Buried deep in the article, what the clickbait headline alludes to: Car chargers are too complicated and expensive. We can make them simpler and cheaper while keeping them safe, which would let us build many more charging stations.
I must say I'm a little confused by their proposal: yes, the later stages of the power conversion in the charger provide the galvanic isolation, but they also provide a more essential role of voltage conversion and current regulation. Connecting a battery directly to a grid-connected rectifier is likely to get melty and or explodey pretty quick, as huge amounts of current will flow in either direction to try to equalise the almost certainly quite-unequal voltages.
Fast chargers work because they can regulate the current flowing into the battery and convert the grid voltage to allow that to happen. Batteries are charged by feeding them with a constant current until you reach a certain voltage near 100% charge, then letting the current drop to get to a complete charge (which is part of why 20% to 80% charges are much faster than complete charges). This is 100% not what you get if you just cut out the charge circuit completely, you instead get a blown fuse at best or a fire at worst. There may be cheaper options for the charge circuit if you don't need them to provide the isolation, but they don't really discuss that, they just talk as if the cost would go to zero.
(For slow charging, this circuit still exists, it's just in the car instead. But it's quite hard to fit something that can handle the power involved in fast charging into a car, which is why it's in the charger side instead).
They propose to address this with a buck regulator:
> [If] we are to get rid of galvanic isolation [there's still a ] need to prevent mismatches between the utility’s AC line voltage and that of the EV battery.
> The solution to this problem is a device called a buck regulator (or buck converter). A buck regulator is similar, functionally, to a step-down transformer, except that it handles DC current rather than AC. In the event that the utility’s AC voltage exceeds the battery voltage, the buck regulator operates like a transformer and steps it down. In comparison with an isolation link of the same power rating, a buck regulator would cost less than 10 percent and the power loss would be less than 20 percent.
What do you mean buried? The article says that at the end of the introduction section.
And it's pretty reasonable to explain how current chargers exist before suggesting the alternative. There are nicely labeled sections to help with skipping forward.
Where I live the electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuels. The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!).
Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs?
I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
EVs emit less carbon even when powered by a fossil fuel dominated grid. The power plant is more efficient than your car, and often uses LNG rather than petrol or diesel, and there are still some renewables in almost any grid. In addition, air pollution close to where you live will be lower. In addition, the grid can be decarbonised over time and your car will become greener as it does.
All of this is true, but it's not the main reason why EVs have taken off. Electricity generation is very flexible. You can use coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and so on. Every country has something.
However, not every country has oil or gas. In fact, only a minority does. China is investing in EVs to avoid being dependent on energy imports. Many other countries are following. Russia and the US being laggards in EV adoption isn't really surprising.
The convenience to me of being able to refuel anywhere quickly, plus the dubious carbon savings, plus the immediate discount on the car purchase (without any subsidies), makes it a moral purchase rather than a practical one. I am not very impressed by the benefits.
I like how EVs accelerate faster. Otherwise it would make my life way more inconvenient, which I surmise is a major blocker for most potential EV purchasers
I guess it depends on your driving habits and homecharging situation, but after a year with my EV, I wouldn't go back if God came down and personally told me that every EV resulted in a baby seal being clubbed. Among the many advantages, never having to go to a gas station is so much better.
Yeah that was my experience (not the seal clubbing) with my Model X in Europe in 2019. Great for the daily commute, never had to hit a gas station but on longer trips it's more planning. Sales of Teslas definitely increased faster than the charging network expanded, so while I never had to wait in 2019, the situation was different in 2022. Now I'm back at 13mpg and similar bhp. Still have good memories of the Tesla but in the states distances are longer and I just can't haul an RV with an EV. Even small trailers have quite the range impact.
It's not difficult, but it's something extra. Now I just plug my car in the garage and it's always charged. Plus it drives so so much better (constant torque at any speed feels amazing, you can control the car very precisely), and doesn't stink and make noise.
I wouldn't go back either, even with the occasional 20-minute charge break on a very long trip.
If you can charge at home overnight, then your "tank" is full every morning. The logistics are a bit more complicated for long distance road trips though.
The gas stations are on the main road that passes through the town, I don't use it for my commute, I literally have to go out of my way to hit a gas station - which is owned by my uncle (small town, I know)
Being able to charge nightly (when needed) at home has been a game changer for us. No more waiting in line at Costco or "we need to fill up the car before X". Car is always fully charged.
Plus for us at least, because we have a very low KwH _night_ rate, our EV is 10x cheaper to run than our ICE. It's a significant difference.
And that's not counting the environmental concerns.
Multi-day trips are another story. But we take very few of those.
While a power plant is more efficient than my car, transmission reduces that efficiency sigificantly (I think here in the UK transmission accounts for 40%-50% of usage, although I may be misremembering).
Does that affect the calculation at all?
EDIT: I was totally wrong - it's more like 7%. Still interested whether that affects the calculation, although it's much less likely to!
Usually, yes. The break even point depends on how clean your energy source is but 15-40k km is about where they even out even considering batteries. Remember if you live somewhere like Norway or Scotland where it’s dark for 6 months, it’s also very very bright for the other 6 months.
Electric engines are 90-95 efficient in converting power to motion.
Even the very best experimental gasoline engines in Toyota's labs are around 30-35% efficient.
Even if all gasoline and diesel was used in massive generator units to produce electricity, EVs would still be better for the environment and the total gasoline/diesel usage would go down.
