged a fraction over 7p a mile. Our previous best with a diesel BMW was almost twice as much. That said the advantage isn't really about financial costs it is about cutting emissions and this is achieved in two ways:

  • The electricity that we charge the car with is supplied by Pure Planet - a company that claims to have its energy 100% from non carbon sources;
  • The petrol generator runs at optimum load at pre-set rpm and at pre-determined temperature so produces fewer pollutants than if it were required to drive the wheels.

And how has your use been divided between purely electric (i.e. from external charger) and petrol?

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If we go on a journey longer than 80ish miles in our BMW i3 we usually have to engage the range extender simply because there's not enough charge points around so we are cautious. For instance we drive (or did before covid) 82 miles to visit our son & his family, en route we can call in at Fleet Services M3 for a 15ish minute charge, but..chargers number only 2 and can't be relied on to work, so for us more chargers would be great, no need to use range extender just drop in somewhere for a quick top up + coffee and wee, if charger is faulty then use one of several more or drive a few miles to the next one, we only have a range of about 100 miles anyway, 80 - 90 in reality to stop battery going below 20%, a 50kw charge is the highest we can go so 20 - 80% would give us roughly 70 miles, prob 1/1.5 hours drive, long enough for me. 

 

OK bigger cars can charge for a bit longer on a supercharger and go further but for the likes of us (majority of EV owners) more charging stations is the answer,

Edited by nb Innisfree
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2 hours ago, IanD said:

 

If you want to charge faster than this everything has to be designed to cope with the higher charging currents, which puts the cost up just to allow faster charging

 

I'd quibble a bit at this point.  You don't need to upgrade the drive systems to allow faster charging, just the charging system from the connector to the batteries.

 

I do agree that if you have to stop and charge during a long run there is very little practical difference between being stopped for 5 minutes or 15 minutes.

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46 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

I'd quibble a bit at this point.  You don't need to upgrade the drive systems to allow faster charging, just the charging system from the connector to the batteries.

 

I do agree that if you have to stop and charge during a long run there is very little practical difference between being stopped for 5 minutes or 15 minutes.

The motor is pretty much the only thing that doesn't have to be upgraded, and by no means the most expensive.

 

The way the controller/charger is normally built in a BEV is as a bidirectional AC-DC converter, which both converts battery DC to (usually) 3-phase AC for the motor, and the reverse (battery DC to 1-phase or 3-phase AC or variable-voltage DC) when charging -- this way all the expensive high-current high-voltage components (IGBTs/MOSFETs/GaN) and their supporting components (cooling and heatsinks, gate drivers, control/monitoring circuits) do double duty.

 

Whether combined like this or separate, either way adding "5-minute charging" (12C, like in the publication) is pretty damn difficult/expensive -- a typical 400V/50kWh battery (and many are bigger than this) needs to be charged at 600kW/1500A, 4x the typical charge/discharge current (3C). You also need a battery that can accept charge at 12C without damage or needing a ludicrous amount of cooling, even at 99% efficiency that's 6kW you have to get out of the battery -- and charger efficiency will be at best 98% (most are around 96%) so you have to get rid of at least 12kW out of that, probably more. 1500A cables, connectors and contactors are big, unwieldy and expensive.

 

Ultra-high-power electronics (hundreds of kW) in a small space like in a car are very challenging ?

 

Edited by IanD
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1 hour ago, David Mack said:

And how has your use been divided between purely electric (i.e. from external charger) and petrol?

We have used 776 litres of petrol in the last 30,000 miles - this is higher than many owners of similar cars have achieved and was due to:

  • Using the car for work (until I retired last September) which involved a lot of stop/start driving. This depletes the battery quickly because every time the car stops long enough to cool down it has to use electricity to warm the batteries back to their optimum operating temperature.
  • During this time Jane was having to make frequent visits to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford and the round trip was more than our battery range.
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3 minutes ago, NB Alnwick said:

We have used 776 litres of petrol in the last 30,000 miles - this is higher than many owners of similar cars have achieved and was due to:

  • Using the car for work (until I retired last September) which involved a lot of stop/start driving. This depletes the battery quickly because every time the car stops long enough to cool down it has to use electricity to warm the batteries back to their optimum operating temperature.
  • During this time Jane was having to make frequent visits to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford and the round trip was more than our battery range.

That's 1.6l/100km which is still pretty damn good, far lower then any ICE. What's your battery pack capacity/electric-only range?

Edited by IanD
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2 hours ago, IanD said:

Do you keep any records to show what fraction of your annual energy use is from "traditional" charging stations (like petrol stations, including superchargers) and what is from "slow top-up" chargers (home, work, supermarket, car-park)?

