"In China, BYD is currently building 4,000 1.5MW charging stations across the country, with plans to roll out 20,000 by the end of this year.
Although not quite as ambitious, a BYD spokesperson for the European side of the business told me that the company is targeting 2,000 1.5mW Flash Charging stations across Europe before 2026 comes to a close."
I'm fascinated by the economics of this. How does BYD make money on this? Do they run the chargers at a profit? How much will this work out per km for drivers compared to diesel or gasoline?
People think of BYD as a budget car marker, but this to support its luxury brand Denza. The Denza Z9 GT EV has a range of 1,036 km (644 miles) on these chargers. I'm guessing having the best charagers is going to be seen as premium/luxury too.
'Ready in 5, full in 9' — this Chinese EV charges to 70% in only 5 minutes, has a 644-mile range, and it's coming to Europe in April
ROFL a typical marketing stunt.
Here in Germany that won‘t work as the bottleneck is the connection to the power grid. Especially when it comes to high power demands. You need thick cables for those power volumes. And those cables do not just arrive over night magically.
The specialists for those connection are rare and we have a hige waiting queue until 2030 for solar parks, battery parks, and some new electricity stations. Was the high demand foreseeable? Yes. Unfortunately in capitalism scarcity increases value which is good for the stakeholder/ doormen of utility companies.
2000 across Europe is not that many, and not every European country slept on infrastructure and electric mobility as we did.
Given that most flagship electric vehicles currently charge at 300-350kW max, and at least in Germany 300kW HPCs are pretty much the top end, 1.5MW are pretty damn impressive. Would be pretty sick to have that charging available for daily use.
Perhaps. All I care is more options so people stop buying Teslas when they realize the shitbox is like two toasters tied together with twine compared to what China is doing with EVs
Feels like you could potentially partially mitigate that by having on-site batteries that “slow charge” from the grid, and then fast charge the cars.
That is what they do for solar farms. Due to low volume connection issues and its financially more attractive to feed power in the evening/ sun down as prices are higher at those times.
I‘m not sure how viable this is for loading stations. They volume a truck needs is quite massive. However, Im still not sure if you ever need a truck full charge. Typically, long distance trucks stop at night for a sleep. This 8 hrs can be used for loading the battery.
For sure, but in this case the batteries are not primarily for storage, just to act as a super capacitor (or maybe that’s actually what you need, super capacitors) so you don't have to support massive cabling from the power station to the charging station, just from the on-site batteries to the car.
The way I read it is that it's the dedicated charging stations in public areas, as opposed to charging points running off a domestic energy supply in the driveway.
With that, most of the CCS T2 tethered chargers have big chonky boi cables, so much so that they're quite unwieldy without the gantries holding some of them up.
Fast chargers are brilliant mind. I use a 75KW charger on a trunk road next to a coffee shop, and it's generally gone from 30% to 80% in 25-35 mins - enough time to get a coffee, read some text messages, get into the headspace of hitting the road again and disconnecting it. Thing is, the fast chargers aren't far off petrol prices at 70-85p/KWh.
Something like a five minute charge would be quite something, perhaps makes long distance EV travelling more comfortable.
Yes, but it is already difficult connecting a new EV charging installation with a good number of 350kW chargers in busy places. Your domestic electricity supply is probably about 60A at 230V, meaning a maximum of 13.8kW per home. 1.5MW is the total maximum electricity demand of about 100 homes, but the actual average usage is more like 300W power home, so 1.5MW is more like 4,900 homes - a small town.
An installation at a service station with a modest 6 chargers would be 9MW, which is more than the power capacity of the median power plant in the UK (which is 5-6MW)
Or the batteries are getting bigger (which they do). But in this scenario there won’t be a business and money to earn. Many people would fuel their car with cheap solar power produced by theirselves.