The Quest For an EV Fast-Charge Standard

An anonymous reader writes "This article explores one of the stumbling blocks currently facing EV adoption: 'Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online daily. But those typically take several hours to fully replenish a battery. As a result, the ability for quick battery boosts — using a compatible direct current fast charger, the Leaf can refill to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes — could potentially become an important point of differentiation among electric models. But the availability of fast charging points has in part been held up by the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging — or even on a single electrical connector.'"

Comments

My solution

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

Re:My solution

[hipp5]

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

Someone is working on that.

Re:My solution

[Cryacin]

I don't think they would sell it like that. You probably would purchase a "licence" for a battery, basically, the right to a working one for the pool, pay for the charged swapover, and have failure replacements calculated into the swapover expense. The concept of "new" and "old" battery wouldn't really come into it.

Re:My solution

[lucidlyTwisted]

I might be a little picky about swapping my brand new cells with an unknown station's current cell stock.

Treat them like gas canisters then. The canister remains the property of the company and all you do it buy the contents. The company is responsible for ensuring the canister is functional, safe etc. If the battery develops a fault - you can simply swap it free of charge for a new one. Obviously you are paying for this in part of the fee when you pick up a fresh battery, but it saves having to horde your own precious batteries.
To be honest I am surprised that the industry didn't do this from the get go since such schemes (as mentioned above) already exist all over the globe for many things. All there needs to be are a few agreed standards on size etc. Again, just like gas canisters really.
If one company makes a better battery that can fit into the same volume, then they can compete. heck, such standardisation could stimulate a new battery market.

Re:My solution

[Riceballsan]

Even better question, how would you prevent tricks. Fake batteries etc... Heck who knows maybe even cheap chinese knockoffs that seem real but have 1/16th of the battery life, maybe even perform similar tricks to that loopback flash drive that registers as a 8GB and then just rewrites over the old data whenever it hits the 16MB of storage it had, could a similar trick be done on a battery to fool the chargers?

Re:My solution

[chill]

The same way that is stopped now with every other item you purchase. By complaining to the store and authorities, and by suing them if necessary. At the very least, stop going there and tell everyone you can.

Fraud is a crime.

Re:My solution

[jimicus]

Easy solution to that - instead of storing the fuel source in the form of a solid lump, make it some sort of energy-dense liquid. That way the manufacturer differentiates themselves on the basis of how much liquid the vehicle requires to travel a given distance and how much liquid their vehicle can store, and the charging station simply pours liquid into some sort of tank until the tank is full.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

Fortunately for the rest of the world, you're not the only one who is coming up with ideas on how to make it work. There are already pilot programs (in Tokyo I believe) where you pull into a station and a robot drops the battery pack from the bottom of the car and swaps in a new one. Works pretty well in fact. Only takes a minute or two for the swap. Each battery pack is charged at the station. They track each battery pack in service via a bar code on it. They know how many times it's been recharged, what it's expected remaining life is, etc. When one goes bad prematurely, they can just pull it out of service and recycle the contents for the next batch of batteries. For a densely populated urban center with power to spare, it's not a bad system.

Re:My solution

[Gription]

That is so obvious that I would suspect that a large company or a government could never get the idea out of a committee. Everyone who has had a R/C car is familiar with the idea because you want to use the thing instead of watch it sit there plugged in...

Two things would be required to make this work out:
- The cells would need to be packaged in one or two standard formats.
- They would also have make it so the condition/replacement of the batteries are a group thing. The charging stations swap out any dieing cells so and that cost is spread across the whole marketplace.

Great

[hipp5]

It's cell phones all over again. Except 100 times the cost. Also, obligatory xkcd reference.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

That's all well and good but what about the people who need to live and work out in sparsely populated areas? After all, someone has to grow the food that is eaten by people in cities.

Re:It's not yet time for a standard

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Battery technology certainly is evolving; but the "put power in" part is a fairly reasonable place to put a nice abstracted interface.

Battery type is key

[kurt555gs]

If these cars used Toshiba's SCIB batteries -> http://www.toshiba.com/ind/product_display.jsp?id1=821 - then they could go from dead to full charge in 10 minutes.

