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»Toyota has been secretly developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a range of 745 miles and a charge time of 10 minutes, which could revolutionize the indu

»Toyota has been secretly developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a range of 745 miles and a charge time of 10 minutes, which could revolutionize the industry.« If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power. For perspective: The two new units at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant have 1100 MW each. Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from?

serpix 3y ago
From a battery bank that is charged at constant rate which discharges at 1MW.
DangerousPie 3y ago
Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue. Sure, if you're going on a 1500 mile road trip and need to charge on the way you'll have a problem, but I doubt that's a very common use case.
- troupo 3y ago
  > Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue. I live in an apartment building that has no charging infrastructure. Many people work from home. If everyone charges at the same time, you still have issues with "where will all this power come from"?
  - glogla 3y ago
    If you live in an apartment and often work from home, you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such don't need to charge the car very often. I did the math for myself, and with how far and how often I go places, I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks. I do have pretty favorable conditions, though (and mostly continue to use the bus).
    - troupo 3y ago
      > If you live in an apartment and often work from home, you probably don't drive hundred miles every day But people who work in offices do? > you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such don't need to charge the car very often. The question of "where to charge a car" remains. > I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks. Let's say I have the same math. Where would I charge the car?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - glogla 3y ago
        So we're talking about people who live in an apartment, yet far from work or in place with bad public transport so they need a long drive to work? I'm not going to claim people like that don't exist, but is it a common use case? For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores, I usually stop there like once a week anyway. We're also trying to get our employer to enable charging in the office garage, but it's dragging a bit. The larger shopping mall I visit with friends for cinema also has free charging for customers. It's not that many places, and people in countryside or suburbia who can charge EVs with free electricity from solar panels have it easier, but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now. We'll see how it scales up.
        troupo 3y ago
        > So we're talking about people who live in an apartment, yet far from work or in place with bad public transport so they need a long drive to work? No, we're not. We're talking about electric cars. I mean, come on. It's not even ten replies above: "Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue." > For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about twenty charging stations in total. > but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now. So, the question of how I would charge my EV still remains.
ezekiel68 3y ago
So, you're telling me we can have 1100 of these cars charging at any one time on that grid. Super!
topspin 3y ago
> Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from? Unknown. An interesting data point, however: Tesla's "V4" charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to supply 1KA at 1KV; 1MW. I can't explain where they're getting that supply, but apparently they're doing it.
- jtc331 3y ago
  Liquid cooled charging cables is pretty standard for high speed DC fast chargers already. When that cooling is broken at an Electrify America charger, for example, charging is limited to something around 50kW.
  - simondotau 3y ago
    Liquid cooling is indeed commonplace among DC fast charging systems. The Tesla V3 supercharger cable is also liquid cooled. The novel aspect of the Tesla V4 supercharger cable is that the conductors are directly immersed in the coolant. https://eepower.com/uploads/articles/image5_10.png https://eepower.com/uploads/articles/image5_10.png
- clouddrover 3y ago
  > Tesla's "V4" charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to supply 1KA at 1KV; 1MW Does it? Can you show me a public Tesla charger that delivers 1 megawatt?
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
But they'll be using 1000Kw for 10 minutes rather than 150 for an hour. Apart from a little less efficiency from the fast charging - there's just as much total much power being used as if slow charging.
- thebears5454 3y ago
  I think you mean there's as much energy being used. There's clearly more power.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    As much energy per time (say 24h), hence as much power. This is assuming the grid spreads the load geographically (not all the chargers at one place) and not everyone is rapid charging their car at the same time (impossible since there won't be enough rapid chargers).
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      "hence as much power" => "hence as much average power"
      - tuukkah 3y ago
        Under the assumptions, power equals average power (to a margin). It would be a huge mistake to try to build the grid to withstand the power of all existing electric devices at the same time, as the probability of such a situation is 0.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  The utility infrastructure to support 150 kW for an hour is much cheaper than 1 MW for 10 minutes. And at these scales the utility will be passing the costs directly on to the customer. No possible way it will be allowed at a residential location.
  - 3y ago
mike_hock 3y ago
Presumably from the same place all the lithium and the necessary infrastructure upgrades would come from (even for "regular" EVs). Maybe Toyota has wised up to the game after getting backlash for commenting honestly on its realistic strategies. In 2023, we want vaporware that promises to fix climate change by emitting 6x as much CO2 during production, but don't worry, it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery will never get to.
- myko 3y ago
  > it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery will never get to Generally EVs get to 15-20k miles without issue, which is the break even point on the optimistic side: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d... Even ~40-80k (the high estimate for break even) isn't that many miles / doesn't take long to achieve. There's been a lot of FUD recently about EVs being more damaging to the climate than ICE, please correct it when you see it.
tuukkah 3y ago
Not everyone will be rapid charging at the same time, and the grid will spread the load geographically. Megawatt-scale rapid charging already exists for some e-buses that can be charged in minutes at the terminus while passengers get off and on.
clouddrover 3y ago
> If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power. Or you could just charge it at 500 kW for 20 minutes. Chargers out perform the batteries at present. No current passenger EV can sustain 350 kW across the whole charge curve. If Toyota's battery will sustain a flat 500 kW or even a flat 350 kW for most of the charge curve then that's a very good thing.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
You could use some kind of buffer; another battery. There are already a few companies out there working on MW+ chargers. Mostly they are aimed at trucks and buses. But the technology is there. The peak load is clearly not coming from the grid. One issue would be that that power is relatively expensive. Using that kind of is a last resort. Instead you'd want a lot of on site battery that can provide lots of power quickly and can soak up power from nearby solar panels, or cheap night time grid power. Easy to say because that is already how a lot of fast chargers work. If you operate these commercially, ensuring access to cheap power is key. Also, just because people buy bigger batteries doesn't mean they actually drive more or use more kwh. It just means they can spread out their charging a bit more. Which means fast chargers would be something they would need to use less. With a battery that large, you'd almost never run out as driving that kind of distance on a single day would be very rare for most people. And honestly the few times you actually do that, take some breaks. This charging pattern is of course already the case for EVs with far smaller batteries. Most EV owners rely more on overnight slow charging than fast charging. With a battery that big you might get away with never having to use a fast charger at all.
jdietrich 3y ago
Rapid chargers are primarily a psychological safety net. Prospective EV owners really worry about them, but EV owners rarely use them. You might take a road trip once a year, but the average driver covers less than 40 miles per day. The normal overnight charging that represents the vast majority of EV power consumption is actively beneficial to the grid by providing demand smoothing; the marginal cost of a kWh falls if someone is willing to buy super-off-peak power at 2am.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Superchargers are almost always full where I'm from, even in shopping malls. I'm sure they'd be even more commonly used if more of them existed. People just know they can't rely on them yet in the same way they rely on finding a gas station
glogla 3y ago
Your comment can be interpreted two ways. If you're asking "where do we get the power plants", that is a valid concern, especially as we want to get rid of coal power plants at the same time. But ultimately it is not that much power - I did a back of the envelope calculation for my country and converting annual vehicle-miles driven into kWh with average EV efficiency ended up adding 11 % increase in electricity consumption. Not sure how it stacks up with other countries, and yes, we need more and cleaner power, but 11 % increase is not insurmountable problem. If you're asking "how does that much power gets places", electric trains routinely run as much power. My city runs hundreds of trams that take over 700 kW each, and full power electric locomotive usually takes about 5 MW. The grid already knows how to handle it.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Also, plenty of power plants are 500 Megawatts+. 1 Megawatt really isn't that much.
fulafel 3y ago
> Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from? For a given size of EV fleet and usage amount it doesn't matter if they charge quickly or slowly from your power plants point of view, higher power charging means there is correspondingly fewer cars charging concurrently since they finish quicker.