I'm using the Tesla FI app which keeps a track of the details of all drives and charges. We have done circa 50 charges in the 9 months on slow overnight 'home' chargers (13A) - over half in this marina - on a 32A commando socket - total circa 820kWh and around 15 charges on the motorway superchargers circ 500kWh. The supercharge total also includes time on the fast chargers in Falkirk which are free - and the 'slow' chargers include a couple of free charges in work. I rarely go up to the office in Scotland but when I do I charge it for free. Apart from the free ones in Falkirk (gov. fitted in a EV charging site) I've never stopped in a petrol station supermarket etc. No need to.

The cost is 16p a unit on the slow chargers and 25p on the superchargers. I think that is around £250 for the 5,000 miles less the free stuff so say £220.

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10 minutes ago, Dr Bob said:

I'm using the Tesla FI app which keeps a track of the details of all drives and charges. We have done circa 50 charges in the 9 months on slow overnight 'home' chargers (13A) - over half in this marina - on a 32A commando socket - total circa 820kWh and around 15 charges on the motorway superchargers circ 500kWh. The supercharge total also includes time on the fast chargers in Falkirk which are free - and the 'slow' chargers include a couple of free charges in work. I rarely go up to the office in Scotland but when I do I charge it for free. Apart from the free ones in Falkirk (gov. fitted in a EV charging site) I've never stopped in a petrol station supermarket etc. No need to.

The cost is 16p a unit on the slow chargers and 25p on the superchargers. I think that is around £250 for the 5,000 miles less the free stuff so say £220.

So your energy split is probably about 20% superchargers (traditional "petrol station" refuelling model, wait while charging) and 80% slower/parked chargers ("new electric" refuelling while parked/otherwise occupied)?

Edited by IanD
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5 hours ago, IanD said:

Usual battery problem, which is the same as for "fantastic new super-efficient solar panels" -- what matters most to 99% of the market is cost per kWh (or kWh capacity for a given price car, which amounts to the same thing). So if the new battery gets to be competitive on price -- and it has to catch up with existing batteries made in huge volumes, just like for monosilicon solar panels -- then it will indeed take over the market. If it's more expensive it will stay as a niche product.

 

This is the bit that Alan conveniently snipped from the end of the article which makes exactly this point:

 

"Anna Tomaszewska, at Imperial College London, UK, who reviewed the fast-charging batteries in 2019, was more cautious about the speed of their rollout. “I think technologies [like StoreDot’s] could start entering the market in the next five years or so. However, since they will be more difficult and expensive to manufacture, we’re likely to initially only see them in niche markets that are highly performance-driven and not as price-sensitive as electric vehicles,” she said."

A bloody big one. Charging up a 50kWh car battery (not especially big nowadays) in 5 minutes needs a 600kW charger...

I actually prefer part of article posted with a source link so that people who are interested can go and read the rest. (sometimes such articles have images and videos which are difficult to copy, so a direct link gives better experience)

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1 hour ago, IanD said:

So your energy split is probably about 20% superchargers (traditional "petrol station" refuelling model, wait while charging) and 80% slower/parked chargers ("new electric" refuelling while parked/otherwise occupied)?

Yep.....but that is totally dependent on how many trips to Jockland we do per year (3 or 4 normally).

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54 minutes ago, restlessnomad said:

I actually prefer part of article posted with a source link so that people who are interested can go and read the rest. (sometimes such articles have images and videos which are difficult to copy, so a direct link gives better experience)

Me too, both snipped bits and a link is the best option.

 

But then it's best if the snipped bits include not just the (positive?) content from whoever wrote it (and is very often promoting the idea) but also any (negative?) analysis from more impartial commentators, assuming there is any. Otherwise we're back in the confirmation bias bubble again... ?

 

At least the original article did include some comment about this, even though it was one paragraph right at the end -- a lot of publications would just have recycled the publicity puff without even checking.

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8 minutes ago, Dr Bob said:

Yep.....but that is totally dependent on how many trips to Jockland we do per year (3 or 4 normally).

Of course, same for everybody, it depends on usage. Some others (many?) have said they never use "filling stations" at all (0%), some (only a few?) use them much more than you (50% or more). It would need a proper look at usage over a lot of different people and use cases to work out an overall figure, and this would probably change with time anyway as BEV adoption goes up.

 

But I expect your result is not that far away from typical, which means that the power needed for all the "petrol-station-style superchargers" is a fraction of total BEV energy use.

 

Which in turn affects the economics of them compared to petrol stations -- if the fuel running cost for BEV is half that of ICE (a reasonable guesstimate) and we use your 20% figure, the total revenue for these "electric stations" will be 10x smaller than all today's petrol stations put together.

 

That's going to transform how many of them there are and where they're put -- and might make paying for their building and grid connection difficult. They'll probably get round this by selling the power at a much higher price, like rip-off petrol stations on motorways do today but more so -- I was horrified last time I drove down the M1 from Yorkshire to find a price of 149p/l when it was 120p at my local station near home ?

