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EV Fast-Charging Standards In Flux
savuporo writes "With the first battery electric vehicles becoming available on markets worldwide, there is an increased push to establish standards for fast-charging plugs. Unfortunately, the story is far from simple. The US hopes to establish its own DC fast-charging standard by 2012, and Europe cannot come to an agreement about their version. Meanwhile, the CHAdeMO fast-charge standard developed and widely deployed in Japan, used on both the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi MiEV, is gaining momentum with deployments underway both in the US and Europe. CHAdeMO is limited to a 62kW charge rate, able to charge smaller battery packs to 80% SoC in 15-30 minutes."
For those of you playing at home, SoC stands for 'State of Charge'.
There's no reason why an EV refueling station can't support multiple charge standards (as long as there are only a handful versus dozens).
One of the biggest expenses in setting up a charging station is in getting the high-power high-voltage power feed from the power company. Supporting a different connector or voltage adds a relatively small incremental cost to the charging station.
After all, gas stations already support diesel and 3 grades of gasoline (ok, technically it's just 2 grades and they blend them at the pump).
Obviously a fast switch of batteries is a better idea. I don't want to wait 15 minutes or even 5 to recharge. Then they can have fast chargers dedicated and efficient to re supply the batteries. I know batteries are expensive so the biggest obstacle is just figuring out a credit/ID system so that people can be trusted to trade $1000 batteries quickly.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Why don't you just shove the Japanese plug up your arse and turn it on full current. Why would we want foreign plugs?
Because they work well with our foreign cars?
Honestly, all that matters is that each region has a uniform standard, and is large enough that economies of scale will kick in.
You're unlikely to take your car to Japan with you, and what's more, since we're only really talking about SIGNALING, it's only going to take a few dollars worth of electronics to do the conversion. Sure, a $20 adapter so you can use your electric razor on another continent is inconvenient, but a $20 adapter so you can use you CAR? No problem.
Now, if the EU can't agree on a standard, that would be a problem. Wander across the border from Germany to France and you can't charge your car... Oops. And the added expense for charging stations to maintain two or more sets of chargers for different countries' vehicles wouldn't be cheap or easy to maintain.
Come to think of it... Are electric cars and hybrids coming with normal electrical outlets installed? 120/240V ? They really should. Could eliminate the "car adapter" market over-night, make traveling much easier and add a tremendous amount of utility to an electric vehicle... Even if utility power goes out, EVERYONE with an electric car could have a substantial backup. I can imagine lightning fast tire changes if you can power your impact tools on the road... But I digress.
As they say, as goes Estonia, so goes Lichtenstein! Clearly Japan is on course to dominate the world...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
When it comes time to design the plug, they should make sure it's non-tapered so that it has to be perfectly lined up to go in the socket. It should also be perfectly symmetrical so it takes ten minutes get it in the socket correctly.
Their they're doing there hair.
There's another reason that switching batteries is good. If a 62 kW supply is required to charge a battery in 30 minutes, you would need 360 kW+ to charge it in 5 minutes. That's a phenomenal power level. If your charging efficiency is 90%, that means you will be dissipating 36 kW in your car as heat while charging. That's pretty close to explosive.
The service station and the power utility would have an interest in leveling their load, so charging an inventory of batteries relatively slowly is a good thing. Even so, each recharging station might need a flywheel energy storage unit (or comparable) to even their load on the utility.
Fiat Lux.
Because then you might plug your car into any generic 3 phase outlet instead of the one dedicated to vehicular charging with the built in road tax metering.
Have gnu, will travel.
1) Li-ion battery packs are generally 96% to over 99% efficient during charging, not 90%.
2) 36kW is not "pretty close to explosive". That's the heat output of a moderately large home's furnace. You really think you can't simply water quench the output of a home furnace for a couple minutes?
3) You don't have to draw a rapid charge straight from the grid. A much more reasonable approach is to charge a shared battery bank at the station, and the battery bank discharges the proper amount whenever someone hooks up. Said batteries can be heavy and cheap instead of light and expensive, and are effectively a "universal standard" instead of requiring the station to stock a separate pack for each vehicle profile.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
LOL. Okay, let's start from the very beginning.
1) Oil makes up a tiny percentage of our electricity generation -- low single digits. Most incremental power in the US these days (new capacity being added) is natural gas and wind.
2) According to a PNL/DOE study, 84% of our vehicles could be switched over today without building any new power plants. The reason is because most EV charging is done at night, when we have huge surplus generation capacity
3) There is little to no need for new bulk distribution, for the same reason as #2. Only local distribution infrastructure may need upgrades when there's high penetration in particular neighborhoods for home charging.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
1) Not "nearly all"; it's about 2/3rds.
2) Hawaii has 1.3 million people. The US has 300 million people. It's a tiny fraction of the US population. In the US, only Hawaii, the outlying islands, and remote parts of Alaska and the a few remote spots in the desert southwest run on oil-fired power. It makes up 1.6% of our total mix. Why? It has nothing to do with the environment; oil-fired power is very expensive. The only thing oil has going for it is that it's easy to get to remote locations, and hence, its used in places like Hawaii and the remote parts of Alaska.
3) Gee willickers, wind farms from the 1970s and 1980s are being decommissioned? Who would ever have guessed that power plants built with technology that has been surpassed many times over could be cheaper to replace than to maintain? Thank god some of those ancient relics are finally getting decommissioned; not only are they expensive and failure prone, but they're often sited poorly and are often bird killers (Altamont Pass in particular). If you were trying to design a raptor cuisinart, designing turbines the way they did for Altamont and placing them in that location would be the way to do it. Anyway, as for the failure rate itself, if you want, I can dig up my spreadsheet of turbine data from the Netherlands, where they documented every turbine in the country and its status. The overall failure rate is extremely low. (and tends to follow a bathtub curve), and the older turbines were *much* less reliable than the modern ones.
4) The wind PTC is under 2 cents per kWh. The estimated health cost from coal power plant emissions, according to the last study I read, ranged from 2 cents to 14 cents per kWh, depending on the plant. *Not* counting climate change, mining consequences, or anything of that nature -- purely airborne emissions.
5) Photovoltaic solar is too expensive for general purpose power generation, but there are many situations individuals or companies can find them in where it's a big cost saver, even without credits. A reasonable installation cost and $2/wh panels in the desert southwest, for example, can produce a good IRR versus commercial or residential rates. The new generation of solar thermal is much cheaper than oil-fired power (some companies claim they'll be able to reach coal parity like wind has in a few places already, but I think that's yet to be proven).
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.