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I'm assuming what they're doing here (they don't really say) is using a flywheel in the equipment in the charging station to charge a "regular" electric car --
by zck 8y ago
I'm assuming what they're doing here (they don't really say) is using a flywheel in the equipment in the charging station to charge a "regular" electric car -- a car that stores the electricity in batteries. And the flywheel is used because the environments they want to deploy these charging stations have lower quality electric grids, "where upgrading the grid for fast electric vehicle charging can be prohibitively expensive".
They even say they can "...charge a battery in ten minutes..." This sounds great! But I'm not sure what cars they'd be charging. Can, for example, you charge a Tesla that fast? I assume not, or Tesla would be charging them that quickly. (https://www.tesla.com/supercharger https://www.tesla.com/supercharger says it takes 30 minutes)
So I'm assuming that they're charging cars with smaller batteries. It sounds interesting, but not as good as my initial reading ("you can charge your car way faster") made me think.
- sp332 8y agoMaybe, but there is another charging standard that's starting to be rolled out that provides up to 350kW with a water-cooled cable. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/electrify-america-will-deploy-2000-350kw-fast-chargers-by-the-end-of-2019/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/electrify-america-will-... That would take 17 minutes to charge even a 100kWh Tesla battery (if you could maintain that rate of charge the whole time, which battery packs generally can't). Edit: fixed units
- Maybestring 8y agoSomething is wrong with those numbers. I suspect it's the 360MW-hr battery. That sounds more like a battery pack for a thousand cars.
- sp332 8y agoYeah I grabbed someone else's numbers for megajoules and confused the units.
- tigershark 8y agoNo, Musk explicitly said that future superchargers for the cars won’t be 350kw. https://electrek.co/2018/05/03/tesla-supercharger-v3-charge-rate-porsche-faster-charging/amp/ https://electrek.co/2018/05/03/tesla-supercharger-v3-charge-...
- sp332 8y agoOk, but I'm addressing zck's comment "I assume not, or Tesla would be charging them that quickly."
- Dylan16807 8y ago> That would take 17 minutes to charge even a 100kWh Tesla battery You'd need to significantly redesign the battery. That cable is limited to 350 amps, and superchargers can already do 350 amps.