How Battery Swapping Could Reduce EV Charge Time to Just 10 Minutes
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
How battery swapping could reduce EV charge time to just 10 minutes:
The fastest electric vehicle charging stations currently get an empty battery to 80 percent full in about 30 minutes. But a new company is working on swapping out empty battery packs for fully charged ones. That would get an electric vehicle to 100 percent full in about 10 minutes.
Ample, which officially launched this week at two sites in San Francisco and another Oakland, builds and operates battery-swapping stations that use a robot to pluck out dead battery packs from under the car and replace them with packs fully charged and ready to go.
The Ample stations can be set up anywhere close to a power source so that the robot machine can get under the belly of the car and also charge a waiting supply of replacement batteries. The stations are completely autonomous and you don't even have to get out of the car while the batteries are switched. You communicate with the station through a smartphone app.
[...] Ample's station can be more energy efficient than a plug-in station, especially fast ones. The Ample station can charge those battery packs during low peak times, when energy is in low demand. It can also be programmed to charge the empty batteries when the grid is using more renewable energy, like wind and solar.
During the holidays and other peak times, fast charging stations have become known for long lines along major travel roads. With battery swapping, Ample is hoping to get those lines moving and cars loaded with efficiently charged energy.
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