School Me on Preheating the Battery

[Archimedes]

It's an upper limit, not a statistic. I'd say, though, that on truly long trips the difference from ideal charging time is immaterial

Sitting in my car next to the dumpster in the back of a poorly lit Taco Bell parking lot for 20 minutes vs. 40-50 minutes is material/relevant to me.

Honestly, anything above 90kwh is fine with me. It’s just the false advertising that makes me laugh.

Sponsored

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

Sitting in my car next to the dumpster in the back of a poorly lit Taco Bell parking lot for 20 minutes vs. 40-50 minutes is material/relevant to me.

Honestly, anything above 90kwh is fine with me. It’s just the false advertising that makes me laugh.

You know, I'd have killed (no, not really) to have a trash bin _anywhere_ near any of the charging stations I stopped at on my trip back from CO. And besides, if you got the ionizer package you should be fine inside the car with recirc on.

I've seen 170kW from 150kW stations, so I do accept it was their intention to deliver on the promised charging rates, but can't always do that. It happens..

As an aside, 250kW is an insane amount of power; towards the end of a charging session, the car was still gulping 50kW at well over 90% SoC. That's ~5x the power of a level 2 charger, which itself is probably the largest draw in a household by far. 250kW/330hp moves a small locomotive. I'm amazed one can simply walk up to a pedestal and start charging at that rate.

 

[Jhenson29]

As an aside, 250kW is an insane amount of power;

I’ve remarked before, but I really don’t think it’s that much. In fact, it seems quite small.
https://www.taycanforum.com/forum/threads/battery-temp.6700/#post-96183

Speaking of (not especially related, I know, but…) I was talking with a co-worker about EVs recently and they remarked about how they didn’t understand how the grid would support these charging stations. But…we were driving back home from a trip working on a machine that’s roughly 3MW. I asked why this is never an issue when installing new machines, many of which have a load as big or bigger than a charging station, usually one of many in a plant. This type of expansion is happening constantly and I never ever hear complaints about straining the grid over it. Charging stations must be special and strain it more with less load.

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

Speaking of (not especially related, I know, but…) I was talking with a co-worker about EVs recently and they remarked about how they didn’t understand how the grid would support these charging stations. But…we were driving back home from a trip working on a machine that’s roughly 3MW.

Point taken, but to clarify my remark, it wasn't out of a concern over the reliability of the grid or anything like that; simply that, in the context of the daily life (of an average person who doesn't work around 3MW engines ;-)), charging stations are orders of magnitude more powerful. (I) Imagine 5 ovens going at full tilt, and that's a 10th.

Having said that, regarding your example (of which I know very little, but I won't let that stop me) - those installations are probably very carefully planned, implemented, monitored and operated by teams of specialists of homogeneous competence level. And they're in sufficiently "low" numbers so as to be manageable (as in take the time to do that planning/implementation correctly). That means the stress/tax they impose on the grid is 'organic'/managed.

Somehow I get the feeling that an exploding (in size/coverage) network of public chargers, geo distributed across a continent, doesn't quite reach the same level of care and quality. It still has to err on the side of safety, and cutting power is the first and easiest form of control. (That is, they'd be throttled before their usage would stress the grid.)

 

[Jhenson29]

but to clarify my remark, it wasn't out of a concern over the reliability of the grid

I know. I was off on a tangent.

those installations are probably very carefully planned, implemented, monitored and operated by teams of specialists of homogeneous competence level.

Lol…less competence than you might think…more than once I’ve seen trailer sized generators brought in to run equipment when people messed up incoming power. And I get calls all of the time from people trying to troubleshoot things who can’t even work a meter.

“Do I want the squiggly line or the dashed line?”

“Sir, what you want is an electrician.”

And they're in sufficiently "low" numbers so as to be manageable (as in take the time to do that planning/implementation correctly).

Not sure what you mean here. My company is relatively small and we do a fair number of new installations per year. I’ve been involved in hundreds over my 18 years. We’re one company of many in one industry of many. I think there’s quite a lot of new installation going on. So much so, that there’s often other equipment being installed in a plant at the same time as ours.
And 3MW was just that particular machine we were on. The one in the post I linked was 10MW.
I just have a hard time understanding how that much new equipment installation happens all of the time and these dinky charging stations can’t do one simple thing right. Again, I’m off on a tangent, more just expressing thoughts than replying to anything in particular.

 

[WasserGKuehlt]

“Do I want the squiggly line or the dashed line?”

“Sir, what you want is an electrician.”

Brilliant.

 

[OTPSkipper]

The difference is that the 3mw load has to be fully on for the owner to get the needed task done.

car charging stations are a soft load. The power company can change how much they get at any time. So if they want to shut down a plant to save money, the charging stations are the most impacted. I suspect ea is negotiating very “soft” contracts to get really good rates. But this enables the power companies to provide just the minimum power on the contract for extended periods of time. I think the fact that it is winter has something to do with this too. Power usage is down where other things are used for heat. So power companies want to run only the newest and most cost effective plants.

the other part of the problem is when power gets reduced, it impacts the faster charging cars more than the slow ones. 85kw is probably great on a ford. But it sucks on a Porsche that is capable of 270kw. I suspect that under “congestion”, ea distributes the power to the chargers evenly.

 

[rs38]

I think these plots (celsius version) should be in a FAQ if not already.

 

[Rusk]

Is there another key for that graph. It looks great but without understanding the colour key and the 0 1 2 3 it means nothing to me the first time seeing it.

 

[Rusk]

I've only done two longer drives that have needed me to charge on route. Both times I used the onboard route planner and I saw the battery temp start to preheat a good 40 mins before getting there.

Both times I used Ionity 350Kw stations and got around 205kW speeds. Sad I didn't see the 260+ but the 200 speeds meant I was only there long enough to nip to the loo and buy a coffee. Walking back to my car to unplug straightaway.

Sponsored