Obvious safety concerns aside, I really worry that we are losing perspective on what the grid is capable of and the possibility that distributed technology won't get us to the ideal outcome fast enough.
The power plant nearest to me could only handle ~1000 instances of this kind of charging before it is completely saturated. The transmission (transformer) infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck. Even if Entergy built several additional gigawatts of capacity on their existing site, they'd have no way to deliver it. Tesla would have to install supercharging stations in their switch yard and figure out how to operate at much higher supply voltages.
Well, the chargers won't be pulling 1MW continuously, so you can smooth this out by installing batteries with the chargers. The grid demand becomes a more constant trickle into the batteries co-located with the charger
the idea would be to slowly charge the capacitor to its capacity in the breaks between the charger being used. That way when you arrive at the charger, the capacitor would be fairly full and able to quickly transfer that energy to your car. The charger would then replenish that capacitor more slowly (meaning that the charger wouldn't be able to be used for a bit).
This will have very little impact on the grid. If you can charge twice as fast you need half as many chargers for the same capacity, resulting in the same load at 100% utilization.
The batteries are the same size that they were previously, so the kWh pulled from the grid doesn't change.
I don't think we can look at it on an average basis when each vehicle is pulling a megawatt, regardless of how long they are doing it for.
Industrial users with electric arc furnaces and other massive loads need special, ongoing arrangements with the utility to operate safely on the grid. It would only take 200~300 of these high speed chargers to equate to the demand of the largest EAFs on earth.
Mostly agree with you on that case. My initial thought on the matter also.
This theoretical car draws 1 MW for 5 minutes, pulling 83 kWh. Your normal residential address in America only uses 20 kWh all day long. The hard limit in a lot of areas is 25-30 kW continuous. Sure, they're building special charging stations, yet this is like 40 residential addresses running at max line limit consumption suddenly.
Looking at this a different way, lighting the entire SoFi Stadium (3.5 Disneylands for another scale), takes 10 MW. [1][2] Ten (10) of these cars pulling on the grid is like lighting an entire NFL scale stadium on game day.
Looking at something like Electricity Maps [3], the entire state of Texas is producing 47,700 MW (11.6 GW Gas, 24.3 GW Wind, 6.7 GW Coal, 5 GW Nuclear, and they're only exchanging 25 MW across their borders with other utilities. 25 of these cars is Texas's border electricity exchange.
Enormous, multi-state electricity organizations. Have 1000 of these show up to gas stations in some place like Texas, and you're suddenly pulling a substation chunk of the entire Texas electric grid all at once.
most of these cars will be charging using L2 overnight charging. If you need to limit the fast charging, you can surge price it so maybe it costs $100 to charge fully instead of 25, etc. There are many possible solutions as long as they can solve for the surges as it spins up and down.
1 EAF is a very minor amount of infrastructure compared the gasoline infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of cars and the energy usage of hundreds of thousands of cars.
I think that this would work by having charging stations "buffer" energy by getting it from the grid more slowly and storing it on-site, ready to be pushed into EVs.
Obvious safety concerns aside, I really worry that we are losing perspective on what the grid is capable of and the possibility that distributed technology won't get us to the ideal outcome fast enough.
The power plant nearest to me could only handle ~1000 instances of this kind of charging before it is completely saturated. The transmission (transformer) infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck. Even if Entergy built several additional gigawatts of capacity on their existing site, they'd have no way to deliver it. Tesla would have to install supercharging stations in their switch yard and figure out how to operate at much higher supply voltages.