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CATL will form a 50-50 joint venture with the UK’s Octopus Energy to jointly build a heavy-truck battery swap network in Europe.
CATL will form a 50-50 joint venture with the UK’s Octopus Energy to jointly build a heavy-truck battery swap network in Europe.
Everything you write is as true for 1.5 MW compared to old 150 kW chargers.
First of all if you charge 3 stacks at a time, you can use the same cables but having 3 of them.
Second you can double the output on the same cables by going from 800 volt to 1600.
So in response I’d say that the Truck could even charge at 10 MW with higher voltage batteries, using multiple battery stacks.
Your argument is as naive as if I claimed CATL can’t switch 3 batteries simultaneously, because that would require 3 machines to perform the switch.
I think you’re naively assuming that 10x the power is 10x the difficulty, and 100x the power is 100x the difficulty.
A 10 MW project is considerably more complex than a 1 MW project, and site selection alone gets significantly more complicated when you need to be near a large enough substation (or be willing to plan out a grid connection and your own substation). A 100 MW project pretty much needs to build out their own dedicated substation, and the whole administrative/legal/regulatory negotiation of connecting that to the grid.
It just seems much simpler to build out a system that steadily charges batteries that can be swapped rather than volatile of spikes in usage and building out the capacity for irregular peaks rather than a steady average.
No it’s not, it’s perfectly linear compared to what we are already doing. And is probably cheaper to install than the battery swap stations, and for sure cheaper to run once installed.
Charging stations with more than 30 400 kW chargers are already common here.
Making the chargers more powerful does not really increase power demand much, because charging is done quicker requiring fewer stations, to handle the same amount of customers. Also these fast chargers can be installed gradually, because not everybody can utilize the high power. But despite of that, we see these stations with 30+ 400 kW chargers, despite very few today can utilize 400 kW, if these were expensive to install, I think there would be a much greater mix of less powerful chargers.
We are transitioning to electricity in general, both regarding heating houses where installation of heat pump systems are currently subsidized, and electric cars that are now 80% of sales here, and finally we have a lot of Data Centers in Denmark because they want green energy that we can supply.
So the electric grid is already being heavily expanded to meet all these demands, although the heavy demand for data centers have caused the waiting time to go up.
I may be wrong, but without mandatory standardization, I don’t think battery swap is where the future is at, as cool as that might be.
That’s no more true than saying building a 10-story building is only 10 times as complex as building a 1-story building. The engineering and design for something like that makes scaling more difficult. Not that a 10-story building is unachievable for architects and engineers, but it does change the nature of the project (and the expertise/approvals needed to make it happen), and where it can be feasibly built.
Yeah, I suspect that the total simultaneous capacity for a charging station like that is much, much lower than 12 MW. If you happen to have 30 cars plugged in at once it likely drops power delivered to each one, and, like you say, it’s very unlikely for there to be all stalls taken by all 400kW capable vehicles. In the US, it’s pretty common for the charging stations to have shared power so that during peak hours, cars don’t actually max out their draw from each charger. Show me an example and we can look at the specific specifications of that particular station/site.
Heating houses is basically insignificant compared to megawatt installations. A 2000 square foot (185 sq m) house can be heated with a 3000W heat pump (or, if you’re super wasteful, 9000W of resistive heating). It’ll take about 330 of those huge houses to hit 1MW, and 3300 before hitting 10MW, which is the threshold that I described as needing specialized planning and site selection.
That’s what I mean. The scale of what we’re describing in the MW+ range, much less the 10MW+ range, has its own special considerations. The stuff we learn by building out 25kW or 50kW residential circuits or even 500 kW apartment buildings, or adding a 50 kW charger in an apartment garage, don’t present the same engineering challenges as delivering 5MW to a single city block, much less to a single vehicle for a few minutes at a time.
Sure, but there aren’t open standards for MW chargers, either. The proprietary systems are all competing for market position right now.