If you are only charging 1 EV in a laboratory, probably. But if you want to charge 1000s of vehicles in 5 minutes across a city, you need a significant upgrade to the way we generate and deliver electricity.
And there may be some hurdles that we don't know how to clear.
When politicians and journalists, who haven't taken a science class since high school, and thought that it was stupid back then, start talking to you, or passing laws, about topics that touch on engineering, just remember to take what they say with a very large grain of salt.
This is the MGUY Australia video Pure HYPE: Not enough ELECTRICITY for 5 minute EV charging. The Chinese company BYD has announced a battery that can be charged in 5 minutes. Can it?
BYD's 5-minute-charge claim is based on supplying over a megawatt of power to the car. Now most journalists and EV activists don't have a clue what a megawatt is, or a joule or, any kind of engineering or electrical understanding, so they don't really understand what a megawatt is. It's essentially 500 [electric] kettles all boiling at once and the kettle is probably the most power- hungry device in your entire house and it takes 500 of those all going at once to represent 1 megawatt of power.
In the US not many of us electric kettles, but you're probably familiar. Instead, lets think about generating that power with solar panels. Depending on location, you would need 5 to 10 acres of solar panels to generate 1 Megawatt. So what are we using to charge these cars?
The video is just over 5 minutes.
Thanks for posting that. It's good to hear some sense in this stuff.
ReplyDeleteNow think about Microsoft buying Three Mile Island to get all the reactors back online to run just their AI system and then start visualizing Every Single Company in the General AI biz wanting to put gigawatts of power in operation in like two years. Quote from Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Google: "Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. "
NFW. No way that could be built and put in operation.