The newer Tesla superchargers can peak at 300 kW, but to your point I’ve been wondering how on earth the grid will handle one order of magnitude more EVs charging during peak hours.
Just do what many stations already do. Use a battery to spread the load. LFP is super cheap and perfect for this.
I just don’t think this will be any harder than the advent of air conditioners was. We used to double electricity demand every decade. In a way, it helps the grid by providing a lot more revenue (demand has been largely stagnant, which has really caused the grid to struggle).
1) Yeah, it is. Like $80/kWh and if properly managed can last over 10,000 cycles, potentially giving a cost per kWh cycle of as low as 1¢. 2) Not true. Supply increases in response to demand.
3) Not that much. 4) Yes, they have, but this is a temporary result due to supply constraints and a huge demand increase outstripping the forecasted demand. This is like saying the world is forever running out of toilet paper in 2020. In the medium term (ie the context of increasing number of EVs by an order of magnitude), this is solved by just increasing lithium production. I think people do not realize just how plentiful of an element lithium is. It’s everywhere and at current prices you could probably profitably extract it from seawater, even though there are so many better sources of it (geothermal brine, even old sources like hard rock), which will soon come online bringing the price down before your seawater extraction could turn a profit.
On a system level its far more then that. And again, its a question of how profitable that is compared to putting them in cars.
> 2) Not true. Supply increases in response to demand.
While this is nice in theory, in practice with an industry as small and specialized as lithium. Scaling is actually a huge problem. Until just 1-2 years ago the industry was massively under-invested and opening new mines takes a huge amount of time.
Every industry forecast predicts massive shortfalls and likely prices not going down. Compare the amount of planned battery factory to the amount of planned capacity added by the lithium companies.
> 3) Not that much
LFP prices are now no longer much cheaper then low-nickel NCMs. Look at VW an Tesla presentation for example, both are investing in high Manganese cells as well.
> I think people do not realize just how plentiful of an element lithium is.
I know exactly how plentiful it is. What you don't seem to know is how complex open up new mining is.
This is not the copper industry with gigantic mining companies with massive pipelines and so on. And lithium has a very complex chemical process to be battery grade. Looking at the history of lithium startup shows that almost all of them so far have failed to actual make a viable certified product.
I'm not saying this will be the case forever but for this decade it will be an issue and many of the car companies will likely miss their targets because of this.
The guy who makes the podcast has been in the industry for 30 years and has interviews with the CEO of pretty much every lithium startup and established company.
I bet they will price the power different throughout the day so, just like in my house, power is 3 times more expensive from 7am till 10pm.
Although now that I think about it, There will be a big dip right in the middle of the day when the solar is blasting the grid. Might be cheapest of all at 2pm, and really expensive on cloudy days.
Where I live, overnight charging at home cost $0.01 per kwh. During peak hours, the cost is $0.20 per kwh. That 20X difference should be enough to get most users to schedule most of their charging overnight, or at least during mid-peak, which is $0.07 per kwh.
It’s true, but no manufacturer publishes exact numbers on this, so people end up not caring too much. With batteries that last a million miles anyway (and an 8 year guarantee on that), it’s easy to tell yourself that you’ll never drive as much anyway.
Energy price OTOH is the biggest motivator for many to charge at home. I think the higher price on fast charging will be important for flattening peak energy draws. Stations will need to purchase buffer batteries anyway to keep their own prices down (surge pricing is a thing for them too), which should keep fast charging expensive for a while.
Or is that a best-case spec using slow overnight charging and no surge loads from rapid acceleration?
Has to be a Tesla by now out there with a million miles, did it last on the original pack? They must know what happens every quarter million miles since Tesla phones-home with every detail.
As I wrote, nobody publishes exact numbers on this. There’s reasonable room for error though because most people never go beyond 300-400k during the lifetime of a car. Packs generally go longer than anticipated a few years back, such that a broken pack is no longer a real concern for most cars starting, say, 2020. There was a lifetime issue with the original Leaf, but they seemed to have fixed that in later versions.
It’s also somewhat moot to worry about this - if you need to charge en route, you’ll fast charge. If you’re at home, you’ll charge slow. You won’t go out of your way to fast charge since it’s expensive. Except if you don’t have a charger at home, at which point you don’t have a choice anyway.
Most cars are parked >20 hours and driven less than 100km a day. Fast charging will likely become something you only do rarely. All we need is a kW or two available at almost every parking spot. Eventually we'll want cars to communicate with the grid to preferentially charge when it's particularly windy or sunny.
We'll just need a lot more grid capacity and power generation. We probably won't be seeing those superchargers installed very often in regular houses, so it's not like the last mile has to support ridiculously high peak loads, but we will need a lot of infrastructure upgrades generally as average electricity consumption goes up.
The transition to EVs won't be instantaneous (cars last a long time), so utilities will have a good long while to adapt to changes in power demand.
I like the idea of electrifying our major highways so that cars can recharge without stopping. One of the benefits of that is that it shifts power usage from overnight charging to daytime charging (when people do most of their driving), which means that electrified roads are more compatible with being able to take advantage of solar power.
I think one idea is that when charging EV at station becomes problematic, you stop charging EV at home. EV home charging is almost ideally suited to demand response.
If that doesn't work out, you would need to build lots of pumped storage hydro.
Depends on when most of the recharging is done. If people are charging at home overnight then we might actually see a smoother load over 24h compared to today, when peak times are during the day to early evening.
Asked and answered. Ubiquitous rooftop solar with onsite battery storage. Sure this does not cover all scenarios or latitudes but it covers a majority of the inhabited world so that grids can handle the rest.