That would make electric charging stations at gas stations feasible.

It takes 10 minutes to fill an SUV with gas.

Great Misconception

[7-Vodka]

Why does EVERYONE have this great misconception that EVs and charging stations are like chicken and egg?

Every time research is done into EV owner driving and charging patterns they show that people really don't drive that far on a daily basis and always prefer to charge AT HOME overnight rather than at some charging station.

Why would anyone want to drive to a charging station and wait an hour when they can just plug in when they get home? That's like having a gas pump at your house, but instead wanting to drive 30 minutes to a "gas station" to fill up.

For EV owners who have longer trips, they can take their second car, rent a car or fly.

Re:Great Misconception

[sgt scrub]

People that are already driving EV cars are not the typical consumer. But I agree for the most part. People will want to charge at home so they don't partial charge the batteries thus reducing their life span. As far as the "rent a car on the fly" thought, that is insightful assuming they can keep the costs below taking a train or bus.

Re:Great Misconception

[Solandri]

For EV owners who have longer trips, they can take their second car, rent a car or fly.

I agree with this sentiment. Rather than buying a single car which has to serve two purposes (short daily commutes, occasional long trips), buy a single car highly optimized for one purpose (short daily commutes), and use a different means to fill the other need (second car, rental, flying for long trips).

However, this runs counter to the way most people think. The car's operating expenses are neglected as noise, while the annoyance that the car can't handle a long trip is ever-present in their minds. That is, a regular car might cost $20k, cost $2k to operate each year. An EV might cost $20k, cost $500 to operate each year, meaning you have $1.5k "available" to use on a rental car for the long trip while still coming out ahead. But all people will think about is how they had to pay $1k "extra" to rent a car for the trip.

The same psychological mistake crops up all over the place. People ignore the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer ink because the purchase price of the printer was so much lower than for a laser printer. People write off nuclear power for electricity because of the waste problem, while ignoring that the extra cost of renewables far exceeds the what it would cost to handle the waste problem. People will prefer to overpay on their income tax withholdings so they will "get" a refund in April, rather than underpay, put the extra money into an interest-bearing account, and give up the money to the government only on the last day of the deadline.

So while I agree with the logic of your solution, it's just not going to fly in the real world. People aren't wired that way.

Why?

[Mashiki]

I still don't see why the big desire for batteries. They're heavy, a pain in the ass to change even if you have a standard. You're looking at someone to do it for you, or knowing how to do it yourself using machinery in both cases. In the end, fuel cells will be the way to go, unless there's some amazing earth shattering breakthrough in battery technology.

Liquid batteries

[hat_eater]

Anyone remembers the Cambridge Crude? I wonder if they'll have a working solution (heh) in 2013.

Still not good enough.

[sunking2]

For the Leaf they give 30 minutes for 30 miles using a faster charger. For simplicity, assume driving 60mph, so your 30 minute commute now takes an hour. And this was for the fastest charge that they talk about replacing a gas station, at $40k installation it certainly isn't for the home. Not impressed.

Re:Still not good enough.

[Sockatume]

It only adds 30 minutes onto your commute if you wait until you're ready to leave, and then plug it in. I don't know about you, but I typically wake up more than an hour before I leave for work, and I'm sure I can find the five minutes to plug in the car somewhere near the start of the window.

Re:Still not good enough.

[Eric Damron]

"For the Leaf they give 30 minutes for 30 miles using a faster charger."

No, that is not correct. The DC Quck Charger (The one that costs upwards of $40k but can be had for $16K) will charge the LEAF from flat to 80% in 25 minutes. You can go way farther than 30 miles with an 80% charge.

The Level 2 chargers will charge the current LEAF from flat to 100% in 7 to 8 hours. That will normally be done over night and you would not need to plug in at all to make a 60 mile round trip.

"Not impressed."

I think you mean "Not informed."

It's too early

[fyngyrz]

Odds are decent that batteries are on the way out -- ultracapacitors are the candidate for replacing them. Currently (pun intended) UC's don't have sufficient capacity, but the capacity curve has been steadily rising over time, and as the stored power required for a vehicle to go a certain distance is slowly dropping, they're likely to meet sooner or later. At that time, batteries become buggy whips in search of (missing) horses.

