Electric Vehicles(EV) — The second most viral word, after the most spoken word of the decade Artificial Intelligence, which consists of Machine Learning, Deep Learning too. There’s a reason why its the 2nd most spoken word that’s just because it comes with a few more disadvantages than the AI field. Here we are not going to discuss in scariest terms like kilowatt-hour, kWh/kg, anode, cathode, chemicals equations, CHAdeMO & CCS charging frameworks.
Most of you would have guessed the disadvantages by now,
- Energy Density
- Energy Efficiency
- Range Anxiety
- Expensive than normal ICE vehicles
- Time taken to recharge the battery
Looking at the disadvantages above the society is thinking to change to EVs but we like it or not the ICE(Internal Combustion Engine) Vehicles are going to die. Some might be wondering what kind of stupid will put “Energy Efficiency” in disadvantages list, I wantedly added it just checking whether you are noticing it or not. Now for the people who didn’t noticed that Energy Efficiency is one of the major advantages that driving EV. EV is four times energy efficient than normal ICE vehicles, EV’s are reaching 90% efficiency and it has 50 times less moving parts. I’ll just talk about the Energy efficiency a little more,
- Say, we are filling the petrol tank with 1 liter of petrol to ICE then only 0.250 ml is used to energize the engine.
- In the other hand, if we provide 1 unit (KW) of power to the EV’s motor it will use 0.90 (KW) to energize the motor.
EV Power Core — Battery
Let’s talk about the most advantageous and disadvantageous part of the Electric vehicle. Let us focus mainly on the economic factors of the battery, especially in countries like India most of people cannot afford for high prices. Statistically speaking from the past decade records we can infer that, Vehicles especially cars which are more than 1 million INR is struggling to touch 15%.
And many people are prefer to buy 2 wheeler rather than cars, mostly because of the price factor. We can see that in the past decade less than 5% of commercial vehicles are sold and 22% of the sold vehicles are 2-Wheelers. The battery is the dominant cost in the electric vehicle, which includes capital cost and cost of electricity for daily battery cycles that we use.
And also if we keep on discharges and charging the battery, its life cycle will reduce and if we rapid charge the battery often it only makes things worse. If the battery capacity — state of health (SoH) reaches 75%-80% its known as End of Life (EoL) for the battery.
Another major technical disadvantage is that time taken to recharge the battery, typically it takes 4–5 hours to charge the battery pack of EV. Even though we fast charge it will take minimum 1 hour to charge the battery. The current solutions includes putting up charging stations at the places where people would spend minimum of 2–3 hours so that they can charge their vehicle in the mean time. But what is the solution we I want to take a trip outstation and I’ve reach there as soon as possible, one might ask. There are huge research works going on for those case scenarios, one of mostly used solution is that range extending battery which is also known as secondary battery. This is not only it there are many energy conserving technologies such as regenerative braking, as I said earlier we don’t want to go inside the technological aspects.
So to overcome not only these above discussed factors but many disadvantages of battery, a model called as Battery-Swapping is proposed.
Battery Swapping
The time consuming factor for battery recharging has been the major controversy from the arrival of electric vehicles. The so called as “Battery swapping” technology will take the EVs to next level, I would say.
How it works ?
It’s a simple technology which doesn't involve building costly and time consuming charging stations in and around the localities. In the traditional charging stations, we station the vehicles and we would have to wait at least 1 hour in the case of rapid charging or high range batteries i.e high kW/Km and 4–5 hours in the case of normal charging or low range batteries i.e low kW/Km. But in this technology, we will not be buying the battery with Electric Vehicle, which also brings down the cost of EV so much, we will be renting the battery from the Energy Operator (EO) with the maximum charge and we will be using (discharging) it and when it touches its minimum threshold we go to a swapping station and swap a maximum charged battery. Isn’t it simple and efficient model for recharging, technically we are not recharging the same battery, yes but its still more effective than the time consuming charging station process.
It may seem to be new to us but many countries, especially china have implemented it to almost 70% and mainly in Beijing. A company named as NIO are effectively implementing this model around china and planning on extending its reign. Here is a video of their model battery swapping station.
Best for a country like India
- First of all the cost of the battery factor affects the most of the population of India as many cannot afford.
- Second, 40 degree centigrade & 50 degree centigrade is normal in the countries like India but the optimum temperature for charging the say, lithium ion battery is 25 degree centigrade.
- Third, we people need everything in an instant which will lead us to rapid charging which implies less battery life.
Considering all the above mentioned factors countries like India’s best solution is Swapping technology. Another point adding up to this technology is that to buy a battery separately in India its GST is 15% which is very higher than 5% of EV’s. We could also tackle this problem by renting the battery pack rather than buying it.
From the discussions above you can figure out many advantages of the battery swapping technology by yourself but I’d have to stress on one of the advantages that is, its Locked Smart Battery technology in simpler terms we can define it as, say the customer who gets the battery from the energy operator and uses it when it discharges fully and he cannot charge it elsewhere other that the bulk chargers which are available at the swapping station itself. So the customer has to return it after using it for one cycle.
The major disadvantage of this technology is that we have to standardize the electric vehicle batteries as we are not matured in this field and if we do that, we will be to killing many innovative technology that are and will be emerging to the development of batteries. Until then the Energy operator who maintains the swapping station will have to maintain a wide variety of batteries for different EV models.
Concluding the topic, I hope you have understood consumer’s perspective of what batteries do to EV and how are we affected. And Battery swapping technology in detail. I’ve tried to explain to the most of my knowledge, as a passionate student on EVs, I’m constantly developing knowledge about the topic so open to any suggestions.
Don’t forget to clap guys….