But the power plant has only slightly higher efficiency off the fossil fuels it burns. So you need to use the ev to store excess grid solar generated during the day to truly get an advantage
At least the power plant is burning that fuel and spewing garbage into the air in a place that isn't your home. And power plants capture more of that pollution than cars do, not to mention that many of them burn cleaner fuel than gasoline or diesel.
And most people tend to keep their cars for 10+ years. The power grid is changing all the time, and it's likely in the time that you own your EV, the sources it gets powered from will become cleaner.
It's also easier to regulate a few dozen power plants to become more efficient and force them to capture more pollution vs. doing that to 100 million cars on the road after the fact.
As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.
As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)
As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.
As far as
> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)
Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].
There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.
It would be nice if instead of the fast charging problem the focus would be shifted to standardized battery packs, that can be field replaced. I don't really want to own 50-100kwh battery. I just want to use the charge in it and happy to pay for that.
I remember reading an article somewhere which explained why this was an impractical issue. I forget the details, but I think issues like weight, ending up with a battery pack that doesn’t hold its charge well, etc. were all big concerns. Weight seems like it would be a huge problem given that the battery is the largest component of the EV drive train and it’s usually kept along the floor of the EV for weight distribution.
They also have 2% ev marketshare in China, because its still an expensive and complex feature that has downsides that the previous comment mentioned. Like these high energy batteries are dangerous as the can burn quite spectacularly, so I personally would not want to take and remove one from my car every charge hen I can wait a few minutes at a regular charging station that is much more common than a replacing station.
I think swappable batteries may be a more practical solution for heavy trucks rather than cars. They have the advantage that they are already built to carry heavy things loaded by forklift, unlike cars.
I agree, but there are aggressive subsidies around electric vehicles and general graft. Similar things happen in most countries but in dictatorships things can go to absurd levels when it aligns with the current policy.
Realistically, this is a pipe dream. China has had a few that are trying this NIO being the most well known.
To me, it's not really viable. The 3 main problems are - The extra costs in a vehicle to allow swapping within say 5 minutes is non-trivial. The physical space required to house X number of batteries ready, X number swap ready is a lot at any moderate volume. Last, Batteries are not universal and now you're constricting either the design of all cars or you have to go to a specific swap station that houses your battery, related to the physical space. I would not accept a battery w/ less volume.
Time will tell if I'm wrong; NIO might do it, but I'm a naysayer for sure.
The main obstacle is battery swap is capex heavy, hence PRC might do it, but most other places, less likely. It's pretty easy to extrapolate PRC auto parking / self driving cars sneaking out during low congestion to hit their battery swap queue. But that is a fairly significant logistics / infra issue when most countries would be lucky to get sufficient fast charging piles in place. Battery volume is probably not an issue since batteries will be rentals for minimum XYZ capacity. And algo might eventually bid for price, i.e. discount rental for partial charge if it means your car go for a swap by itself a couple days earlier.
NIO has a battery swap station in my city in Trondheim, Norway. It has not been that popular. You might say that installing a fast charger is complex and costly, but a battery swapping station is also very costly and complex. The difference is that you can put out more fast charging stations at various locations. This means that you often have to choose between driving 20 minutes to a battery swapping station to do a 5 minute swap, or drive 5 minutes to do a 20 minute fast charge. The added complexity of a swapping station just is not worth it.
Would you do it if it was cheaper per kwh? Say you have an EV where any battery you get from the swap station is better than 90% degradation, and you pay $0.40 per kwh for the electricity in the battery- but you get the option to take a battery between 80% and 90% degradation, in which case you get the battery all filled up, but only pay $0.35 per kwh for the electricity in that battery.
Like Henry Ford tried on the Model T: The Model T was offered in three fuels: Gasoline, Electric, and Alcohol. It only took I think less than a year to make it Gasoline only.
There were issues with charging, motor driving, and batteries.
For converting from ac to dc for charging you had either a dc generator or old school selenium rectifiers or vacuum tubes ones. I used to have an old 60's battery charger with selenium rectifier. First car I drove had a DC generator. So wasn't until the 70's you got cheap high quality rectifiers and thyristors.
When I started my career in the 80's it was all coming together. Robust power electronics shows up then. By the end of the decade inverter controllers for motors were becoming common. And the mid 90's is when Toyota starts working on their hybrid drive. The battery they used was a nicad battery.
And then there are batteries. Before 1980 or so you're options were lead acid or nicad. The former have low energy density and the max output current was low. Nicads were expensive and also low capacity, but had higher output per weight. Which is why the Prius and the EV1 used them.
Late 80's I got a hold of some lithium primary cells they could put out a few amps at 4.1V. I did a calculation if you put 5000 of them at $10 each into an EV the battery would weigh 600lbs and put out about 250 hp. Weeee! And at $15 each the battery would cost $75k. Cause primary batteries it's $250/mile. 1 years later you had rechargeables with similar specs and cheaper.
I feel that in the 1910-20s when gasoline won the electric technology just wasn't there. People wanted electric cars to succeed buy the economics and performance wasn't there.
When cars where new they didn't go very fast and ICE efficiency was very bad. It just turned out that it's a lot easier to improve ICE power output and tank size than to improve batteries.
