ElectricMotorcycleForum.com
Makes And Models => Energica => Topic started by: Pard on July 10, 2025, 07:54:18 PM
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Link to and reprint of some good information for use EV users:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/07/04/why-your-ev-wont-fill-up-in-five/
Why Your EV Won’t Fill Up In Five Minutes | Willis Eschenbach, Watts Up With That
Well, it’s happened again. The tech press is in full swoon, the Twitterati are high-fiving in the digital aisles, and the battery boys at Huawei are strutting around like they’ve just reinvented fire.
“Solid-state battery! 1,800 miles of range! Five-minute charge!”
The headlines practically write themselves. If you believe the hype, we’ll soon be zipping across continents on a single charge, stopping only long enough to grab a coffee while our car slurps down enough energy to power a small hospital. Here’s Huawei’s claim:
Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, has recently made waves in the electric vehicle (EV) industry with claims of a groundbreaking solid-state battery that could redefine the future of transportation.
According to reports from TechRadar, Huawei asserts that this new battery technology can deliver an astonishing range of up to 1,800 miles on a single charge while achieving a full recharge in under five minutes. If verified, these specifications could position Huawei as a formidable player in the EV battery race, challenging established leaders like Tesla, BYD, and CATL.
But, as usual, reality is hiding out in the fine print, ducking the spotlight while the PR machine does its victory lap. Nobody wants to talk about physics. Nobody asks how, exactly, you’re supposed to pour Niagara Falls through a garden hose.
Let’s start with the chemistry, because that’s what gets the headlines. Huawei, CATL, BYD, and every battery startup with a logo and a LinkedIn page are racing to show off lab results with solid electrolytes, nitrogen-doped sulfide electrodes, and energy densities that would make a Tesla blush. Yes, it’s impressive. Yes, it’s real science. Yes, the batteries likely exist, even if only in lab versions.
But chemistry is only half the story—the easy half, frankly. The hard part is what comes after: getting all that energy in and out of the battery without melting the neighborhood. Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math, my favorite kind.
Charging a 600 kWh battery in 5 minutes isn’t a “nice to have” kind of deal. It’s a “requires the power output of a small hydroelectric dam” situation.
Energy equals power multiplied by time. So: 600 kWh divided by (5/60) hours is 7,200 kW—7.2 megawatts—per car. That’s not a typo. MEGAwatts. Per car. That’s the kind of load that would make your local substation break out in hives.
And it’s not just the grid. You’ll need:
- High-voltage wiring thicker than your wrist
- Transformers the size of shipping containers
- Power cables with active cooling, or else they’ll melt like a cheap extension cord at a Fourth of July barbecue
- Buffer batteries to keep the grid from doing a faceplant every time someone plugs in their new wonder-car
And don’t get me started on “green electricity.” The fantasy is that we’ll run this whole show on wind and solar, but unless you’re planning to build a solar farm the size of Luxembourg in every city, you’re dreaming. Fast charging at this scale is not compatible with the current “green” grid, and won’t be for decades—if ever. A couple of charging poles and a few rooftop panels aren’t going to cut it. We’re talking industrial-scale power plants, and even then, you’re right on the edge.
Here’s the cold hand of physics. Car batteries are at around 400 volts or so. 7.2 megawatts divided by 400 volts gives us 18,000 amperes. Per car. The typical US house has a 90 amp service, coming in on large overhead or underground cables. I’m sure you can see the problem …
To deliver 18,000 amps per car, you need connectors that look more like fire hoses than anything you’ve seen at a gas station. These electrical cables must be actively cooled, or they’ll turn into modern art. Cables are rated by their “ampacity”, which is how many amps of electricity they can carry safely without overheating. According to the NEC ampacity charts, the largest standard copper wire size, 2000 kcmil, has an ampacity of only 750 amps at 90°C, and we need an ampacity of 18,000 amps. (A “cmil” is a circular mil, which is the area of a circle 1/1000 of an inch in diameter. A “kcmil” is a thousand cmils. And no, I don’t know how many cmils there are in a bushel …)
A 2000 kcmil cable is about an inch and a half (3.8 cm) in diameter. Here’s a single 2000 kcmil underground direct-burial cable … and you’d need 24 of them to handle 18,000 amps.
The problem is that if you put more amperes of electricity through the cable and exceed the cable’s ampacity, it melts. Which is why you’d need a serious cooling system for charging cables if they are to be of a useable size … and if the cooling fails, you don’t want to be anywhere near the cable.
And if a few hundred cars plug in at once without a buffer? Say hello to an instant blackout.
The battery companies don’t care. Their job is chemistry. The rest is “someone else’s problem”—which is to say, yours. Or your city’s. Or your utility’s.
Who’s going to pay for the grid upgrades, the transformers, the buffer batteries, the land, the cooling systems, the huge connectors, the maintenance, the insurance? If you don’t own an electric car, are you ready to pay for your neighbor’s five-minute charge via higher taxes or utility rates? And if you do own an EV, are you prepared to shell out $500–600 per charge just to cover the infrastructure?
