[mytailorisrich]

For this sort of fast charging you need the charging station itself to have a large pool of batteries to buffer the energy from the grid and to push it at very high power to cars. Probably still requires a good size connection to the grid.

I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.

[adrian_b]

Obviously, the engineers at BYD, CATL etc. are not stupid, so these fast chargers, which have been in production for several months and which are already installed in an increasing number of places, do include batteries, so they need only an averaged power from the electrical grid, not the up to 1 MW power that is provided to the charged vehicle.

BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.

It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.

The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).

[Salgat]

To add, the technology for stationary batteries (lithium phosphate) is cheaper, because you're no longer constrained by density/size.