The gas piston engine didn't just power cars, it also powered aircraft, armoured vehicles, and trucks. Anyone using electric vehicles by the time World War 2 broke out against a gas piston enemy would've been constantly outmanoeuvred and outgunned. And the logistics chains to bring men and materials to the front of the enemy's front lines would've been far faster then any electric trucks at the time. Especially without the modern day micro controllers that make modern battery management systems possible.
Tesla tried battery swapping in 2015 and abandoned it due to a lack of customer interest (and also due to various problems that made the process less straightforward than you'd think). Both the Model S and Model X were designed from the outset to have swappable batteries.
The battery swap feature was implemented only to maximize California clean energy credits. Only enough infrastructure was built to claim the credits.
“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”
Premature reject. It's working in China, it would work in trucking. "Tesla tried" doesn't mean jack. No car manufacturers want to do this because it means loosing a point of innovation. It has to be regulated to happen at scale. It won't happen but not because it can't work. After all... look at 12v car batteries
Horrid quality video and not about the trucking you mean (i think), but these [0] electric dump trucks are a very welcome sight everywhere in Shenzhen, China.
Battery swapping for trucks is far different from cars though. Trucks are reasonably standardised, they commonly have predestined routes and purpose built depots to operate from. If you're say Pepsi and you've got a fleet of trucks going between your warehouses you can build the infrastructure around your route.
If you look at old mobile phones with removable batteries, you'll notice that there is usually a lot of space taken up by the plastic around the battery which is designed to allow a user to replace it repeatedly. A car battery that's rapidly replaceable would need a large, strong structure around it to allow it to be replaced but also to hold together in the event of a crash. If batteries had to be swapped out, you would lose more cabin space and structural rigidity. Then you get to standardised connectors and mountings, data protocols, the list goes on. And that's before you think of the automated equipment to actually swap the batteries.
In a world where we can charge a car today from 10-80% in 10 minutes, it doesn't seem like a worthwhile engineering challenge.
Well it's patented and Tesla doesn't own the patent. But that aside, you trade a different set of problems, specifically what happens if the pack that is put into your car is damaged and as a result of that damage catches fire when it is discharging? That isn't something that happens with gasoline.
I keep hoping flow batteries can overcome their issues as replacing depleted electrolyte with charged electrolyte is much more like 'refueling' in the current sense of the word.
Contaminants in fuel can cause damage to cars. I don't know if retailers tend to carry insurance for this but typically they are responsible, although proving it may not be easy. I imagine the risk would be quite rare and fairly well handled with insurance.
What's patented? Seems like a ridiculous patent if it entirely covered all practical manner of swapping batteries to recharge an EV.
A battery can weigh up to half a ton. Because of the weight, you want to keep it at a low position in the car. That is not easy to swap. By contrast consider that you charge your car. For a daily commute, the most practical is to charge it on your driveway or at the office. In my case that means I only have to consider public charging on vacations and longer weekend trips. Now this means my net travel speed is lower then. But I can adjust to that.
It is actually practical position for an automated swap. You drive to the position, the door on the ground open, the robot pulls the old battery and installs the new one, no hassle.
no hassle unless the door has to cope with rain, salt water drizzle and daily freeze-thaw cycles. then it suddenly starts to cost like half a spaceship
I absolutely do not want that unless there are guarantees around the condition of the batteries.
I can't imagine much worse than being on a road trip and quick swapping to a new battery that you discover, after driving away, has significantly degraded performance and range.
Now think about a field you know. Maybe laptops or phones.
Would a standardised battery block in laptops work? The same battery would work in a Frame.work, System76, MacBook air, MacBook pro, a Lenovo Thinkbook and whatever gaming monster there is from Asus.
Sounds stupid, right? It's just as stupid for cars.
And if laptops had battery swapping, would you swap your brand new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station? Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
I am not sure it is the same. First of all the limitation in usage for a phone/laptop reduces the utility, but for a transportation device it is way worse. On phone/laptop you can use the main functions while charging, but tethered. On a car the main function is the only thing you cant use.
There does not have to have a single battery standard, could be s/m/l, like coincell, aaa, aa etc.
> Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
Do you trust random utilities/charger manufacture?
> new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station.
Would you care if it is within regulated thresholds and you can get another one any time you want?
Yet standardization across manufacturers is a huge hurdle... Like every automaker has different battery designs, voltages, and cooling systems optimized for their vehicles. Plus, swapping stations require massive infrastructure investments and a steady supply of charged packs, which means even more logistics and costs.
is that infra more expensive than preparing for the holiday events when half the nation decides to relocate to somewhere else and they need on the go charging? Not just the charging stations, but grid usage etc.
The argument sounds kind of persuasive to a layman (even one that did a little bit of EE a while back), but my gut says there would be no need to write this article if there weren't regulations or other engineering traditions that decided galvanic isolation is necessary for safety.
I guess the difference is galvanic isolation is physically (i.e. passively) fail safe, while ground detection is an active safety measure? You can always put in two ground wires in the current system too...
Is there some way for the ground wire to have a signal in it even if it were broken (via EMF)? Can the chip fail in an unsafe way?
The system proposed in this piece could probably be safely implemented, but it would much more challenging to do than the author seems to indicate. There are a variety of failure modes that they ignore.
The author also glosses over a 20% power loss (to heating), which would cost money and bulk to dissipate.
I particularly dislike how this article tries to sweep the power loss issue under the rug: The first mention of loss says that the isolation link is "responsible for about 50 percent of the charger’s power loss". The second mention of loss says "the power loss would be less than 20 percent". They want you to think that those numbers are comparable, and that they've reduced loss from 50% to 20%.
