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Power Transportation China

BYD Unveils New Super-Charging EV Tech With Peak Speeds of 1,000 kW (yahoo.com) 78

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)
    • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Monday March 17, 2025 @09:56PM (#65241271)

      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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Sorry, but I'm an American. How many horse powers per hour/second/minutes is that?

      • Re:Megawatt (Score:4, Funny)

        by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Monday March 17, 2025 @11:23PM (#65241359) Homepage

        Enough to fling a pound of iron across 2.5 football fields in the time it takes for one Superbowl commercial to play.

      • Sorry, but I'm an American. How many horse powers per hour/second/minutes is that?

        It doesn't matter where you went to school. All of us will need to learn about electrical charging soon.

        Using 1 megawatt to charge the battery for five minutes is just how fast the charging is happening. The question you're asking is about as relevant as asking how many gallons per minute is a gas pump filling your car. If the gas pump at the Chevron station can fill my gas tank twice as fast as the pump at Costco, does that make it better?

        Actually, for EVs, sometimes the difference between a 5 minute ch

      • I know you are joking, but one megawatt is about 1341 horsepower. They are both units of power (not energy) so no per hour or per second is needed.
    • 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.

        • so you are much better off increasing the total surface area of the skin by using multiple bundled conductors.

          We don't need to guess, these things already exist and the standard for MCS (Megawatt Charging System) is due to be finalised this year after some 5 years of testing. The standard will almost certainly be 2 large single current carrying conductors, hollowed out and liquid cooled. Though it's not clear yet if liquid cooling will be required for 1MW charging, the standard will cover up to 4.5MW. As someone else pointed out you're thinking of skin effect which doesn't come into play here. Single conductors wil

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Some 350kW chargers used water cooled cables, but the current 400kW ones we have in Europe don't bother. The 400kW can't be sustained for very long so they don't need active cooling.

          These batteries will have active cooling too. Presumably a heat pump. Given that charging will only take 5 minutes they will probably use the time between charges to cool the battery back down, for the most part.

          It's interesting tech but I'm not sure how needed it is for most people. The Nio battery swap tech might be better any

          • by Askmum ( 1038780 )
            Not really true, trucks can charge at 300-350 kW for a long period. But those kinds of powers are only availablie with 800 V batteries, so the current is limited to 500 A. Tesla Superchargers do 250 kW with 400 V * 625 A.
            MWC is going to 1250 V * 3000 A.
            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              The truck chargers are either water cooled, or split so you use two cables carrying 150-175W each.

      • 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.

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday March 17, 2025 @09:50PM (#65241261)

    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

      • by shilly ( 142940 )

        But you can only use 150kWh of that 600, with the rest being spewed out as heat

          • by shilly ( 142940 )

            Sure, but what matters is how much of your time is being wasted, engaged in the process of fuelling or charging.

            I spent less than 2 minutes of my time on my last two charges, with zero inconvenience to me:

            1. At the weekend, I drove from London to Durham, stopped at Markham Vale for dinner. I didn’t really need to charge, but thought I might as well. I parked the car in the same car park I’d have used if I wasn’t charging, plugged the car in and tapped my phone to start the charge (30 secon

    • 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.
      • Probably pretty sizeable. CCS allows for up to 1000V in it's current deployed standard, so "only" 1000A (it's specced for 500).

        I'd imagine that for these kind of charge rates there'd be some sort of active thermal sensing in the plug and socket housing, along with a current ramp at the beginning.

        any tiny resistance in the connector will result in a fire in no time.

        It's crazy. With the I^2 term, normal contact resistances are going to dissipate kilowatts. Though as I said they're already specced for 500A, wh

    • 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.

    • by bgarcia ( 33222 )

      To hit 1 megawatt you either need even higher voltages, or higher current- both of which require stouter cables and connectors.

      Higher current requires thicker conductors to limit resistive losses and heat buildup.

      Higher voltage requires insulation to prevent sparks or leakage, but that's easy to handle and doesn't require a whole lot. The wiring in your house is usually rated to handle 600v, even though it will never see more than a 240v potential difference.

    • Is it doable? Sure.

      Not only is it doable, it's been proven years ago to the point where charging systems designed for 4.5MW are expected to be finalised with the update to IEC 61851-23 this year. It's a 1.5kV charging system by the way with actively cooled cables.

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

      That kind of fear has been present since day one of EVs, and it has been proven unfounded. Engineers know what they are doing and know the problems batteries face and design around these problems. Part of the higher power MCS test include an active external cooling l

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Many commercial vehicles accept 1MW or more already, without serious degradation issues. They key is that they have massive batteries, or usually multiple batteries that are charged individually and multiple chargers to do it.

      A 200kWh battery at 1MW would only be 5C, well within the safe zone for modern chemistries. BYD has been making batteries much larger than that for years, it's just a question of if they can fit one to a car. My guess would be that they probably can these days.

  • 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.

  • by shilly ( 142940 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @04:30AM (#65241749)

    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% confident that what people do on longer trips, is what I did when I drove from London to Durham at the weekend: they drive for 2.5 or 3 hours, stop for a piss and a bite to eat and a stretch and a rest, and then drive another 2 hours to their destination. Plugging in my car while I did this added a max of 1 minute of extra time — the chargers are in the car park, so it was just plug in, tap my phone and head off to the fish and chip shop (Chesters, it was pretty good: http://eatatchesters.com/ [eatatchesters.com]). A five minute charge would have been inconvenient, as I’d have felt obliged to go back to the car and unplug before I’d finished my dinner.

    So I think of this kind of charging advance as being a halo product, designed to put people’s minds at ease and increase consumer acceptance.

    • In places like Canada that usually looks a bit different. First of all it can easily be -20c and that changes a lot of the numbers right off the bat. It takes almost 9x8 hour days to get across the country, so most people want to do a full 8 hour day of driving. There isn't a lot in between so you can't really expect to find a decent place to eat that will be worth the money and not total junk. Generally I would go grocery shopping and pack a cooler or go to subway when leaving the city I'm in and eat o
      • by shilly ( 142940 )

        Hi Fluffernutter!

        As always, I readily concede that your needs are very different and an EV won’t meet your use case for a long while yet. I don’t see that changing even with this 1MW charging, and even if you had 1MW chargers right across Canada. I mean, tbh, what would, in my view, serve you better, is the ability to drive 8 hours non-stop and then recharge during the 16 hours out of each 24 when you’re not driving, for that giant road trip across the country. Presumably you’re talk

        • Vacuum insulation panels don't take a lot of room. By combining that with watercooling and block heater outlets it's technically possible to make cold weather EVs right now, when not driving the battery stays warm and while driving the battery stays warm, but the market isn't large enough to justify.

  • 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.
  • Call me old fashioned (and it wouldn't be the first time), but I will stick to my De Lorean [youtube.com], thank you.

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