serpix 3y ago

From a battery bank that is charged at constant rate which discharges at 1MW.

DangerousPie 3y ago

Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue. Sure, if you're going on a 1500 mile road trip and need to charge on the way you'll have a problem, but I doubt that's a very common use case.

troupo 3y ago
> Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue. I live in an apartment building that has no charging infrastructure. Many people work from home. If everyone charges at the same time, you still have issues with "where will all this power come from"?
- glogla 3y ago
  If you live in an apartment and often work from home, you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such don't need to charge the car very often. I did the math for myself, and with how far and how often I go places, I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks. I do have pretty favorable conditions, though (and mostly continue to use the bus).
  - troupo 3y ago
    > If you live in an apartment and often work from home, you probably don't drive hundred miles every day But people who work in offices do? > you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such don't need to charge the car very often. The question of "where to charge a car" remains. > I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks. Let's say I have the same math. Where would I charge the car?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - glogla 3y ago
      So we're talking about people who live in an apartment, yet far from work or in place with bad public transport so they need a long drive to work? I'm not going to claim people like that don't exist, but is it a common use case? For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores, I usually stop there like once a week anyway. We're also trying to get our employer to enable charging in the office garage, but it's dragging a bit. The larger shopping mall I visit with friends for cinema also has free charging for customers. It's not that many places, and people in countryside or suburbia who can charge EVs with free electricity from solar panels have it easier, but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now. We'll see how it scales up.
      - troupo 3y ago
        > So we're talking about people who live in an apartment, yet far from work or in place with bad public transport so they need a long drive to work? No, we're not. We're talking about electric cars. I mean, come on. It's not even ten replies above: "Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue." > For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about twenty charging stations in total. > but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now. So, the question of how I would charge my EV still remains.

ezekiel68 3y ago

So, you're telling me we can have 1100 of these cars charging at any one time on that grid. Super!

topspin 3y ago

> Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from? Unknown. An interesting data point, however: Tesla's "V4" charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to supply 1KA at 1KV; 1MW. I can't explain where they're getting that supply, but apparently they're doing it.

jtc331 3y ago
Liquid cooled charging cables is pretty standard for high speed DC fast chargers already. When that cooling is broken at an Electrify America charger, for example, charging is limited to something around 50kW.
- simondotau 3y ago
  Liquid cooling is indeed commonplace among DC fast charging systems. The Tesla V3 supercharger cable is also liquid cooled. The novel aspect of the Tesla V4 supercharger cable is that the conductors are directly immersed in the coolant. https://eepower.com/uploads/articles/image5_10.png https://eepower.com/uploads/articles/image5_10.png
clouddrover 3y ago
> Tesla's "V4" charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to supply 1KA at 1KV; 1MW Does it? Can you show me a public Tesla charger that delivers 1 megawatt?