The article needs absolute efficiency figures to know if this is a good idea. I also wonder if better conversation electronics could make a difference. I'm guessing there is some tradeoff between cost of conversion and volume/weight/efficiency.
The other question is how this fits in with regenerative braking. Is this power conversion circuit dual purpose?
We also require arc-fault breakers in the electrical code for new construction despite even their first-order effects being negative. We're drowning in over-regulation and the most prominent people pretending to care aren't going after the real problems.
Arc-fault protections are required primarily due to lobbying by receptacle and panel manufactures, not because they provide a real benefit. The number of people injured due to arc faults is vanishingly low, and a better solution to the majority of applications is to replace the NEMA 5-15 receptacle with almost literally any other (or at least improve upon the design). A more fitting comparison might be ground-fault circuit protections, which do very much have real benefits in all required situations without any drawbacks, while being very cheap to implement (effectively, a current clamp driving a relay).
On the other hand, feeding 7.2kV down a wire handled by very normal people in very normal (read: adverse; wet, humid, non-careful) conditions without any passive protections, relying on the portable (car) end to perform all of the shock safety is laughable at best. A bug in the car’s charging circuit (hardware, firmware, or software) and whoops, the chassis has 7200V to ground when the cable gets plugged in during a rainstorm.
Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
The car can't have the ground-fault circuit; it must be in the stationary part.
The article does point out they believe non-galvanically-isolated can be as safe in practical usage; similar to half of Japan outlets are all protected by GFCI and don't use a ground, yet have a similar safety record. The authors built a system using the motor as an inductor and the inverter as a step-down buck regulator to charge the batteries, back in the 90s; they know what they're talking about.
> Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
Not sure how you square this with your opening paragraph.
Construction with decades old regulations and fast paced technology is a pretty different environment from electric vehicle development where regulators are (usually) actively trying to make things easier.
I can't help but wonder while reading the article: why didn't this win in the market? As the author mentioned, the tech was there with the prototypes they built over 20 years ago. Why did Tesla and every other electric car manufacturer decide to go in a different direction?
For context, US agriculture subsidies come principally in the form of Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC). These programs pay subsidies to farmers based on price or revenue losses for covered commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Farmers choose between PLC, which pays based on national average prices, and ARC, which pays based on county or individual farm revenue.
ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy?
> Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for
mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0]
We passed legislation authorizing spending a few billion ($7.5B, 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act), and have deployed a portion of it. Most of the authorized $$$ has not yet been spent; it unlocks over the decade from 2021-2030. One fault of the bill is it depends on states actually doing the work to build these stations; the feds aren't doing it directly. If states drag their feet, stations don't get built.
The timeline is even longer (and with such good cause). It also took till March 2023 to specify federal requirements for a charger! That's not a bad thing, it's not unreasonable at all. We didn't have any open systems for charging until then! There were no federal standards for what to build or how to stay or fall out of compliance! Before you start paying people to build chargers, you have to have some direction for what to build, have to make it better than the free for all of unreliable chargers that had hindered confidence & adoption so badly!
Folks act so salty about this all, such snark. But in my view so much was smartly done. There's so many layers of problems that needed to be tackled for consumers to actually get success, and it felt like these were gone through slowly carefully over time to make something useful and helpful.
For example, the charging standards require a certain amount of availability. Otherwise, folks might build some crappy chargers, not maintain them, and still claim money.
Folks have had all kinds of issues with chargers being not in service. Or fully used! One of the big requirements that took a while to hammer out was that chargers neede to live report their status: how many chargers are there, at what power outputs, at this location, and which are in use & what capacity is remaining? So you can get to the charger you are aiming for and have some real hope of charging up!
It's been just under two years since the standards got made. They're good, important standards, that insure this money was going to be for public benefit, that it really would tackle the problem. It is unsurprising as hell to me that there's not a ton of deployments yet!
For a "hacker news" site, I would expect a more reasonable set of expectations about product development lifecycle. Simply manufacturing compatible chargers is gonna take at least a year, in all probability. Site planning can somewhat happen in parallel, but going through the state to get the fed money is going to be a bit complex, especially at first. This stuff just takes time! The pool of money was mostly unspent, and I expect over time, as roll outs ramped up, the difficulty & costs would have been going down.
The political appetite & cycle is so contrary to the actual pace of the world some time. Sometimes we have to be willing to let good things take time to happen. It all felt so with-cause to me.
Ok, but taking two years to come up with a big document of standards while Tesla was able to just do all that by themselves and then build more chargers for less is kind of the issue. I appreciate that it's not easy, but the not-easiness is the problem.
Tesla took over a decade before they open-sourced their supercharger standards.
From Tesla's own website: "NACS was originally developed by Tesla, deployed in 2012 with the first Supercharger and Model S vehicle and eventually published by Tesla in 2022 with the goal of industry-wide adoption."
Tesla though has had to pair partner by partner with every other car maker who wants to use their network. Deals have to be cut to figure out how payments are gonna work with each manufacturer's car/app.
Tesla also has been operating on chargers for years! They took their own sweet time we just don't think about the first years!
Tesla never built standards. They just made something that sort of worked for them. That sort of somewhat helped some specific consumers find chargers, albeit with not enough status available to know what to expect when you got there.