Here’s the bottom line: rapid charging is a lab dream, not a real-world solution for EVs. Technically, it absolutely works. Practically, fuggetaboudit. For most people, charging will still be a 30–90 minute affair—if not longer. Maybe that’s why Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes are quietly tiptoeing back to hydrogen, hybrids, and expensive e-fuels made from hydrogen plus CO2.
The electric car revolution is here, but the real revolution that’s needed isn’t in the battery—it’s in the ground, in the cables, in the substations, in the cable cooling systems, in the grid, in the generators, in the transformers, and in the cold, hard economics of power delivery. So before you run out and buy that car with “five-minute charging,” maybe ask yourself: Who’s building the grid? Who’s cooling the cables? And who, exactly, is paying for this party?
Because until someone answers those questions, the only thing getting charged in five minutes is your credit card.
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High Tech generates high expectation "click bait" news. Anything to attract new investors and disrupt sales of other brand's vehicles, in the hopes that potential customers will stop buying other vehicles as they wait for the latest miracle to arrive on a showroom floor. Just don't hold your breath while you wait! ::)
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I reckon with active cooling and a battery chemistry with better thermal performance (solid state offers that) you could get down to a consistent 10-15 minute charge but you'd need some kind of absolute blockbuster breakthrough on chemistry to get beyond that. You *can* charge any old lithium battery at silly speeds if you can cool it adequately but it won't last 1000 cycles if you do.
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ive done similar math in one of my other threads to show how ridiculous this all is.
btw that cable will weigh like 10 lbs per foot as well. they can get away with running raw bus bar internally but external. yah.
anyways he covered that. the biggest problem to overcome is, that technology, it's brittle, the battery plates like to crack real easy, they are not very robust. a square a few centimeters on a circuit board or bread board is one thing, but a 16 x 24 x 12 inch battery, with everything smooshed in there real hard.... not so good.,
it might work great on a static power plant install, or a train that maybe does a wibbley wobbelty on a pair of tracks, but a car or worse a retard like me who wants to jump train tressles on his bike. that's going to beat the living shit out of those batteries. causing capacity loss or god help you, internal shorting and catastrophic energy release, sudden unplanned disassembly.
actually let me go back to his comment again. the size. as he said you need 20k AMPS to push that kind of charge rate. again, a battery the size of a stamp, yes teeny wires, teeny battery might need 25 amps, ok not too horrible. but that also means the battery itself, needs the conductors themself to be that big to handle the current to it. what is the minimum size a battery can be that can handle 20 kilo amps thru it, and how many cells? the size of a train car?
i have to tow a train, behind my bike, just to fast charge it. but the good news is, i can put solar panels on top of each of the 60 cars so that when i come to a stop 5 minutes later, they recharged the standby battery so it's all GREEN !!!
aaron
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Link to and reprint of some good information for use EV users:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/07/04/why-your-ev-wont-fill-up-in-five/
Charging a 600 kWh battery in 5 minutes isn’t a “nice to have” kind of deal. It’s a “requires the power output of a small hydroelectric dam” situation.
Why did they go with 600KWH as the size of the battery in their math example?
If you do the same math on an 800 volt car, which there are on the road now, or with a ~75KWH battery, like what's in an Ioniq 5 or EV6 it seems like the 1800 mile range is the more incredulous number than the charge current you would need. There are four 1000KW chargers being installed in Oakland right now. (Its at the seaport and they are using the infrastructure from the shore power and electric gantry cranes from a former container ship terminal)
Increase in energy density doesnt mean the same battery pack the size of a refrigerator will now go thousands of miles, it means the battery pack that will get you 300 miles is now the size of a microwave oven. Maybe you can go 300 miles with only 60KWH or something since you don't have all that weight and you have more freedom for aero considerations.
I think advances are good.
Don't give Anti EV warriors ammo.
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Why did they go with 600KWH as the size of the battery in their math example?
I suspect the answer is semi trucks because they cannot conceive of a world where semi trucks might be reduced to short range intermodal operations between source/destination and railhead and due to the legal context for trucking stopping for any extended length of time doesn't work.
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yah the 1000 kw would be for semi's but they do need to stop and rest after 8 hours is it? in which case speed may not necessarily be a factor anymore, let it charge / top off while you are getting your mandatory rest, unless you got a partner and are tag teaming the trip.
surprised they don't just make an all electric train, put 4 or 5 cars just batteries. should be able to store a few mw hour per car. as an added bonus put panels on top of the cars being pulled and pull some extra charge on the ride. think of the regen if they put a regen motor on every train car instead of brakes. it'd stop a lot faster and get a decent recovery.
aaron
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Link to and reprint of some good information for use EV users:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/07/04/why-your-ev-wont-fill-up-in-five/
Charging a 600 kWh battery in 5 minutes isn’t a “nice to have” kind of deal. It’s a “requires the power output of a small hydroelectric dam” situation.
