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Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current.

The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.

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Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.

Traffic congestion costs for electricity is going to get wild if we start stacking all sorts of random >= 1.5 MW demands scattered everywhere.

Imagine if we had a parallel information network that could coordinate the charging times of all these things in real-time.

Fair bit of overhead to pull that off, but interesting.

Not really, all you'd need to do is make a live price ticket that's dependent on congestion and make that available over the network, and economics takes care of the rest.

This is what they already are doing, the article is behind a paywall so no clue if they say it there but you can for example see this article about it: https://www.etechvolution.com/p/byd-megawatt-flash-charging-...

Supercaps are viable for this sort of short term charge and discharge. The much maligned donut labs is suspected to be a license built Nordic hybrid supercap battery model

> guess they could put a large battery at the charging station

BYD's megawatt charging does exactly that.

Tbe best part, the "large battery" uses the same battary on BYD cars. The same electric components, cooling system, etc.

Exactly what Tesla's megapack superchargers do

This is what everyone is already doing, even for relatively small and slow dispensers.

It's simply cheaper to have on-site batteries. It makes installation work with a smaller connection to the grid, and makes it possible to install chargers in more places without upgrading the grid connection.

Energy arbitrage is profitable on its own, so EV charging stations are almost just an excuse to get some land and a grid connection for more batteries.

Exactly what Tesla's megapack superchargers do

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