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by gpm 779 days ago
Just have the same batteries in the charging station to smooth out power usage? Seems a lot cheaper and operationally less complex than a gas station.
4 comments

Those would need to get cycled a lot(many times per day). You might want one for your house if you wanted to charge quickly at home, but for charging stations, I think more realistically they'd have 10x less charging spots if each person was only there 1/10th the time.

So the peak would be the same, but if there were too many customers then sort of like at a busy gas station people would be waiting for a spot rather than waiting for charging to complete.

> Those would need to get cycled a lot(many times per day).

Fortunately these batteries have "an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles". Also, since there aren't super-dangerous elements in them, they should be much easier and cleaner to recycle/renew - especially with the giant recharge-station-scale ones' we're talking about, which could be designed specifically for that.

This assumes that the same number of vehicles use the charging station. Lower charge times means potentially higher steady-state throughput.
Higher steady-state is mostly a good thing. You need to bulk up the power lines, but you're making good use of them and have lots of money to spend on them.
Having lots of money doesn't mean spending lots of money. Budgets often get cut for no good reason.
Okay, I mean I'm aware of that perfectly generic information but "sometimes management sucks" doesn't impact a feasibility analysis much. And this hypothetical station was already willing to spend on a lot on batteries.
Just because they want to spend on batteries doesn't necessarily mean they can spend on power lines. Most of the time you can't just pay the power company to bulk up your lines, just like you can't always pay an ISP to install a faster connection, even if they provide that service to another area.
Okay but that's a completely different objection from the one in your previous comment.

And yes it's not always possible but it'll be available in enough places.

If a particular station can't get better lines, then as someone else said they could have fewer charging spots. High load per spot still works out well for them, because they can save space.

I had an engineering colleague who previously worked at a company that reconditioned Prius batteries. It involved cycling powe in and out of the battery several times. Where did all that power come from? Another battery.
i doubt if the batteries can handle the type of surge output as the superchargers require.
They easily do. Discharge rates are typically higher than charge rates. For stationary batteries it's all easier due to being able to have larger, more parallel batteries, and better cooling when weight is not a concern.

Battery-backed charging stations are already common, because it allows use of cheaper grid interconnection, and use of cheaper off-peak or renewable energy.

If the car batteries can handle some amount of power, batteries on the other side can handle the same amount.

Especially because the station would want to have multiple cars worth of energy stored, which means the load is divided among more cells and they don't have to work nearly as hard.