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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

What is the actual difficulty of charging at higher power? Is it getting energy to the charger? The charging device itself?

Even as a non-EV-maximalist, I find it mind-boggling that we pump oil out in a few places in the world, ship it to turn it into gasoline, then ship it to millions of pre-placed fuel tanks and pumps around the world, and it all just works. Whereas even though all these places have electric power too, they can't charge EVs.

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Building out the infrastructure just takes time. There's only so much capacity for new builds. Eventually there will be EV chargers everywhere.

North America's infrastructure build out has also been stunted by a dumb EV charging standards war. CCS won the protocol war (CHAdeMO and Tesla's protocol lost) and Tesla's plug has now been standardized as SAE J3400. The future for North America is CCS chargers with the J3400 plug on the end.

Here's an example of that happening now. Same CCS charger that was already there, now with a different plug on the end. They replaced the CHAdeMO plug with a CCS J3400 plug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-0xRTduPI

Europe's EV infrastructure is further along in part because they sensibly standardized on CCS type 2 Combo a decade ago. And a lot of the rest of the world will use it too:

https://insideevs.com/news/333637/european-ccs-type-2-combo-...

Standardization drove investment and development. All companies could build to a common standard so all brands of charging network, all brands of charger could more easily interoperate with all brands of EV.

It's a shame that car companies couldn't agree on a global plug and a global protocol. But at least CCS will be used by most of the world.

> And a lot of the rest of the world will use it too:

China has its own standard, which probably dwarfs Europe in terms of EVs using it. But it’s not like people are driving much between the two regions.

> China has its own standard

Standards. China is deprecating the GB/T plug and Japan is deprecating the CHAdeMO plug. China and Japan will switch to ChaoJi (aka CHAdeMO 3.0) which has a new plug and protocol changes. It would be better if they just used CCS, even if they want to insist on yet another plug:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaoJi

There's nothing wrong with it on a technical level. It's just dumb to introduce yet more incompatibility when they could harmonize with the rest of the world.

Japan in particular should harmonize with right hand drive countries (which would mean CCS Type 2 Combo).

This problem could also be solved by using battery swap stations, where batteries charge much slower but the change is nearly instant. It's already a standard for electric motorbikes in Asia, especially for delivery folks.

I tried a system like this about 15 years ago, and it was unweildy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

China is propelling its electric truck market by embracing battery swapping.

In 2022, China sold 36,000 electric trucks, 91% of the global total..support for battery swapping is playing a key role.

With plug-in charging, it usually takes 40 minutes with DC fast charging or several hours via regular charging to recharge an electric truck. In contrast, battery swapping only takes 3–6 minutes.

https://theicct.org/china-is-propelling-its-electric-truck-m...

The NIO car company sells cars with swappable batteries and has built battery swap stations in Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The swap action looks slow and very particular still to be honest, but there's probably good reasons behind it (including not wanting actuators on the car itself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdQQxgxDrY

The swap takes six minutes (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmWL1hZQmD0). The swap stations charge the packs to 90%. So swapping in a 100 kWh pack that has been charged to 90 kWh is the equivalent of charging the car at 900 kW.

Nio will start introducing 150 kWh packs in the same physical form factor which they charge to 135 kWh. Swapping one of those in would be the equivalent of charging at 1.35 megawatts.

A gallon of diesel, which you can easily carry, has about 40 kWh of (admittedly thermal) energy. You can pour it into a tank in a few seconds.

Edit: if it takes 10 seconds per gallon, that's 14.4 megawatts. Quite a lot. For instance, this massive wind turbine is rated 14 MW:

https://www.siemensgamesa.com/products-and-services/offshore...

Yeah, I've heard it's hard/impossible to put together a cable to transfer that much energy; in that context ofc. It's substation-tier equipment.

Battery-swapping may be the way.

It’s just growing pains.

Electric cars are trivial to charge at home because they get hours to charge every day. However on a road trip people want to dump as much energy as quickly as possible which has meant a rapid evolution of what cars/cabling/chargers/grid can handle and what chargers can supply. In 20 years this will all be boring infrastructure just like gas stations, until then it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Charging an EV is straightforward if you have a home parking spot. However, "According to the 2017 American Housing Survey, 66% of all occupied housing units in the United States had a garage or carport."

For those living in big cities and relying on street parking, EVs are still less practical. I envision a service where you leave your car parked on the street and schedule a mobile charger through an app to come and charge it while you're away.

Add driveway to garage or carport, but I get your point.

Individuals can’t install them, but cities or parking garages can. Level 1 or 2 chargers down a city street makes more sense the more EV adoption increases.

Right now only 1% of cars on the road are EV’s, but EV’s and plug in hybrids are 18% of new car sales. Even if adoption stalls we will still build a lot more EV infrastructure, which then makes EV’s more attractive.

Pretty sure the real issue is safety. Obviously you want to avoid exposed hot contacts and arcing, but also thermal safety is a pretty big deal. Addressing that increases cost, so companies don't want to do it unless there's enough proven demand at that location to pay it back quickly. Same problem as internet access or mail delivery to rural areas, and the same solution suggests itself.

It's the hardware required to output a huge volume of electricity into the battery in a short amount of time.

Getting the power to the charger is trivial.

But what is it then, beyond a thick copper cable? An expensive transformer-rectifier? High-power electronics?

If I look at a petrol pump, I understand what makes it bulky. What makes a high power car charger bulky and expensive?

It converts from AC to DC and then has to work with the car to figure out at what rate to send power. You can't just go full throttle or the battery would start a fire (simplification).

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