CATL will form a 50-50 joint venture with the UK’s Octopus Energy to jointly build a heavy-truck battery swap network in Europe.
CATL will form a 50-50 joint venture with the UK’s Octopus Energy to jointly build a heavy-truck battery swap network in Europe.
That’s no more true than saying building a 10-story building is only 10 times as complex as building a 1-story building. The engineering and design for something like that makes scaling more difficult. Not that a 10-story building is unachievable for architects and engineers, but it does change the nature of the project (and the expertise/approvals needed to make it happen), and where it can be feasibly built.
Yeah, I suspect that the total simultaneous capacity for a charging station like that is much, much lower than 12 MW. If you happen to have 30 cars plugged in at once it likely drops power delivered to each one, and, like you say, it’s very unlikely for there to be all stalls taken by all 400kW capable vehicles. In the US, it’s pretty common for the charging stations to have shared power so that during peak hours, cars don’t actually max out their draw from each charger. Show me an example and we can look at the specific specifications of that particular station/site.
Heating houses is basically insignificant compared to megawatt installations. A 2000 square foot (185 sq m) house can be heated with a 3000W heat pump (or, if you’re super wasteful, 9000W of resistive heating). It’ll take about 330 of those huge houses to hit 1MW, and 3300 before hitting 10MW, which is the threshold that I described as needing specialized planning and site selection.
That’s what I mean. The scale of what we’re describing in the MW+ range, much less the 10MW+ range, has its own special considerations. The stuff we learn by building out 25kW or 50kW residential circuits or even 500 kW apartment buildings, or adding a 50 kW charger in an apartment garage, don’t present the same engineering challenges as delivering 5MW to a single city block, much less to a single vehicle for a few minutes at a time.
Sure, but there aren’t open standards for MW chargers, either. The proprietary systems are all competing for market position right now.