Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?
"Your maths is still off as you asset that charging the car is faster than filling the tank"
In the last month I've spent under a minute charging my car - I asserted that to do that milage in an ICE vehicle would have taken longer at the pump.
You see what matters is the time it takes *me* - and whilst I am asleep the car gets charged without me having to be there.
I also said that the time spent DC charging can, and should, be very similar to a comfort/safety stop anyway. At the point where you aren't finished going to the loo before the car has charged then it again hasn't cost you any time at all. I am for the moment assuming that you don't wee into a bottle whilst driving along the motorway, and am assuming that you take regular stops as per standard advice (it's been in the highway code for many years).
300kW+ chargers are not going to be home use, they won't be at workplaces either. They'll be the equivalent of motorway services. And they have beefy grid connections, and install beefier connections as needed.
I'd like to see microreactors at most service stations - they're already well connected to the grid to either top up needs or to export, they're mostly far enough away from populations to get around the nimby crowd, they have a ready use for much of the waste heat (the service station buildings) and it would allow them to be net exporters of power - even with a bank of fifty or a hundred 350kW chargers.
"I routinely see lines of cars waiting to fill up at petrol stations"
So it doesn't take you only three minutes to fill up? It takes some multiple of "three minutes + however long the person in front you takes to pay, and then get back into their vehicle, adjust whatever it is some drivers seem to adjust when they have filled up with fuel and then move on".
I haven't queued to charge all year, even on the ?four? occasions I've needed DC charging (two journeys).
"But it's also nonsense to play hydrocarbons against electrics as they are undoubtedly a much better form (energy density, flexibility) than batteries."
Well, they're dense, not necessarily flexible, but they're also terrible in many ways - their usage is highly inefficient. So much so that if I burned them in a power station I'd get more miles out of my EV (after all transmission losses are accounted for) than you would burning them directly. They're also pushing durty, smelly, pollutants into highly populated areas as well as being noisy.
Using electricity, via batteries, is actually a win on all counts. You get more miles to the gallon than you would with direct burning, you get much lower local pollution. And since much of our energy is actually renewable (or nuclear) on the grid you end up with lower global pollution as well. Yes - there is a cost of mining minerals, but there is also a massive cost in pumping and moving oil.
EVs also have the capacity to be an excellent contributor to grid demand balancing.
An EV battery is typically on the order of 50kWh... we should be making EVSE equipment that can charge and discharge that battery - even if only at 7kW (i.e. through a 32A breaker) - to balance load throughout the day. Most cars spend most of their time parked - so you select a charge you don't want to dip below and allow your vehicle to supply your house with power during the day (24 hours of a typical house is only 20% of the 50kW battery) leaving you with plenty of range for daily driving, and it can charge when demand is lower than potential supply.
This will need the smart grid to be really smart, telling my car/house/EVSE when it's good to charge my battery rather than discharging it on a really granular scale - probably using a financial incentive to make it worthwhile, like the octopus Agile tariff.
One person doing this doesn't matter, but hundreds of thousands of vehicles doing it *will* make a significant difference - it's distributed grid scale storage.