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

But they'll be using 1000Kw for 10 minutes rather than 150 for an hour. Apart from a little less efficiency from the fast charging - there's just as much total much power being used as if slow charging.

thebears5454 3y ago
I think you mean there's as much energy being used. There's clearly more power.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  As much energy per time (say 24h), hence as much power. This is assuming the grid spreads the load geographically (not all the chargers at one place) and not everyone is rapid charging their car at the same time (impossible since there won't be enough rapid chargers).
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    "hence as much power" => "hence as much average power"
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      Under the assumptions, power equals average power (to a margin). It would be a huge mistake to try to build the grid to withstand the power of all existing electric devices at the same time, as the probability of such a situation is 0.
cool_dude85 3y ago
The utility infrastructure to support 150 kW for an hour is much cheaper than 1 MW for 10 minutes. And at these scales the utility will be passing the costs directly on to the customer. No possible way it will be allowed at a residential location.
- 3y ago

mike_hock 3y ago

Presumably from the same place all the lithium and the necessary infrastructure upgrades would come from (even for "regular" EVs). Maybe Toyota has wised up to the game after getting backlash for commenting honestly on its realistic strategies. In 2023, we want vaporware that promises to fix climate change by emitting 6x as much CO2 during production, but don't worry, it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery will never get to.

myko 3y ago
> it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery will never get to Generally EVs get to 15-20k miles without issue, which is the break even point on the optimistic side: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d... Even ~40-80k (the high estimate for break even) isn't that many miles / doesn't take long to achieve. There's been a lot of FUD recently about EVs being more damaging to the climate than ICE, please correct it when you see it.

tuukkah 3y ago

Not everyone will be rapid charging at the same time, and the grid will spread the load geographically. Megawatt-scale rapid charging already exists for some e-buses that can be charged in minutes at the terminus while passengers get off and on.

clouddrover 3y ago

> If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power. Or you could just charge it at 500 kW for 20 minutes. Chargers out perform the batteries at present. No current passenger EV can sustain 350 kW across the whole charge curve. If Toyota's battery will sustain a flat 500 kW or even a flat 350 kW for most of the charge curve then that's a very good thing.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

You could use some kind of buffer; another battery. There are already a few companies out there working on MW+ chargers. Mostly they are aimed at trucks and buses. But the technology is there. The peak load is clearly not coming from the grid. One issue would be that that power is relatively expensive. Using that kind of is a last resort. Instead you'd want a lot of on site battery that can provide lots of power quickly and can soak up power from nearby solar panels, or cheap night time grid power. Easy to say because that is already how a lot of fast chargers work. If you operate these commercially, ensuring access to cheap power is key. Also, just because people buy bigger batteries doesn't mean they actually drive more or use more kwh. It just means they can spread out their charging a bit more. Which means fast chargers would be something they would need to use less. With a battery that large, you'd almost never run out as driving that kind of distance on a single day would be very rare for most people. And honestly the few times you actually do that, take some breaks. This charging pattern is of course already the case for EVs with far smaller batteries. Most EV owners rely more on overnight slow charging than fast charging. With a battery that big you might get away with never having to use a fast charger at all.

jdietrich 3y ago

Rapid chargers are primarily a psychological safety net. Prospective EV owners really worry about them, but EV owners rarely use them. You might take a road trip once a year, but the average driver covers less than 40 miles per day. The normal overnight charging that represents the vast majority of EV power consumption is actively beneficial to the grid by providing demand smoothing; the marginal cost of a kWh falls if someone is willing to buy super-off-peak power at 2am.

mardifoufs 3y ago
Superchargers are almost always full where I'm from, even in shopping malls. I'm sure they'd be even more commonly used if more of them existed. People just know they can't rely on them yet in the same way they rely on finding a gas station

glogla 3y ago

Your comment can be interpreted two ways. If you're asking "where do we get the power plants", that is a valid concern, especially as we want to get rid of coal power plants at the same time. But ultimately it is not that much power - I did a back of the envelope calculation for my country and converting annual vehicle-miles driven into kWh with average EV efficiency ended up adding 11 % increase in electricity consumption. Not sure how it stacks up with other countries, and yes, we need more and cleaner power, but 11 % increase is not insurmountable problem. If you're asking "how does that much power gets places", electric trains routinely run as much power. My city runs hundreds of trams that take over 700 kW each, and full power electric locomotive usually takes about 5 MW. The grid already knows how to handle it.

londons_explore 3y ago
Also, plenty of power plants are 500 Megawatts+. 1 Megawatt really isn't that much.

fulafel 3y ago

> Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from? For a given size of EV fleet and usage amount it doesn't matter if they charge quickly or slowly from your power plants point of view, higher power charging means there is correspondingly fewer cars charging concurrently since they finish quicker.