The Electric Vehicle Charging Problem

This video was made possible thanks to CuriosityStream. Watch an exclusive companion video on Nebula, which you can access by signing up for the CuriosityStream/Nebula package for $15 per year at CuriosityStream.com/Wendover. Any disruptive technology has a turning point: there is a moment when its path to market dominance is certain. Now,

electric

vehicle

s are almost certainly a disruptive technology; they are almost certainly a technology that will, over time, become dominant over its predecessor. In this case, the predecessor is the internal combustion car that you yourself probably use. Chances are, though, when asked, you'll say your next car won't be

electric

, and you're right: According to surveys, the average consumer wouldn't even consider purchasing an electric

vehicle

, proving that the technology isn't It's enough. however, it is at that inflection point where it is on some path to market dominance.

But again, that path is almost certain. Electric vehicles aren't there yet (at the moment they're too expensive, have too short a range, and charge too slowly), but they're close. In fact, research can quantify how close they are. The “tipping point price” of electric vehicles, the price that will lead to widespread adoption and eventual disruption, has been shown to be $36,000. If we take a look at the prices of the base models of three of the world's best-selling electric vehicles, they're already roughly there, so we know that's not what's holding back mass-market consumers. What also matters is the reach.

Consumers say they need 291 miles or 469 kilometers before the cars can reach the mass market. Two of those best-selling electric vehicles, the Tesla Model 3 and the Chevy Volt EV, are not far behind that, while the Nissan LEAF lags behind. Range and cost are closely related and you can basically trade one for the other, as the battery is the biggest cost of an electric vehicle. That's why the industry is so focused on innovating and scaling to reduce the cost of EV battery components, and it's working. In 2013, the average price per kWh for an electric vehicle battery was $668, meaning the 50 kWh battery in the base model Tesla Model 3 would cost $22,400, 2/3 of what the vehicle sells for.

Today, the average price per kWh has dropped to $137, meaning the same battery pack would cost just $6,850, and this price per kWh is expected to drop to $100 in 2023. It is increasingly possible that manufacturers sell an Electric Vehicle for the magical price of $36,000 with a magical range of 291 miles. While electric vehicles aren't there yet, they're actually not far away and will be for years to come. So reach isn't what's significantly holding back mass-market consumers, and it won't be at all in a few years. But what it is is getting paid. Research shows that consumers want to be able to charge their cars from empty to full in 31 minutes, and that's the magic number for mass market adoption.

With this, the current $36,000 electric vehicles are not yet available. The base model Chevy Volt EV can't even do fast

charging

, it doesn't have the technology for it, and even the upgraded and more expensive model that does allow fast

charging

can only reach a 39% state of charge in 31 minutes. The Nissan LEAF does a little better, reaching a 62% state of charge in 31 minutes, while the base model Tesla Model 3 does better, with its ability to fill its battery to 83% in the most ideal conditions using the faster models of Tesla Superchargers, but that would only give you 196 miles or 315 kilometers of range, again in the most ideal conditions.

In colder climates, the charging time would be longer and the autonomy would be shorter. Therefore, it is currently possible to get an electric vehicle with almost what the mass market requires in terms of cost and range, but achieving that charging time is much more difficult. What this research can lead us to conclude is that the biggest barrier right now to the mass adoption of electric vehicles in the market is, in fact, the

problem

of charging. The tipping point simply won't happen without widespread fast charging, but widespread fast charging is simply difficult because of the very way our electrical grid works.

You see, back in the 1880s, Thomas Edison, with his direct current electrical system, battled George Westinghouse and his alternating current system. As the names suggest, direct current electricity flows steadily and unidirectionally, while alternating current oscillates in magnitude and rapidly changes direction. The exact details of how each works aren't as important in this context, but what is important is knowing that, for a variety of reasons, AC power won out—it's now the standard for power grids—but there are certain technologies that They still need DC Power. The most widespread example of this is batteries: you cannot charge a battery on AC power.

This is why you don't plug your smartphone directly into an outlet; You plug it into a power brick that plugs into an outlet, and that power brick is an AC to DC inverter. A standard iPhone charging inverter produces 5 watts of electricity, enough to charge the phone's 11 watt-hour battery in a few hours. Meanwhile, a base model Tesla Model 3 has a 50 kilowatt hour battery, 4,500 times larger. Therefore, you need a much higher wattage power inverter to charge at any speed. This is solved in two ways. On board that Model 3, there's a 7.7 kW inverter that can take AC power from common sources, like a standard wall outlet, and convert it to DC power to charge the battery.

