this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Great article, but when comparing to BYD 5 min charging, the CATL system is incomplete.
The new CATL battery can handle faster charging, but they haven't made chargers that can handle or deliver the needed power, to charge that fast.
BYD has built the the entire infrastructure from charger to battery, the charging system in the car can handle the 1MW charging power required. (1000 volt at 1000 amp). A battery that can handle it from 10-60% And finally they are setting up charging stations that can supply that level of power.
The CATL battery is great because it shows we can go even further, but BYD has their system available NOW!
What may be the biggest benefit IMO though, is that the new CATL battery will allow cars to charge very fast even with smaller batteries. Which may introduce a completely new type of cheap EV with medium range that can charge super fast, so they can still be used reasonably well for occasional longer trips too. This is also helped by the more than twice as high durability of the new battery. Smaller batteries need to be charged more often, and these batteries can handle that too.
Charging this fast is always battery to battery, right? Any idea how many cars can the BYD charger charge before going back to a normal speed (i.e. getting power from the grid)?
It doesn’t need to be, high voltage transmission lines can run 1000s of MW then you can use a transformer to step the voltage to what you need and then use a rectifier bridge to convert to DC.
The problem I see is the effect of trying to turn on and off 1MW power from a grid could cause problems so the battery could work a bit as an expansion tank to smooth out grid power, so that you always charge it at 100KW and if you need to increase supply you can slowly increase your power draw without shocking the grid.
At the end of the day I personally think 1MW charging is overkill and a 10 minute charge time is a perfectly reasonable goal
Why not use a large capacitor as a buffer. Would give peak power at the beginning of the charging cycle which is what you want anyway for quick turnaround.
Electricity is not my forte so correct me if I’m wrong but if you had a long gap in cars using the charger a capacitor would quickly become saturated. Which means you would need more wattage going to the capacitor at all times. Whereas with a battery if you have a car on a 5 minute charger with 5 minutes in between you could pretty easily run 500kW constantly to the battery and then as the battery dropped in level you could slowly ramp up the power draw