edatoakrun
Well-known member
More to the point, the real costs of ~350A charging will likely prevent it's widespread adoption for passenger vehicles (other than possibly for the luxury vehicle market) for many years to come.RegGuheert said:...Charging at-or-near 350A will take quite a bit of time to become commonplace. There will be problems with overheating and fires early on. Simply put, it is a challenge to make the resistance low enough in connectors and crimps in consumer products at such high current levels. It also takes a lot of copper.
Sorry to burst any bubbles, but the infrastructure for ~350 kW charging for large numbers of BEVs is almost as much a pipe dream as is hydrogen infrastructure for large numbers of FCVs.
Utilities institute demand charges and time-of-use-rates because of the high costs high intermittent electricity demands place on the grid.
It already generally costs much more to deliver kWh at ~50 kW per-mile-driven than gasoline per-mile-driven for an efficient ICEV.
So most BEV drivers will probably opt for DC charge rates of much lower than ~350 kW, if the ACTUAL cost savings of taking more time to recharge are passed on to them when they pay at the charge site.
The fact is, on-board battery storage is generally a poor choice for vehicles for inefficient (high-speed) long distance travel, and will remain so for many years to come, due to both the high cost of the large battery packs, and the high costs for rapid refueling.
Can you imagine the astronomical cost to build the extra generation or storage capacity that would be required to charge hundreds of of thousands of BEVs at ~350 kW (or even at ~50 kW, for that matter) during peak demand on a hot Friday evening in Southern California, as the masses try to exit the urban centers for their weekend getaways?
Can you imagine how much cheaper, more efficient, and more convenient to drivers it would be instead, to equip the same hundreds of of thousands of BEVs with much smaller battery packs sufficient for normal daily driving requirements, and adding a hydrocarbon-fueled 10 kW to 50 kW on-board range extender, allowing these same drivers in their BEVx's to drive long-distances occasionally with less frequent, faster, and MUCH cheaper refueling stops?