Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 103 posts

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#71

Post by crote »

cestith wrote: post #64
dirck-norman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 minute swap is not needed for this.

Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.

The vast majority of charging is done at home, though. Five-minute-charging/swapping is basically a gimmick to show off to your friends, and only really sees (questionable) use during that once-a-year road trip.

The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#72

Post by crote »

maeln wrote: post #10
tristanj wrote: post #2

I did not expect Nio's 5-minute battery swap technology to become obsolete this soon.

We should always take marketing number with a huge grain of salt, so the 10 to 98% in 7 minutes remain to be seen. Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power. It is does, there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems (for bus). A public transit operator might want to have more battery than vehicle, so that they can rotat…

> there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems

There isn't. Buses aren't really size- or weight-constricted and don't drive at highway speeds, so building one with enough battery capacity to last most of the day isn't a big deal. Plenty of cities have already transitioned to a 100% electric bus fleet, after all.

A big thing to remember is that people don't travel at the same volume at every moment of the day, so you don't need to run buses at the same frequency the entire day either. You can run buses at 10-minute intervals during commute hours, 15-minute intervals in the middle of the day, and 30-minute intervals in the early mornings and late evenings. This means that there is plenty of time between the morning rush and the evening rush for some buses to go off-duty and charge for a few hour. They are going to sit idle anyways, so why not make use of it?

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#73

Post by crote »

rcxdude wrote: post #37
tristanj wrote: post #2

I did not expect Nio's 5-minute battery swap technology to become obsolete this soon.

Swapping does help reduce the high peak power demands that fast charging has. There's limited places where you can get the infrastructure to install a bank of chargers capable of this kind of speed (though, one potential approach is having a local block of batteries near the charger, but you are then paying the efficiency cost of another battery round-trip, and the cost of the batteries which will get a lot of wear a…

The charging station's batteries don't have to use the same chemistry though, as they aren't space- and weight-constrained like EV batteries are. You can optimize for durability and cost instead.

Having station-based storage also allows the station to participate on the energy market and purchase only when electricity is cheap. It could even do double duty by selling back electricity from storage during periods of high grid demand! Heck, pair it with a local grid storage battery which is going to be built anyways and you basically get it for free.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#74

Post by fhn »

adrian_b wrote: post #56
chris_va wrote: post #43

The poor grid. The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year. ... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.

The speed of charging is irrelevant, because the energy consumption is the same. The power requirements for a charging station is determined by the number of cars charged in a day, not by how fast they are charged. The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power…

but in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1. So power requirements for these stations went up by 7x. Sure, they can fill up at night but they would need a lot more batteries on standby.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#75

Post by crote »

audunw wrote: post #27
bayesianbot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels quite clear Donut doesn't have much - no meaningful new tests released for many weeks already and some executive of Nordic Nano sued Donut Lab and said their claims were misleading. I haven't really followed that closely myself, but I've noticed the people who I saw defending Donut before have gone really quiet about it lately.

I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough? It’s clear they have something very interesting. We’re mainly missing lo…

They didn't share third party tests. They shared tests done by a party they contracted, and whose test reports don't back up the claims to the extent that they claimed.

Do they have something interesting? Maybe! But it could also be yet another Theranos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they haven't exactly been forthcoming with it.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#76

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

WarmWash wrote: post #66
hangonhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. You're missing something. Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.

Renters shouldn't get EVs if they cannot charge at home. Which sucks, but the majority of people (2/3) don't rent.

With last year's battery tech sure, but not next year's apparently

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#78

Post by crote »

fhn wrote: post #74
adrian_b wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speed of charging is irrelevant, because the energy consumption is the same. The power requirements for a charging station is determined by the number of cars charged in a day, not by how fast they are charged. The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power…

but in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1. So power requirements for these stations went up by 7x. Sure, they can fill up at night but they would need a lot more batteries on standby.

> in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1

Why? Where do those extra cars come from? In reality the change you're going to see is from spending 30 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 30 minutes of sitting idle to spending 5 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 55 minutes of sitting idle.

Or, alternatively, go from 6 stations each spending 30 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour to 1 station spending 5 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour.

The electricity demand only depends on the number of miles driven. Same with ICE cars: the speed through which fuel comes out of the gas station's nozzle doesn't impact how much fuel you consume during your commute, or how often the gas station needs to be resupplied.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#79

Post by organsnyder »

JMKH42 wrote: post #30
dgacmu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get 400km per charge using 88% of the battery (98% -> 10%), that's 400,000km (258,000 miles) before you're down to 90%, at which point you have likely worn out an awful lot of other things with the car. Admitting that I have the luxury of an urban, low-driving lifestyle: I'm 50. That battery would literally last the rest of my driving life and have room to spare.

Understanding battery degredation takes a lot of nuance. If you do nothing but charge and discharge quickly at some given temperature, you degrade to 90% in 1,000 cycles. But the battery also degrades over time, the hotter it is the more, the higher the SOC the more. So you have to add on that calendar degradation, to that 10% loss from just charging. Total degradation in practice will vary a lot, based on users char…

The battery in my PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica) showed no appreciable degradation in eight years (and >100k miles) before being replaced under recall for a manufacturing fault last year.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#80

Post by sandworm101 »

adrian_b wrote: post #53
sandworm101 wrote: post #8

> have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge. Scaling that to something the size of an EV pack will require one massive cable/connector. Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) Charging one car could suck up more power than an entire neighbourhood. Say four or five chargers operating at once ... every…

Like others have pointed, you have made a mistake in your computation. The currents that are required are only of hundreds of amps and the latest chargers can provide up to 1000 A. Also like others have said, it does not matter how fast you charge a car, the total energy consumption is the same, so fast chargers do not require changes in the power supply of a charging station. The fast chargers that enable this full…

Ya, i missed a 0, but chargers with batteries are irrelevant for charging stations by a highway like a modern gas station. They have a constant flow of vehicles. There will be no time for a buffer battery when the next customer is maybe 45 seconds behind the last.

A buffer battery may have a place for a home charger, but a constant-use commerical charger is a very different thing. Or think of a rental car stand at an airport, or a truck/buss depot. They will have a vehicle arriving every minute and every hour wasted charging is an hour less rental time.

Post reply on HN