None of that is at all good enough for actual infrastructure the world needs to be able to depend on. "Works for my car" isn't how gasoline works, and it's not how ev charging is gonna ever succeed.
>It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits.
Yes, that's exactly the problem, an over regulated permitting regime. If we are in a climate emergency then we should treat it as such, which means that if the Federal government can't overrule local permitting restrictions, they should prioritize funding to states that are willing to relax permitting requirements and get shovels in the ground.
The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program have made significant progress in expanding electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across the United States.
As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
It's irritating to see Joe Rogan's moronic talking points repeated uncritically in these hallowed halls. Truly, as Brandolini[0] observed, public discourse is flooded with misinformation faster than we can bail it out.
>As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
That's not good for a law that was ratified in November of 2021. It might be about par for the course for the federal government, but that's the problem.
> Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
The trick being played here is counting all charging stations in the US and pretending they're part of the IRA's funding.
in accounting rules, it's spent money. the notes say that 61 ports have been built from that allocated money.
like I said, I would love to see the cost breakdown. is all that allocated money spent? are some projects still being constructed? three years seems like a long time to get 61 ports when you allocated $2B.
I'll be honest and tell you I didn't look into the specifics of this project.
My guess would be that the money is also allocated for an X amount of sites / charging ports still in progress. Or do they only allocate the money after the site is fully operational?
If that's the case, I think saying '2B spent for 61 ports' is disingenuous at best.
You don't think a (probably significant) portion of that money is allocated to sites that were 'in progress' on July 2024?
From what I can tell from the newsletter I get from a big European charging infrastructure provider the lead time of a new charging location tends to be 1 - 2 years depending on the specific location.
While I do agree these numbers are disingenuous, looking at politics I definitely see the next administration counting the chargers that will come up past January 2025 to their win list. Oh well, I guess that's politics.
Oil would be pretty much the same. Ag would be a chaotic disaster. The subsidies for ag were written in blood based on the need to smooth the natural forces of extreme cyclic market fluctuations that affect all inelastic commodities.
But a society cannot afford those cycles to play out for their food supply. Prices need to be stable and we need a slight oversupply of staples to be robust rather than perfectly efficient.
I’m not saying the subsidies are perfectly dialed in and that there’s no waste or pork. But some are very very necessary.
the big division we need to kill is ethanol in fuel. it's 30% less efficient than gas, much more expensive, produces more CO2 and gums up and destroys engines if you let it sit for a few weeks.
A big issue I see with this is that it would necessitate a new fast charging standard, which (due to the extra ground connection) could not be backwards compatible with any existing fast charging standard - rendering it useless for the 40 million electric cars already on the roads worldwide.
Right after we just changed charging standards here in the US. And from what I've heard the cost and time required to run service to a charging station far exceeds the cost of the charging station itself.
If you’re not being facetious, a unit of currency, minted out of metals of varying preciousness throughout the ages in the shape of a circle, usually imprinted with the monarch or head of state on one side and a symbol on the other.
If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions.
These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less.
Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.
The first sentence explicitly says 'outlet', which means not a cable even though the post doesn't use the word 'cable' until later.
When you say "all about coin-op" you are still doing an incorrect simplification of "coin-operated 120V outlet".
I know they forgot to repeat the word "outlet" on point 4, but even then they didn't just say coin-op, they said coin-op 120V. It's referring back to the first sentence, and 120V itself has implications of not being one of those beefy EV cables (and the only 120V cable alternative to a grossly underutilized EV cable is like a C13, and a dangling C13 that plugs into your car is a pretty silly interpretation).
Ahh, I didn't realize "outlet" referred to just the socket, thanks. In that case, isn't the GP describing pretty much a level 2 AC charger? Those don't come with cables (at least here).
Pretty much. They're saying put in really cheap and reliable power sources with a cheap and reliable funding mechanism. And put them everywhere. Only go to level 2 if it's just as easy and reliable as level 1, prioritize ubiquity over speed.
L1 charging isn't really appropriate anywhere except at home or something like an airport parking lot where cars may be plugged in for a significant amount of time.. like 24h+. It's very slow.
It's 7 mph of charging. The average car is driving 60 minutes per day, and if there are chargers everywhere that's 161 miles per day of charge if it's plugged in when not driven.
That covers everything the existing system doesn't already.
The 7mph claim is inflated. The rare EV gets more than 5 mi/kWh in any situation, especially highway driving, and your L1 charging is getting you roughly 1 kWh/hr.
> The average car is driving 60 minutes per day
This is a sleight of hand. Non-average situations arise all the time.
Your proposal is ridiculously burdensome and not especially helpful.
Of course. We already have blanketed the country with level 3 charging. You can reach 99% of the country solely using Tesla Superchargers. The non-average problem is solved.
What we need to solve is the "can renters buy EVs knowing they will always have reasonably-priced place to charge" problem.
12 and 16A L1 chargers are common which is 1.44 and 1.92kW respectively at 120V. Its not 100% efficient but they definitely deliver more than 1kW to the battery.
Owning an EV, I can confirm your numbers. I'm in a 240V country, but level 1 is still pretty slow. It's great for the home, but I'd want at least 3-phase AC charging when I'm out.
EVSEs are more fragile, more prone to vandalism, so more costly to keep running.
240V could use the same wires and double available power, but existing portable chargers never draw more than 16A from 120V, so people can't screw it up.
