5 minute charging is a nothing burger. If they are tailgating for hours, they can do normal level 2 and get what they need.
5 minute charging is something that sounds like a good idea if you've never had an electric car, and are used to only charging at very specialized locations that you have to seek out and spend dedicated time at, ie gas stations. But after actually having an electric car, the idea becomes superfluous. Current charging speed is going to be just fine for 99-99.5% of those driving long distance to a football game.
Most EV ranges I see are in the 300 mile ballpark (currently) which is going to require a full recharge for the round trip.
On the day to day with an EV, I agree it’s not a big deal. Travel is a very big deal though.
4-5 people in a vehicle loaded with luggage or other gear. People driving to beaches during the summer. People going to Disney. People travelling to ports to go on a cruise.
For pretty much every European a 1000km round trip is something you do on a special vacation. And you stay for a few days on the other end :D Definitely not something you do on a weekend to go see a sports team.
There are some UK football fans who do that, but they're on a bus and can sleep both ways (usually they don't, they get shitfaced)
Charleston, SC (240 miles, 580 round trip)
Florence, SC (210 miles, 520 rt)
Columbia, SC (132 miles, 262 rt)
Charlotte, NC (134 miles, 268 rt)
Atlanta, GA (121 miles, 242 rt)
People come from all over and this happens all over the country.
100k people drive in. All individually in personal vehicles? Most commuting 4 hours away? No.
Even if the average occupancy gets to 2, you've massively reduced the energy needs.
I really doubt the failures of electric vehicles are because of college football. If that's truly the case I feel really bad about the future of the human race.
What we need is not an EV that can drive 400 miles and charge in 5 minutes, but public transportation infrastructure that can ferry you from your home to the massive gathering place and back without you and the other 100,000 attendees needing to drive your own 3 ton vehicles.
Turns out my neighbors next door have relatives the exact opposite direction of where my relatives are and we've got very different hobbies.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's perfectly enough to have rows of 22kW three phase chargers there, during a 2 hour(?) ballgame you get a good 100km of range - enough to take you back home or at least to the nearest rapid charger if you need one.
Or you could have rows of 100kW+ chargers with smart load balancing. The CCS connector tells the charger how much battery is left in the car so the load balancer can prioritize cars with less charge dynamically.
But in your example there are two long periods of time where the cars are stationary, right? They're parked all day while partying and parked all night when they're staying at a hotel. Any pauses in the driving can also come with charging up.
I don't know if that's realistic or not.
Solve college football tailgating because that's what most people in the world REALLY care about!
Really no different then solving a drive down the coast to Orlando. When every car on the highway has to stop to recharge to do a long drive a 45 minute recharge will bottleneck the entire highway system.
The rapid recharge is the key use case to address EV adoption. I’ve owned 3 and I’m speaking from experience.
You just think of a college football Saturday where 100k people drive in, tailgate all day and then either stay in a hotel or head back the same day. Often coming from 3-4 hours away.
It’s simply not realistic for all those vehicles to need to do 45 minutes of charging.
When that gets solved, you’ll see rapid adoption.