this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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The advancements in battery tech are obviously great news but I still have no idea how you’d power a “traditional” charging station (with several terminals) for EVs.
There’s plenty of time to find a solution to that before today’s experimental battery tech becomes ubiquitous in cars but power generation and infrastructure seems like it’ll be the bottleneck. I haven’t done the math or anything but it just seems like 5m charging of more than one or two cars at once would strain the grid that exists today.
There are charging stations with 40 chargers delivering +200kW each, they're powered by HV lines directly to transformers located at the charging stations. But most (all?) BEVs are only near max charging power for a fairly short period of time, and full occupation is also not seen very often. These large stations (and smaller too) are managed by load sharing, so in the theoretical case that 40 cars arrive exactly at the same time with perfectly prepared battery temperature and SoC and all connect at exactly the same time, they will just be capped by the chargers so the station doesn't exceed available power spec.
Thank you for doing the math.
There are individual buildings and industrial installations who have power use in the megawatt range, getting this much power to a charging station is definitely possible, but would need to be coordinated with the grid operator, and require high voltage run directly to the station.
Energy density needs to increase for sure, but I see a point where cars charge fast enough that there will be less need to increase it further. I imagine it'll look a lot like gas stations today, where they stop for a few minutes and leave again.
Most vehicles should be charging slowly at home anyways.
Yeah fair point. The grid and infra are going to be key.