You don’t really need two ground wires, CP has a diode with series resistance 2.74K to PE (ground) so it’s trivially possible for the EVSE to just send a push/pull waveform over CP and if it reads push but not pull (remember diode) then it knows it’s connected properly.
The return path for the pilot current will be over the PE contact, so it can also be detect and doubly verify that PE is low resistance, although ideally you’d want a much smaller series resistance.
If I understood the article correctly, the high safety comes from having two ground connections and stopping already if one of them is broken. Your way would mean that if PE breaks, and at the same time contact between some high voltage component and the chassis is made, electrocution is possible.
So basically, remove isolation transformers, and feed the line voltage (7.2kV or so) through a simple buck converter into the car.
Instead of galvanic isolation, use redundant ground connectors that are monitored for continuity.
I'm not sure I agree with this. It puts too much responsibility onto the EVSE side, as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens. If something like emergency pyro disconnects are mandated, I might be able to trust it a bit more.
> as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens
Are you talking about the case where both of the ground wires fail while charging? If either is non-functional when charging starts, it disallows charging. If one fails during charging, charging disconnects.
Imagine a catastrophic fault: a dude in another car drives into your car, and a conductor in the car breaks off and energizes the car body. The current now goes through the car body into the ground, and also through the grounding wire back to the charger (EVSE). It's a phase-to-ground short.
The charger tries to interrupt the flow, but the short circuit fries the power electrics in the buck converter (MOSFET/IGBTs can fail _short_). The charger will have contactors that physically disconnect the line from the converter, but they normally interrupt the line with zero voltage when the controlling IGBTs are closed.
In this case, they'll have to interrupt high voltage and high current flow. Can they do it reliably within the fractions of a second?
Imagine a catastrophic fault: a dude in another car drives into your car at the petrol pump. The petrol pump starts dropping huge amounts of petrol on the ground. Part of the car wreck falls back on the ground and ignites a fire, causing the whole station to blow up, killing everyone within 100 meters.
Clearly, we cannot allow petrol stations to exist.
Modern petrol pumps have break-away detection, it can recognize when the nozzle/hose is broken along the chain - I _think_ it works via the nozzle being lower gauge, which means when the flow rate suddenly increases there must be a high volume leak in the hose. And even then, it's only a few liters a minute. That's enough for a nasty fire, yes, but you can usually extinguish it with a handheld extinguisher.
Cars, at least modern cars, are also built with safety systems in mind. The fuel line from inlet to tank isn't open as it used to be, nowadays there's a spring actuated flap that is pushed aside by the nozzle (as well as vapor suction systems in the nozzle) so vapors cannot escape and form an explosive atmosphere.
On top of _that_, all parts from nozzle over hose to pump to tanks have safety features to prevent a catastrophic explosion: flame arrestors and inertization, and buried tanks.
So, we didn't ban petrol stations, but in the interest of safety and environmental protections (reduction/near elimination of VOC escape) we mandated changes in how cars and petrol stations are made so that even the dumbest possible user (aka, someone smoking a cigarette right next to his Ferrari getting refilled with 102 octane fuel) will more likely than not either not explode at all or the explosion will be relatively harmless in scope.
There is really no difference between the two cases, because any EV chargers will also have multiple levels of over-current, over-voltage and short-circuit protection, i.e. both at each charger and for the entire charging station.
So not even an exploding car would be able to prevent the disconnection of the chargers by some of the protection circuits.
The issue here is that interrupting a 7.2kV 50A current is not easy. If an arc ignites, it can keep the current flowing for quite a while. Long enough to kill anybody unlucky enough to be a part of the ground fault path.
Modern petrol stations are designed with this very scenario in mind. The above-ground structure can burn down, but the underground gas tank will still be fine.
And more to the point, right now with galvanic isolation this scenario fails safe. The current won't go through the ground. In fact, you can peel away the insulation from the charger cable and touch one conductor while a fast DC charging session is in progress. You will be fine, as long as you don't touch the second conductor at the same time.
When a fault occurs (say a battery fluid leak to the chassis) and is detected, a mechanical relay has to open to disconnect the power from the grid. That can take 200 ms or so, which is a long time to have 400v flowing through you.
One can have in series a very fast solid-state relay (which would disconnect in some tens of microseconds at most; e.g. with IGBTs) and a mechanical relay for permanent disconnection.
This would increase the cost, but by many times less than the insulated power converters used today.
> We estimate that the cost of the bill of materials and assembly of a galvanically isolated charging port is about $300 per kilowatt. So a single 300-kW port in a public charging station includes about $90,000 of power electronics, of which about $54,000 is for the isolation link.
I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up.
Seems ridiculously high, like paying some military/space grade premiums, or just using very niche parts without economies of scale driving the cost down.
> > So a single 300-kW port in a public charging station includes about $90,000 of power electronics, of which about $54,000 is for the isolation link.
> I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up.
These things also generate revenue. It's not a zero sum game. Fast charging pricing varies quite a lot but 50 cents per kwh is a nice round number to work with (and probably lowish). Some places charge more, some less. If an average charging session charges 30 kwh, that's 15$/session. To earn back 90K, you need 6000 charging sessions. At 17 sessions per day, you'd get there in about a year. You also have to deal with power and other overhead obviously. And chargers are more expensive than just that. A good charger should be generating 50-100K of revenue per year and do that for several years until it is replaced. The lifetime revenue should be at least a few hundred thousand $.
