Further elaborating on that, I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you n...

philipkglass · on Oct 3, 2022

I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you need to (even partially) charge 20k cars in 5 minutes.

That's about one Tsar Bomba of energy.

This is too high by 4 orders of magnitude. 100 kWh is a larger than average battery capacity for a contemporary BEV [1]. That's 2000 MWh for 20,000 vehicles charging from empty (modulo charging inefficiencies). 1 megaton is 4.18 * 10^15 joules or 1,162,000 MWh [2] while the Tsar Bomba had a yield of at least 50 megatons as tested [3]. So charging 20k electric cars from empty requires about 0.003% as much energy as the Tsar Bomba released.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

moralestapia · on Oct 3, 2022

You're right, I jumped from kWh -> TWh, where it should've been kWh -> GWh.

Still, if you look at power, that much energy moving in 5 minutes is about 24GW. That's massive. Unless I'm wrong with numbers again :P.

neon_electro · on Oct 3, 2022

It’s a red herring. We don’t need to do that.

brightball · on Oct 3, 2022

This problem specifically is why I keep an eye on the Graphene Aluminum Ion battery technology coming from Graphene Manufacturing Group.

Graphene has seemed to be the key to rapid charging while maintaining temperatures for over a decade. The challenge was always getting enough usable graphene at low cost without mining.