Aside from the present position on the total energy curve, UC's offer wider temperature ranges, less toxicity, much faster charging, essentially unlimited charge/discharge cycles, have such a long lifetime compared to a battery that they reduce the disposal/recycle problem to basically irrelevant (you could probably will your UC's a few generations down the road), and present less of a fire/explosive hazard and are easily fused in array form in safe fashion. Constant voltage output is easily obtained with off the shelf electronics, and as UCs don't age the way batteries do, determining the actual charge, as opposed to an estimate, for UCs is far more easily accomplished. Current in, self-discharge rate out, current out.

This applies from small loads to large ones; In fact, as small devices become more and more efficient, as has been the trend for some time, they are walking down the curve towards practical use of UCs even faster than vehicles are.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't invest in a Lithium Ion startup today; it looks to me like the world's worst bet. And as for connectors and standards... it's just too early. A connector designed for the relatively anemic charge rates of a Li battery would probably go up in a flash if subjected to the current inrush that an equivalent capacity array of Uc's could demand -- and limiting the charge rate to Li rates is silly. It'll take quite a connector to provide a fast, efficient charge to an UC array, but it'll *so* be worth it. Electronics that monitor the voltage drop across the connector while aware of the available contact area could maintain a safe charge rate, pushing current at prodigious rates, potentially (hah) charging the vehicle in seconds -- far faster than either fueling up with gasoline *or* charging a battery. And contrariwise, a (relative) trickle from a could also charge the UCs overnight, leading to relatively simple and inexpensive home charging stations. Bucket-brigade techniques, where the home charger trickles itself while you're off elsewhere, then is able to quickly charge the vehicle require equivalent storage in the charger itself and so are more expensive, but again, would be so worth it.

The thing is, until all this settles out -- and it is very much in flux (hah) right now -- it doesn't make much sense to standardize on anything, unless it's a trivially replaceable connector system at the charging station.

Re:It's too early

[Joce640k]

Ultracapacitors currently only have about a tenth of the energy density of a battery and whether they can be improved more than two or three times while maintaining reasonable costs is far from certain.

Other than that, they're all good. Their efficiency is impressive (about 95% of electricity will end up in the motor, unlike batteries which can convert as much as 50% of it to heat during charging/discharging) and their working life makes them very attractive - current batteries aren't going to last more than a few years (much less if you're continually quick-charging them) and the e-waste millions of car batteries could produce down the line is huge.

Maybe we'll just have to get used to the idea of having a big chunk of the car space dedicated to the capacitor.

Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[scottbomb]

The same people wanting us driving electric cars also don't want us building new power plants that would be required to support the additional load. The power grids can barely handle the loads they're under now.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[currently_awake]

Our grid is only at/near peak capacity during parts of the day. At night it's well below half capacity. If we charge at night we're fine.

battery swap in the real world

[spage]

It's fun to see a bunch of armchair engineers designing battery swap while seemingly ignorant of the real world.

Better Place sells you electric miles. They own the battery packs, so there's no issue with getting a tired one. You charge at home, you charge at one of their public chargers, and the sexy part is the robotic battery swap station. They are rolling it out in Denmark and Israel, so we can see the problems with their model: swap stations and spare batteries cost a fortune so blanket coverage is only practical in compact countries (like Denmark and Israel), only one manufacturer has committed to using their standardized QuickDrop battery on only one model (Renault Fluence Z.E.) , and to make it profitable BP has to charge you a lot more than it would cost to lease a battery as part of your car and cheaply recharge it yourself. We'll see how many EV drivers in those two countries value the BP approach, meanwhile beware BP's happy PR talk spin mode.

Tesla's upcoming Model S has a swappable battery pack. Pull into a Tesla store and they could swap your pack with a charged one for a long trip. It's sort of like a dealer putting snow tires on your car for a winter journey. They haven't figured out the details.

The seductive idea of replacing individual standardized battery sheets doesn't work in the real world where each weighs 20+ pounds (and an electric car has 10-40 of them), is mounted in a special enclosure with thermal management, has massive thick connectors carrying large voltages, etc.