Of course this whole article is based on the notion that its assertions about cost are correct. They probably are high balling a few numbers. All I'm reading is that US charging companies are paying a high price for their infrastructure and are apparently failing to benefit from economies of scale, learning effects, etc.
High speed chargers are being deployed at scale across the globe. The US is technically behind on this front with relatively low EV adoption rates. So, I would expect US companies to be somewhat behind on the cost front as well.
Bottom line: done right, unsubsidized charging infrastructure should be doable and profitable.
Subsidies are of course involved in a lot of places. But it's not like fossil fuels are un-subsidized. Regardless of what you think of that, there's a good reason for that: governments are eager to sponsor energy infrastructure because it's an economic multiplier. Economic growth is strongly connected to energy availability and usage. Lucrative economic activity tends to be very energy intensive.
The US has invested many trillions in it's oil and gas infrastructure over the decades. And that's just direct investments. All those expensive wars in the middle east to secure access to oil are also part of this. And it has had a decent return on investment on those investments.
It's nowhere near matching that for the clean replacement for any of that stuff. Other countries are outspending the US so they can provide clean, cheap energy to their economies. The US should be spending more and spending smarter or it risks pricing itself out of the market. China in particular has built up quite a lead here. I don't think the Chinese are wasting their money.
This doesn't solve fundamental problems with how America has built its charging infrastructure.
We never should have placed hardwired cables on the L2 or L3 chargers. The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time? It's a joke.
Rented an EV in Europe... the cable is in the trunk! You own it. Take it out, plug it into the charger, plug it into your car.
Having a bad day? Drive over the plug? Smash it with a hammer? Don't know how plugs work so you tried to kick it off your car? No problem, go buy yourself a new one. The charger still works for everyone else.
The charger HW can be agnostic. Car manufacturers can make up whatever crazy plug they want for their car, just provide the cable.
Somehow this largely isn't a problem for gas stations. Not sure why you'd want to carry around a bulky cable when it can just live at the charge station.
> The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time?
Anecdotal, but this has not been my experience at all.
Could be a combination of things: more robust nozzle design vs CCS, the gas station is manned and has security cameras.
I would happily carry the cable on trips where I planned to stop and charge if it meant the L3 was guaranteed to work.
Anecdotal for me as well. EVgo was so unreliable that I just stopped driving my EV for any trip that required charging. Almost every visit I’d have to try 2-3 chargers, hold the plug in or slightly bias it up or down to get past some comms/short/? check to start charging.
Usually no issues with ChargePoint L2 or L3, (it’s not the car). But there just aren’t that many around.
Having to carry and connect your own heavy-duty cable every time you charge would be a hassle for a lot of drivers, especially in bad weather or at busy stations
Fair point. There are benefits to having the cable on the charger for sure, I’ve just found L3 chargers to be unreliable (and when they don’t work it’s always a massive hassle - no one is going to the L3 with 50% SOC)
Maybe the CCS plug is just not up to the reps they get, hopefully NACS will be better.
I'm no electrical engineer but would that really be so much cheaper? A buck converted is essentially the same thing where the transformer is replaced by an inductor. You get rid of a bit of copper but all the power electronics to do the high-frequency switching is still there. Together with most of the components.
They "estimate" this would save 60% on galvanic link, and on the rest, you can save another half. So that would mean you are at 20% cost plus some ground wire fault detection HW.
To reduce public infra cost we simply need to ERASE the speculation around it. Simply only grid operators are allowed to install chargers and them are allowed to be payed only with a bank card not with apps not with dedicated cards and so on.
Cutting this part will makes the very same hw much cheaper.
So the problem is about preventing electric shock. Which is not a new problem at all.
Using galvanic isolation is 1 of the solution, but it's expensive. How about using something like RCB to detect mismatch between output current and input current. This is well tested after all
We could use smaller external batteries that take seconds to replace more often?
I still think road charging would be cool and obviously the fastest if we never have to stop anyways. Couldn’t work everywhere in the US probably but I can dream.
Had the thought once of autonomous batteries who lived on a stretch of interstate that when charged, would zoom out and attach themselves to a moving
vehicle to dump their charge then peel off to go charge again
This is it - even a highly available charging network only lightly alleviates range anxiety, as the other portion is the time it takes to charge up. If I can drive for 600+ miles on a single charge, the vast majority of my trips are covered, even round-trips. But sitting around waiting 30m to charge gets annoying every several hours, even if I can find a working station.
The protagonist plows snow for a living, using 200-300 bhp diesel truck for like half a year each year, day after day. This thing just can not be replaced with an electric no matter what you try. And without it there would be zero traffic, electric or no.
It often looks like people here mostly do not comprehend what snowfall is.
I also saw a person in Norway commenting about their high uptake of EVs noting that at the end of the day the snow piles in the city are noticeably cleaner than they used to be when ICE engines were more common.
First off, who are you talking to? I didn't see anyone suggest replacing every truck in the world with electric.
Second, that's not a particularly large number for horsepower. Please explain why you think it can't be electric. Note that charging time can be solved by having a bigger fleet, and while that is expensive it's well within the range of "no matter what you try".
Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it?
- With galvanic isolation baked directly into onboard charger, I'm thinking worst case outcome is charging infra and isolation link get fried, but that really expensive EV battery remains safe.
- Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety.
> Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it?
I mentioned further down-thread, but pretty much the same way everyone else does: don’t get hit by lightning, or have a lightning rod. A tiny transformer isn’t going to stop lightning, and it’s not supposed to.