Why did they go with 600KWH as the size of the battery in their math example?
If you do the same math on an 800 volt car, which there are on the road now, or with a ~75KWH battery, like what's in an Ioniq 5 or EV6 it seems like the 1800 mile range is the more incredulous number than the charge current you would need. There are four 1000KW chargers being installed in Oakland right now. (Its at the seaport and they are using the infrastructure from the shore power and electric gantry cranes from a former container ship terminal)
Increase in energy density doesnt mean the same battery pack the size of a refrigerator will now go thousands of miles, it means the battery pack that will get you 300 miles is now the size of a microwave oven. Maybe you can go 300 miles with only 60KWH or something since you don't have all that weight and you have more freedom for aero considerations.
I think advances are good.
Don't give Anti EV warriors ammo.
Advances are good.
For the casual and mostly ignorant (me) user of this amazing tech, it is hard to know what is posibble, probable, and unobtanium.
That was the value I read in the piece.
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yah the 1000 kw would be for semi's but they do need to stop and rest after 8 hours is it? in which case speed may not necessarily be a factor anymore, let it charge / top off while you are getting your mandatory rest, unless you got a partner and are tag teaming the trip.
surprised they don't just make an all electric train, put 4 or 5 cars just batteries. should be able to store a few mw hour per car. as an added bonus put panels on top of the cars being pulled and pull some extra charge on the ride. think of the regen if they put a regen motor on every train car instead of brakes. it'd stop a lot faster and get a decent recovery.
aaron
Battery trains go all the way back over a century actually. There are some trains running on battery today but the applications are kinda limited. Locomotives have weight per axle limits to take into account and experiments with building battery electric freight locos haven't really gone anywhere.
The thing you need to understand about railways is the trains only go where the rails are so battery electric is the dud solution compared to simply putting up catenery. That however smacks of the worst thing in the entire world ... capital investment.
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yah the 1000 kw would be for semi's but they do need to stop and rest after 8 hours is it? in which case speed may not necessarily be a factor anymore, let it charge / top off while you are getting your mandatory rest, unless you got a partner and are tag teaming the trip.
surprised they don't just make an all electric train, put 4 or 5 cars just batteries. should be able to store a few mw hour per car. as an added bonus put panels on top of the cars being pulled and pull some extra charge on the ride. think of the regen if they put a regen motor on every train car instead of brakes. it'd stop a lot faster and get a decent recovery.
aaron
Battery trains go all the way back over a century actually. There are some trains running on battery today but the applications are kinda limited. Locomotives have weight per axle limits to take into account and experiments with building battery electric freight locos haven't really gone anywhere.
The thing you need to understand about railways is the trains only go where the rails are so battery electric is the dud solution compared to simply putting up catenery. That however smacks of the worst thing in the entire world ... capital investment.
The San Francisco Bay Area's train commuter system, Caltrain, has at least one fully battery-powered locomotive on order as of last year, at great cost, as I recall. I think it is supposed to be delivered in a year or two. They plan to use it to replace one of their diesel locomotives for the run between San Jose and Gilroy, where overhead power is not available for their current new electric locomotives that operate between San Francisco and San Jose.
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trains are electric anyways, the locomotive runs a generator, which in turns powers a motor to spin the wheels to give pull. i want to say its a 2.5 to 3.2 megawatt genset? don't quote that number though. put a battery up there instead, add batteries and motor sets for additional push / pull as needed. add battery cars behind it for distance, add motorcars for torque / pull. this could be part of a routine, say every 500 miles or whatever it works out to, train pulls in, uncouples 10 battery cars, discharged, latches 10 full ones, re couples load back up and back on its way, turn around ehh, an hour. then the discharged can be recharged and ready to hook to the next swap coming in.
will it work everywhere, no of course not but i bet there are instances where it can. like rooftop solar. will it work for your home, it'll help a lot yah, will it work for an industrial process...probably not.
it'd be interesting to see at very least.
aaron
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The San Francisco Bay Area's train commuter system, Caltrain, has at least one fully battery-powered locomotive on order as of last year, at great cost, as I recall. I think it is supposed to be delivered in a year or two. They plan to use it to replace one of their diesel locomotives for the run between San Jose and Gilroy, where overhead power is not available for their current new electric locomotives that operate between San Francisco and San Jose.
TFL have maintained a fleet of battery electric locos for decades that they use for engineering work, they do exist but their applications are limited. One of the bigger uses is in giving electric trains the ability to bridge a gap if the power is out or they haven't been able to put up wires on a short stretch and stuff like that. In London there's actually been a trial running of an old subsurface underground train converted to battery to replace diesel on a short local branch service instead of putting up wires. Long term, wires are better but it allows the railway to skip out on doing things properly by buying cheap boots.