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

[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: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.

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.

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.

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.