Do You Really Think Journalists Understand the Physics of Electric Vehicles?

A typical journalist hasn't taken a science course since high school, probably didn't do too well, and thought it was stupid. "When am I going to use this?" The only difference for math, is that they may have been required to take a math course in college, though even that is doubtful today.

Well, since they only pretend to be experts in stuff they report on, they haven't thought about science, even when writing about science and engineering.

Leith van Onselen at Macrobusiness has an article that points that out. EV battery hype fails basic physics

The latest greatest announcement that someone has developed a battery that can be charged in 5 minutes, or whatever. But what they haven't announced is the electricity grid that can provide that power.

Australia cannot achieve these types of charging times in practice; they are purely theoretical.

Why? Because of the inextricable link between the power of a charger and the duration required to charge an EV battery.

Existing Australian infrastructure also cannot achieve the necessary electricity throughput to charge an EV battery in five minutes. To do so at scale would require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in new poles, high-capacity wires, transformers, substations, etc, which is cost-prohibitive.

That doesn't even cover the issue of load balancing on the grid, which is something grid operators are already struggling with given the problems introduced by solar and wind.

The article does mention the problems of cold-weather charging that EV batteries face, and notes that the latest breakthrough does achieve charging at -10 degrees Celsius. Which is cold by some standards, but not Midwestern standards. -10 degrees Celsius is +14 degrees Fahrenheit. As far as I can tell they still haven't addressed temperatures in the -20 degrees Fahrenheit range.

This the MGUY Australia video Fast Charging: The SIMPLE fact EV zealots ALWAYS forget.