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by donny2018 1038 days ago
I'm not an engineer but I attempted to do some napkin math in my comment in a previous topic about this CATL battery. I'll copy/paste:

Assuming 400km worth of charge needs maybe 60 kw/h of energy, to deliver that amount of energy in 10 minutes would require at least 360kw charger. Charging just a few cars simultaneously will require megawatts of power. I wonder what are the implications in terms of city infrastructure or investment costs to building charging stations for that.
1 comments
davedx 1038 days ago
V3 Superchargers are 250 kW per car with 1MW power cabinets.

The issue at the moment is that grids in a lot of places in the world can't keep up with the connection requests, and this is indeed mainly due to not being able to upgrade transmission capacity fast enough.

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ZeroGravitas 1038 days ago
One of the boring ways to upgrade the grid is to raise the transmission limits set to prevent overheating in the summer when it's cold in the winter.

Reminds me of "the duck curve" where the worry was that gas plants couldn't ramp output fast enough. There were many exciting high tech solutions but one solution was just to ask the gas plants if they could ramp faster. Turns out they could, they'd just not needed to before.

Seems to be a recurring pattern: you can hyperventilate about how something is hard or impossible or you can ask some engineers if they can improve things. If you get really desperate you can pay people for coming up with solutions and create a market. Of course that all assumes you actually want to solve the problem.

edit: recent third example. Grid connection queues in England had zombie projects in them because you got fined if you left the queue. They had an amnesty and a bunch off them dropped out moving up dates for real projects.

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davedx 1038 days ago
Yup, this is because most things that are engineered have tolerances in them. But pushing the envelope will only get you so far, at some point you're going to run up against hard physical limits (in this case with grid transmission capacity).

The National Grid connection queue is still a huge bottleneck for renewable and battery developers. The amnesty helped but at the end of the day, the overhead lines, substations and transformers need to be upgraded.

At least in the UK there's quite some visibility into the queue and required and ongoing works. Here in Europe it's like a black box.

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