Re:Giving EV batteries a second life for sustainability and ...
by rektide on Saturday April 10, 2021 @09:54PM
(#26766912)
I'm still trying to get over how awesome Google's 2014 Little Box Challenge was. Only a 2kW inverter, but one team (the Red Electronic Devils) managed a 14 cubic inch design. All the technical approaches are documented, as a part of the competition. A good number of extremely interesting ultra-high efficiency inverter designs!!
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/02/and-winner-of-1-million-li...
You're probably right that just engineering a specific solution or ordering them from a supplier that makes such things is probably less hassle and possibly cheaper in the long run.
I'm currently doing an EV conversion. I'm amazed that you can buy a box that's about ten or fifteen pounds or so for a couple thousand dollars that can handle about 90 kilowatts of power (in short bursts), converting around 100-200 volts to AC power to drive a motor. That's probably enough to power a whole residential block by itself, and yet it's not even a very powerful controller compared to what you find in a high-end OEM EV. I'd expect anyone building a large scale grid backup battery storage system to have access to inverter parts at least that good and at least that cheap, and if they don't they could afford to design it themselves.