At its maximum speed, it can fully charge the car in less than ten hours and has the advantage of allowing consumers to charge using normal wall sockets or by installing relatively inexpensive chargers into existing home AC electrical circuits. The downside, however, is that while 7.7 kW is fast enough for regular overnight charging at home, it's not fast enough to compete with the convenience of filling up an internal combustion car at the gas station. It's not fast enough if you're on a long-distance trip and need to be able to gain hundreds of miles of range in a matter of minutes.

So if you need more electricity faster, you need a higher power inverter. To be able to take a Tesla Model 3 from almost empty to almost full in thirty minutes, between 120 and 250 kW are needed. The

problem

, however, is that a 250 kW inverter costs, at least in this case, $57,600 and is about the size of a very large refrigerator; It is not exactly practical to have it as an internal component of the car. So for faster charging, it is necessary to discard the inversion process. That's exactly what a DC fast charger does: it supplies a huge amount of DC power to the car, which bypasses the built-in inverter and charges the battery directly.

Between the inverter, charger, and all the other equipment needed for a fast charging station, the cost and size are not insignificant. One of the most popular models, the Chargepoint Express 250, which can charge a single car at a somewhat slow rate of 62.5 kW, sells for $40,800, and that's before installation. Meanwhile, while an exact figure is difficult to come by, industry experts estimate that it costs Tesla around $250,000 to build an average supercharging station with 6 to 8 stalls delivering 120 to 150 kW each, while its The closest equivalent, Volkswagen's Electrify America stations, are estimated to cost $350,000. But here's something contradictory: using a 250 kW charger versus a 150 kW charger doesn't really affect the charging speed.

Batteries charge more slowly the fuller they are, so the first 20% will go by much faster than the last 20%. In the context of electric vehicle charging, this means that once charging has started, the speed is not affected by the amount of power the station produces, but rather by the amount of electricity the battery can accept. Therefore, it is actually faster to charge to 50%, drive to empty, charge to 50%, and drive to empty again than to charge to 100% and drive to empty. A Tesla Model 3 can go from zero to 50% charge in 15 minutes with a 250 kW charger and 17 minutes with a 150 kW charger, giving it enough range to drive at least 100 miles or 160 kilometers, while load from 50% to 50%. 90% would need an additional 27 minutes in both cases.

Therefore, by combining two charges from empty to 50%, in two stops, the 100% charging tipping point speed could effectively be achieved in 31 minutes with existing 250 kW chargers. Therefore, what the industry needs is not faster chargers, but more chargers, which is enormously difficult given the enormous cost of fast chargers. The average American lives four minutes from a gas station. Meanwhile, the same average American lives 31 minutes from their nearest Tesla Supercharger. Currently, there are 976 Supercharging stations in the U.S., each with between two and 56 individual chargers. To match the four-minute fueling station average, Tesla would need to build 31,251 additional supercharging stations.

At a cost of $250,000 per station, that would cost the company about $7.8 billion, or about ten times its total annual profits since 2020. Additionally, only about 750,000 Teslas have been sold in the U.S., which means having fast charging stations as accessible as gas stations, the company would need to install a $250,000 supercharging station for every 23 cars it had on the road. Obviously, that's not feasible, since the stations would never break even with such infrequent use, and that's exactly the problem. You need the infrastructure to sell the cars, but you can't build the infrastructure until the cars are sold. It's the classic chicken and egg problem.

However, there might be a solution. According to federal government data, there are about 3,845 non-Tesla DC fast chargers in the US, the vast majority of which could charge a Model 3 in an hour...assuming it could be plugged in. Just as there was a format war in the 1880s between DC and AC power, there is now a charging standards war. Take the example of Salina, Kansas, a small town off Interstate 70 that most people only visit to refuel or, in this case, recharge. This Supercharger uses Tesla's proprietary plug, this Electrify America station uses CCS and CHAdeMO plugs, and this hotel's charger uses a J-1772 plug.

There are four different types of outlets in a small town. Now, a Tesla could use the Tesla charger and the J-1772 charger with an included adapter, but could only use the CHAdeMO charger with a $540 limited speed adapter, and couldn't use the CCS charger at all, since there is no There is an adapter for that type of plug. Meanwhile, a Chevy Volt EV wouldn't be able to use the Tesla or CHAdeMO chargers at all, as there are no adapters available for either for its CCS plug. This means that to fit each type of vehicle, DC fast chargers must have three different plug types, which, overwhelmingly, they simply don't.

