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Power Transportation China

BYD Unveils New Super-Charging EV Tech With Peak Speeds of 1,000 kW (yahoo.com) 58

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Reuters: BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China. The so-called "super e-platform" will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a 5-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company's Shenzhen headquarters.

Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla's superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs -- Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,328.91) and BYD said it would build over 4,000 ultra-fast charging piles, or units, across China to match the new platform.
"In order to completely solve our user's charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles," Wang said.

"This is the first time in the industry that the unit of megawatt (charge) has been achieved on charging power," he said.

BYD Unveils New Super-Charging EV Tech With Peak Speeds of 1,000 kW

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  • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Monday March 17, 2025 @09:30PM (#65241235) Homepage
    1,000 kW? That's a megawatt. Use the word.
    (that is rather impressive, actually)
    • Zero-point-zero-zero-one jiggawatts!

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Better than the swasticar.
    • 1,000 kW? That's a megawatt. Use the word. (that is rather impressive, actually)

      It is, but you won't just be plunking those down without the participation of your local electric utility.

    • A thousand amps at a thousand volts? That's a serious conductor. Are they using solid bus bars instead of cables?

      • by short ( 66530 )
        Another opion is there are big heat losses and they just manage to cool the cables down - like the liquid cooling of Tesla Supercharge cables.
      • Re:Megawatt (Score:4, Informative)

        by tragedy ( 27079 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @01:23AM (#65241515)

        I would not expect so. For high voltage most of the current will move along the skin of your conductor, so you are much better off increasing the total surface area of the skin by using multiple bundled conductors. You might need to liquid cool the cables to keep them at a manageable temperature. Also, the lithium battery pack will charge with something around 95% efficiency. That other 5% will become heat. Some in the cable, but probably a lot in the battery pack. So that's 50 KW of heat or around 170,000 BTUs/hr, which is about what you would need for a home furnace in a 3000 square foot home in a cold climate, for example. Still a car radiator can handle radiating heat at around 100 KW or more, but that's the radiator for an ICE. The ba ttery could sink that much heat. Estimating around 300 kg for the battery, that would be around 50 kJ per kg of battery. That's very roughly enough to raise the temperature of the battery by 50 degrees C applied instantaneously. Starting at room temperature, that's skin-meltingly hot, but obviously you would have the radiator going during charging and heat would radiate away from the battery, be conducted to the rest of the car, etc. So it would not heat up that much. Still, a design concern for a car meant to charge like this might include a beefier cooling system for the battery itself and a larger, more powerful radiator. Or the charging station itself could have some built in cooling features. A cooling unit that sits under the car, for example, or coolant hoses that are part of the charging connector that snap on and pump heat back to the charger, etc.

        Of course, charging efficiency could be up by 98%, but best to design for a worst case scenario and battery heating could be a limiting factor for MegaWatt vehicle chargers. If the goal is to keep charging times consistently fast, it will need to be dealt with.

        • Re:Megawatt (Score:5, Informative)

          by heypete ( 60671 ) <pete@heypete.com> on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @02:31AM (#65241587) Homepage

          For high voltage most of the current will move along the skin of your conductor, so you are much better off increasing the total surface area of the skin by using multiple bundled conductors

          You're thinking of the skin effect [wikipedia.org] applies to conductors carrying high-frequency (not high-voltage) electricity.

          DC circuits of whatever voltage are unaffected by the skin effect, and EV fast charging is essentially exclusively DC.

        • Wrong.

          For AC, current tends to move along the outside of the conductor. Skin effect is an AC thing, and skin depth is a function of frequency. It doesn't really effect DC.

          Multiple bundles conductors only help with skin effect if they're arranged the right way. The effect is caused by the changing magnetic field generated the changing current flowing in wire. so spreads across adjacent conductors. See Litz wire.

          All of this information is on wikipedia.

      • Let's talk about safety. Some forgotten piece of science fiction described a being falling into futuristic power machinery: "The meter thick bus bars cleared their grisly short."
    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      It may be impressive, but I thought Kempower already had MegaWatt range vehicle chargers.

  • They make great cars too bad we'll never see them here. Not as long as the world is tribalist.

    • "Tribalist" ?

      Try "Opposed to dictatorships".
  • My car is rates to 250kw of charging, but it quickly drops off as the batteries heat. I suppose they could put a lot more effort into heating the batteries before arriving at a charger and then a lot more effort into cooling the batteries while charging. That means extra cost, complication, and weight, lowering efficiency. Or they could just kill battery longevity. Or they could just be making ultra fast chargers that will be underutilized while waiting for battery tech to catch up.

    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      To me it seems most logical to put the cooling functions into the stationary charging station itself rather than into the car. It makes sense if it is only for the purpose of handling battery heating during charging. This could be from a cooling unit that cools from under the car, or potentially by hooking a coolant cable loop from the charger to the car.

    • My car charging rate is around 10 to 20MW
      I can fill up 600kWh in about 2 minutes

    • I'd be interested to see the size of the charging cable they plan to use. Even at 480V, 1MW of power needs just over 2,000A of current and that is going to require a very beefy cable and a plug-in connector that works extremely well: any tiny resistance in the connector will result in a fire in no time.
    • by shilly ( 142940 )

      Erm, this article is about the batteries, not the chargers BYD’s new *cars* will be capable of charging at this speed (470km in five minutes).

  • Would this needs lots of energy storage connected to the grid?

  • Give me a few minutes.
    I have to redesign my solar installation.

    Hm, gosh, on the first glance it seems I need a bigger house, with a bigger roof, too!

  • Battery lifespan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sirket ( 60694 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @12:29AM (#65241451)

    You can only push so much current into a battery without destroying it and the higher the current, the faster they degrade.

    Not to mention modern fast chargers are 1000v and at the limit of how much current you can push through their wires and connectors. To hit 1 megawatt you either need even higher voltages, or higher current- both of which require stouter cables and connectors. Not to mention the added safety risks that come with such systems.

    Is it doable? Sure. Do I think current battery designs can handle those rates without rapid degradation? No.

    • by shilly ( 142940 )

      American complacency and smugness on full show. BYD have an excellent track record of delivering the tech they’ll say they deliver. And that tech has an excellent track record of reliability.

      Stroking your chin and saying “aha, but what about degradation” as though keeping degradation to acceptable levels won’t have been one of the key engineering objectives for BYD, to which they’’ll have devoted really substantial effort, is just absurd.

  • The USB Implementer's Forum has announced the ratification of USB-PD 4.0, delivering unprecedented power and rapid charging capability to consumer devices. While remaining backward-compatible with existing USB-C connectors, USB-PD 4.0 will also support SAE-J1772, CCS, and NACS connectors. Said Feldman Mertikopf during the announcement, "We see no reason why people shouldn't be able to charge both their car and their phone using the same foundational infrastructure."
  • If it is a speed, shouldn't there be some unit of time involved?
  • I plugged my car into the new megawatt charger and blew the whole power substation.
    {^_-} Well, the lights dimmed to be sure.

  • Feels to me that this tech is largely useful for addressing consumer perceptions of EV shortcomings. In practice, most EV drivers will rarely feel the need to charge this fast, at least in most of the world. What this battery tech enables is driving 400 miles, stopping for 5 minutes, and then driving another 250 miles. That’s 650 miles of driving — 10 hours — with only a five minute break. The vast majority of people, including in the US, do not drive like that, ever. For Brits, I am 100%

  • And meanwhile, the US has wasted a decade on banning climate change talk, bullying and stripping rights from minorities and trying to resurrect "clean coal".

    What a waste of potential progress.

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