Put another way, how do gas stations guard against lightning strikes? The concerns are roughly the same. The answer, in general, is “they don’t,” because they don’t need to.
Lightning strike on a near empty tank of gas can go boom, too. Definitely can start a fire. This is like asking, "yeah, but what if the charging station gets hit by a meteor?"
> Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it?
They don't. If lightning strikes, you make a claim and get an insurance payoff.
> Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety.
Nope. The lightning current won't go through the battery, it'll just melt the conductors in the charging cable.
I would guess it will jump to a grounded conductor inside the charging cabinet or the grounded case of the cabinet itself before it goes to the car that is sitting on rubber tires
Lightning can strike cars directly, and when it does, the couple inches of air and rubber between the car and the ground mean nothing (the tires sometimes explode, which looks neat when caught on video, if nothing else). Remember, the lightning travelled for thousands of metres through the air before reaching the car - another 4” of “insulator” isn’t going to stop it.
Now, if lightning were to strike the charging cabinet itself, I imagine that most of the surge current would go through the cabinet into the ground. If any were to make it to the chassis of the car through the charger, it would probably (“educated” guess) be at a low enough potential to not jump through the tires, but rather off some other low-hanging metal components. If it’s below the ~dozens of kV needed for that, charge will build up for a good fraction of a second, and dissipate over the next few seconds (or close to instantly if the ground wires don’t melt in the charging cable).
Really, the level of isolation in either the current case or proposed case doesn’t do that much to help with lightning strikes. They’re both designed to mitigate shock hazards measured in the hundreds to single-digit-thousands of volts. When the arc distance is measured in kilometres rather than centimetres, a 3” galvanic isolation transformer isn’t going to save you.
The solution for lighting is the same as it always has been: ideally, don’t get struck by lightning; otherwise, install a lightning rod nearby.
There was a cases of a Tesla getting struck by lightning while supercharging. It killed the electronics in the car and the charger, but otherwise nothing particular happened.
The lightning discharge won't create a potential difference across the battery terminals, it'll flow around the battery through the car's body into the ground.
> Nope. The lightning current won't go through the battery, it'll just melt the conductors in the charging cable.
This strikes me as a direct consequence of galvanic isolation provided by isolation link stage in prevailing architectures, something the article proposes to eliminate.
I'm struggling to imagine how a magnitude of surge energy sufficient to "melt the conductors in the charging cable" while directly coupled to a charger and without galvanic isolation leaves an EV's battery unscathed in such an event. What exactly isolates/protects the battery again?
Lightning is still electricity. It technically follows _all_ the paths, but most of the current will go through the low-resistance paths.
For the battery to explode, the lightning will need to cause a potential difference across its terminals. But why would it? The paths _around_ the battery cells (through the battery and car body) have much less resistance.
The conductors in the charging cable can melt, because the path from the car, though the cable, and through the EVSE body to the ground is another relatively low-resistance path.
tl;dr existing galvanic isolation in fast chargers is very costly (~60% of capital cost) and delaying deployment of unsubsidized EV charging infrastructure; the authors think it can be replaced safely and cost-effectively with a second ground wire and some logic to detect/verify grounding.
As far as I can tell there is no source provided for the number. Nor is there are source for the stall cost.
Tesla almost certainly has the lowest stall cost on the market, while consistently providing higher uptime and reliability. I want to see numbers based on them. It is no secret that the other charging stall manufacturers are incompetent (terribly reliability and uptime), so it wouldn't surprise me if their hardware was designed poorly AND terribly high in cost.
According to a bid in Texas, Tesla's cost per stall was about 20% of competing companies. So is the cost a problem when the charger is designed correctly, or only when not?
It also didn't compare the capital costs to the costs of building an ICE refuelling station.
What is the cost of the tanks, fuel pumps, calibration, etc? Including the costs of rehabilitation of the ground from fuel contamination over the lifetime of the infrastructure as well?
That's what needs to be compared, not the current capital costs of infrastructure that is only just been sufficiently standardized and regulated to be able to be rolled out for all EVs, not just one brand or another.
How is that useful for this analysis? I agree it might be interesting in the abstract, and probably interesting for an investor choosing how to deploy capital. But I don't think it has any impact on the argument. Clearly there is a high cost to deploying existing charging stalls. Lowering that cost would clearly increase infrastructure rollout.
Part of the article is claiming that the rollout of EV charging is slowed by the large capital cost, and about how to reduce that capital cost.
But without comparing to existing ICE refuelling, which is what EV charging replaces/stands alongside, there's no real identification as to whether the capital costs actually are slowing the rollout.
What is driving the rollout is demand not supply. Of course, they're related, but EV fast charging will tend to be for distance travel, not commuting.
Commuters will plug in at home (or at work) and standard L1 charging is going to be "enough".
So EV charging will be for distance, on major highways etc.
How much is a highway "services" installation, where refuelling/recharging is combined with food or other services, an actual limitation of capital cost of the recharging compared to other capital costs?
> But without comparing to existing ICE refuelling, which is what EV charging replaces/stands alongside, there's no real identification as to whether the capital costs actually are slowing the rollout.
I'm still not following here. Again, it just does not seem relevant.
> What is driving the rollout is demand not supply.
Uh, sure, but at lower capital cost there is some marginal demand worth pursuing. And lower prices to the consumer would stimulate higher demand.