Especially along interstate highways, there are Tesla stations and the combined CHAdeMO and CCS stations. Just as Edison and Westinghouse delayed more widespread adoption of electric power by competing against each other in the same areas with their different and incompatible AC and DC standards, different stakeholders in the electric vehicle market are competing against each other in the US. US to create redundant systems, largely incompatible networks. But that doesn't happen everywhere. You see, in Europe, CCS is the standard. The European Union has a directive which means that many member states, by law, require public DC fast chargers to include a CCS plug.

Therefore, in the EU and neighboring countries such as the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland, CCS is now the de facto or de jure charging standard. That forced Tesla to the point that, in 2018, it retrofitted all of its existing Superchargers with CCS plugs, switched its Model 3 to CCS, and released an adapter that allowed its other models to use CCS chargers. In total, this means that virtually any car in Europe can use virtually any DC fast charger. This, combined with Europe's higher population density, has helped ensure that the density and coverage of DC fast chargers is much higher than in the US, even though EV ownership per capita is actually higher in the US than in Europe as a whole,although certain European countries far eclipse the United States rate.

Europe is almost identical in size to the United States, has a very similar number of electric cars overall, but has twice as many DC fast charging stations. In Germany, the furthest you can go with a DC fast charger is here in Winterberg. From this small ski town, the nearest fast charger is about 50 kilometers away, in Marburg. Meanwhile, in the United States, if you wanted to drive directly from Dallas to Denver, two major cities, using a base model Tesla Model 3, you simply couldn't. There is a stretch of 226 miles or 363 kilometers without a DC fast charger between Amarillo, Texas and Trinidad, Colorado, which, given the difference in elevation, the car would not travel.

While Tesla will close this gap soon with a new charger in Clayton, New Mexico, that won't solve the problem for all other electric vehicles on the market, as the charging systems are not compatible. Simply put, mass market consumers aren't going to buy cars they can't drive from Dallas to Denver. What Europe has that the United States does not have are coordinated government plans. Germany's federal government, for example, builds its own charging stations, while offering strong incentives for private companies to do so as well. Meanwhile, the US federal government has done very little to incentivize the construction of fast chargers and certainly does not have a network of its own.

Certain states, like Oklahoma or Colorado, have strong, coordinated government programs to build fast-charging infrastructure, meaning even shorter-range EVs can drive essentially anywhere in each state without encountering a fast-charging gap, but The problem is that EV drivers in Colorado or Oklahoma will eventually want to drive through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming or other states that don't have a coordinated plan. The US federal government clearly wants people to buy electric vehicles, because it offers significant tax credits to those who do, but people are not going to buy electric vehicles without the charging infrastructure to support it. Electric vehicles have a cost comparable to internal combustion cars and their autonomy is about what consumers demand, but what is being left behind is that charging infrastructure.

This is not even a uniquely American problem. In Australia, you cannot drive from Perth to Sydney (the country's fourth and first most populous city) in an electric vehicle, due to a huge charging gap, while in Russia, despite similar incentives for purchasing electric vehicles, there are a total of 24 DC fast chargers throughout the country. Of course, some will always debate whether governments should incentivize EVs, but regardless, they do: it's hard to find a developed country that doesn't have some tax or other monetary incentive for EV ownership. The point is that they are incentivizing in the wrong way.

Electric vehicles are very, very close to reaching the tipping point criterion in everything but charging. Cost is not an obstacle, technology is not an obstacle, infrastructure is, so governments are putting the cart before the horse. Individual companies cannot achieve the scale required, and even if they did, as the format war in the United States demonstrates, it probably would not be the kind of scale that the mass-market consumer demands. Individual car companies can take care of making individual electric vehicles attractive to consumers; the government doesn't need to worry about that, but infrastructure is the government's job. Governments manage or regulate roads, bridges, tunnels, sidewalks, railways, airports, power grids, dams, sewers, water supply networks, and even fuel delivery systems, because they are infrastructure, and infrastructure is essential, so The only question is: why not charge?

So, as you may have guessed, I have an electric vehicle, so I took it to my local Tesla Supercharger to make a companion video to this one where I give a super detailed, super nerdy explanation of exactly how a Supercharger works from a technical perspective. You can find that companion video exclusively on Nebula, which, as you probably already know, is home to tons of exclusive, ad-free content from tons of your favorite educational creators. The reason we can put companion videos like this on there is because of the way Nebula works: it doesn't have an algorithm to punish us when we do something different than what we normally do, and direct subscriptions from users help fund both these like others. projects, like our many Nebula originals.

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