The poor grid.

The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.

... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.

WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The whole fast charge thing is mostly marketing to convert people from "gas car mindset" into getting an EV.

The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this.

What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.

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hangonhn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Wait. You're missing something.

Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.

	▲	WarmWash 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Renters shouldn't get EVs if they cannot charge at home. Which sucks, but the majority of people (2/3) don't rent.

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adrian_b 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The speed of charging is irrelevant, because the energy consumption is the same. The power requirements for a charging station is determined by the number of cars charged in a day, not by how fast they are charged.

The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power averaged over a long time, not the peak power that they provide to the charged vehicle.

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mytailorisrich 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For this sort of fast charging you need the charging station itself to have a large pool of batteries to buffer the energy from the grid and to push it at very high power to cars. Probably still requires a good size connection to the grid.

I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.

	▲	adrian_b 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Obviously, the engineers at BYD, CATL etc. are not stupid, so these fast chargers, which have been in production for several months and which are already installed in an increasing number of places, do include batteries, so they need only an averaged power from the electrical grid, not the up to 1 MW power that is provided to the charged vehicle. BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures. It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries. The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).
	▲	Salgat an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To add, the technology for stationary batteries (lithium phosphate) is cheaper, because you're no longer constrained by density/size.