 

Of course if they do this there'll be even more incentive for people not to use them, they'll end up as a "distress purchase" for people who either don't care about the cost or have no choice...

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1 hour ago, restlessnomad said:

I actually prefer part of article posted with a source link so that people who are interested can go and read the rest. (sometimes such articles have images and videos which are difficult to copy, so a direct link gives better experience)

I would agree. I read the full article early this morning (only once) and have just scanned the posts on this topic. It's obvious that many are basing their opinions on very little of the information contained in the full article. Better be informed then debate. I also accept that the whole article could just be spin.

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3 minutes ago, Slim said:

 It's obvious that many are basing their opinions on very little of the information contained in the full article. Better be informed then debate. I also accept that the whole article could just be spin.

 

I did like the fact that this press release is about a system that actually exists and has been assembled in a battery factory, not the usual "well it works in the lab, give us more money and another 10 years" type of story.

 

That alone makes it worth discussing, if only for novelty value! :)

 

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5 minutes ago, Slim said:

I would agree. I read the full article early this morning (only once) and have just scanned the posts on this topic. It's obvious that many are basing their opinions on very little of the information contained in the full article. Better be informed then debate. I also accept that the whole article could just be spin.

I don't think the technical part of the article (very fast-charging batteries) is spin.

 

The fact that this would enable 5minute charging for cars is partial spin -- it is technically possible, but unlikely to be widely applicable in real life. Little things like smartphones -- absolutely, this would be great. Huge high-power things like cars, much less likely.

 

Any "this will transform the business" claim always deserves a huge pinch of salt, unless they've really done their due diligence and shown that it's not only better but also no more expensive, because this is the reality for power sources. Solar panels, windfarms, modular nuclear reactors, batteries for BEV -- they all live or die on cost.

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Today's Times trails a piece that is in nature magazine about development of a lithium iron phosphate battery that has been developed at Penn State Unuversity. They are claiming it is cheap, cobalt free and recharges to privide a car range of 200 miles in 10 minutes. Unfortunately the published research is behind a paywall.

 

The nature article

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21 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

I did like the fact that this press release is about a system that actually exists and has been assembled in a battery factory, not the usual "well it works in the lab, give us more money and another 10 years" type of story.

 

That alone makes it worth discussing, if only for novelty value! :)

 

Absolutely, that puts it way ahead of most so-called technological breakthroughs, including many of the other super-batteries that have been promised ?

 

The problem is that the headline "can charge in 5 minutes" feature is not what most of the target markets really want. If the headline was "double the energy density" or "half the cost" or "double the life" then things would be very different, because these are what the BEV market desperately wants, not 5 minute charging which it can't really use.

 

The chemistry they're using might well be able to deliver some of these, especially low cost by avoiding things like cobalt, and if it does this will make it a success.

 

If all it delivers is "5 minute charging" and it's not competitive on cost, I don't think it'll get widespread use.

5 minutes ago, Cheshire cat said:

Today's Times trails a piece that is in nature magazine about development of a lithium iron phosphate battery that has been developed at Penn State Unuversity. They are claiming it is cheap, cobalt free and recharges to privide a car range of 200 miles in 10 minutes. Unfortunately the published research is behind a paywall.

 

The nature article

That's also mentioned in the first post in this thread.

 

For anyone who's technically minded, the link at the bottom of the Guardian article has a lot of interesting information in it:

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590116819300116

Edited by IanD
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1 hour ago, IanD said:

 

Which in turn affects the economics of them compared to petrol stations -- if the fuel running cost for BEV is half that of ICE (a reasonable guesstimate) and we use your 20% figure, the total revenue for these "electric stations" will be 10x smaller than all today's petrol stations put together.

 

That's going to transform how many of them there are and where they're put -- and might make paying for their building and grid connection difficult. They'll probably get round this by selling the power at a much higher price, like rip-off petrol stations on motorways do today but more so -- I was horrified last time I drove down the M1 from Yorkshire to find a price of 149p/l when it was 120p at my local station near home ?

 

True in terms of private car users, but the headline price of fuel at a motorway filling station is not what most users actually pay. It's just there to milk those few drivers that haven't had the foresight to fill up beforehand somewhere cheaper. The vast majority of motorway filling station users are business users and holders of fuel cards. And the price they pay is down to the terms of the fuel card scheme, and not necessarily related to the stated pump price. For lorry drivers in particular, the sheer convenience of filling upon the motorway is clear and having the bill charged direct to the company makes it an obvious thing to do.

Once we have electric trucks, the same will apply, which will give the motorway operators much the same volume of business as they have at present from the haulage trade. Pricing for truck users will work out at a level which is competitive yet provides a return on investment. And the private motorist paying out of his own pocket will probably still get fleeced!

Edited by David Mack
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