this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this but I remember reading a comment on here a while back saying that to get that kind of energy jammed into a battery that quickly you'd need a cable as thick as a telephone pole to keep it from glowing like a toaster coil.
Nah that's bullshit.
Interstate powerlines are like half an inch and they carry several orders of magnitude more power than you'd ever need to quickly charge a car battery.
EV charge cables are thick because a lot of them contain several wires which all need to be electrically shielded from each other (which is generally done by maintaining a physical gap between the actual wires). Part of that is just because we have multiple generations of EV charge technology and the new standards are backwards compatible with the old standards... so a lot of the wires in the cable are not even used when you charge your EV.
Yes but that's 10s of thousand volts AC power at a reasonable current. We're talking DC at a couple hundred volts and an extremely high current.
Yes - cables do get thicker as you increase the capacity... but you're never going to see a cable as "thick as a telephone pole". Any vehicle that needs that much power will use hydrogen instead (Airbus plans to have hydrogen powered commercial passenger aircraft operational within two years).
The other thing that needs to be considered is distance. Those interstate highway lines need to carry power over extreme distances. An EV charge cable can be very short (and they could be a lot shorter than they typically are, if thickness were to become an issue).
There are already 350kW DC fast charge systems in deployment right now and the entire bundle of cables (several wires) is about as thick as the cable we're all used to for pumping gas.
At 350kW you could charge a small EV battery in something like two minutes. In reality, it takes longer... because current battery tech can't take that much power on a small battery - it can on very large batteries such as commercial heavy vehicles, but hopefully that will change soon.
Nah, just use higher voltage to push more juice over the same size wires