Five-minute EV charging: CATL says "Hold my electrons and watch this"
Five-minute EV charging: CATL says "Hold my electrons and watch this"
newatlas.com
Battery in a battery: just one of CATL's new EV tech announcements
18 comments
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Great article, but when comparing to BYD 5 min charging, the CATL system is incomplete.
The new CATL battery can handle faster charging, but they haven't made chargers that can handle or deliver the needed power, to charge that fast.BYD has built the the entire infrastructure from charger to battery, the charging system in the car can handle the 1MW charging power required. (1000 volt at 1000 amp). A battery that can handle it from 10-60% And finally they are setting up charging stations that can supply that level of power.
The CATL battery is great because it shows we can go even further, but BYD has their system available NOW!
What may be the biggest benefit IMO though, is that the new CATL battery will allow cars to charge very fast even with smaller batteries. Which may introduce a completely new type of cheap EV with medium range that can charge super fast, so they can still be used reasonably well for occasional longer trips too. This is also helped by the more than twice as high durability of the new battery. Smaller batteries need to be charged more often, and these batteries can handle that too.
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Meanwhile the fastest charger in my city is ~50kW and is often out of order, so you have to go even slower because most others are 25kW... And it's not better anywhere near, half hour drive gets me to no better chargers. This lack of infrastructre where I live is one of the reasons I still don't have bev (also price).
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We can now get cheap 22kW chargers for home use. But yes electric cars are still expensive, we are hoping 2nd hand EV will drop in price quickly, because there are always new better cars coming out. Here you can almost buy a house for what a new EV with good range cost.
Here it cost extra to use fast chargers, but we have from 50 to 300 kW. But already at 100 kW it's already more than twice the normal cost of electricity.
We have solar panels, so we would really really like an EV? That's free charging half the year. 😎
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Charging this fast is always battery to battery, right? Any idea how many cars can the BYD charger charge before going back to a normal speed (i.e. getting power from the grid)?
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It doesn’t need to be, high voltage transmission lines can run 1000s of MW then you can use a transformer to step the voltage to what you need and then use a rectifier bridge to convert to DC.
The problem I see is the effect of trying to turn on and off 1MW power from a grid could cause problems so the battery could work a bit as an expansion tank to smooth out grid power, so that you always charge it at 100KW and if you need to increase supply you can slowly increase your power draw without shocking the grid.
At the end of the day I personally think 1MW charging is overkill and a 10 minute charge time is a perfectly reasonable goal
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Good luck getting the local utility to supply you a 1MW hookup for your single charging station
18 comments