> When a vehicle comes to recharge, the spinning is slowed down to change that kinetic energy back into electrical energy and to flush it into the vehicle’s battery at such an intensity that the battery fully recharges in around 15 minutes.
Unless another car was there just before you?
This is not going to work in any location where cars queue up; it inherently requires a light duty cycle. Any high thoroughfare location will need to install many units.
> Of these, 61% were in the center of the country and, according to Weizer, most of them require anything from an hour to three hours to recharge a car battery fully. The number of ultra-fast 150-kilowatt chargers numbers just a few dozen, he said.
So if instead it takes three hours to charge a flywheel that can then dump the energy in 15 minutes, that's an 8% duty cycle for the best charging time.
So, of course, doh, it will have to be expensive to use these compared to slow charging. Drivers will pay not just for the convenience of the fast charge per se, but also pay a built-in "bugger off markup" which, through its price point, has the effect of deterring someone else from having taken the charge just before them.
I think the headline is stressing the wrong thing.
Whilst it's true that most available cars[1] have an upper charging limit well below the common charging station max of 250kW, not all charging stations are created equal.
There's a lot of smaller charging points that have to be small because the grid can't supply 250kW so you only get 50kW or 9kW.
Even if you do have the grid capacity to supply a few high current points you might be able to double the number with localised energy storage. Flattening that peak demand when all points start charging the same time.
Right now there's a lot of contention and queuing for those high capacity stations at certain times of day.
As long as the cost of an energy storage system, regardless of how it works, is lower than the cost of expanding the grid locally it's a viable option.
1. e.g. Audi eTron can only charge at a max of 150kW and the rate drops off as the battery fills.
I'll bet they've put more thought into it than someone only just reading about it now. :P
It's not like huge underground tanks of petrol or high current electricity in close proximity of people are without risk either.
Seriously though, to operate one of these you'd have to have liability insurance. So the manufactured would have to put some engineering into making it an insurable risk before anyone will buy and install it.
One could speculate that they might even have started with the max amount of kinetic energy they could safely contain and worked backwards to get that 17,000rpm * half ton answer.
That purple garbage bin is the most ulgy thing i ever seen; they really need to get their shit together, the society we are building looks very bad
How future people will look at us when they'll look back 1000 years in the past?
"Wtf happened, they had great design in ancient egypt and during the middle age, then they fucked up in the industrial and tech era, this shit is ugly af"
Very sad, says a lot about the mindset we currently are rewarding, maximum profit for the short term
Unless another car was there just before you?
This is not going to work in any location where cars queue up; it inherently requires a light duty cycle. Any high thoroughfare location will need to install many units.
> Of these, 61% were in the center of the country and, according to Weizer, most of them require anything from an hour to three hours to recharge a car battery fully. The number of ultra-fast 150-kilowatt chargers numbers just a few dozen, he said.
So if instead it takes three hours to charge a flywheel that can then dump the energy in 15 minutes, that's an 8% duty cycle for the best charging time.
So, of course, doh, it will have to be expensive to use these compared to slow charging. Drivers will pay not just for the convenience of the fast charge per se, but also pay a built-in "bugger off markup" which, through its price point, has the effect of deterring someone else from having taken the charge just before them.