Inexpensive, low-cost batteries enable megawatt-scale charging without the need for major grid upgrades right away

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Battery prices have continued to fall, frankly faster than even battery optimists like me ever dreamed of. We are seeing commercial and benchmark price points that we did not expect to see until 2030 or later. This has major implications for electric trucking.

In 2022, a kilowatt-hour of battery capacity costs US$159. In 2023, $136. At the beginning of 2024, the batteries were available for $95 per kilowatt-hour. CATL recently announced that it will ship batteries at $56 per kilowatt-hour at the end of 2024. It is reasonable to assume that $30 per kilowatt-hour will likely reach $30 by 2030, and that is a conservative projection.

Most reports on megawatt-scale truck charging have focused on the maximum potential power requirements. For example, in a 2022 report, RMI, National Grid, CalStart, Stable, and Geotab analyzed Geotab data for trucking in New York and Massachusetts. It’s a good thing, but it focused on peak power demand for charging stations and assumed no temporary battery storage was available. Given the wide variation in traffic loads at most sites, this meant they were not looking at average power, but rather maximum power. For more than a quarter of the 71 sites reviewed, the study found that 5 megawatts of grid electricity was needed. That’s enough to charge five Tesla Semis or Daimler Class 8 trucks at once.

This is a problem because multi-megawatt grid connections can take years, while sub-megawatt connections take months in most places, according to studies like this one conducted by the Department of Energy. This amount of energy is a major infrastructure project. But what if battery banks were cheap?

Let’s look at transformers for a minute, one of the limiting factors. Transformers are made of laminated silicon steel or amorphous steel, copper or aluminum wire, various insulating materials such as paper, pressure plate, insulating oil, steel, radiators, fans, or cooling tubes made of metals such as copper or aluminum, electrical contacts and materials Buffer. Material: porcelain or epoxy resin. You see Transformers every day, but subtract them from the visual landscape. The round trash-pail-sized cans on utility poles are transformers. A lot of the metal boxes next to commercial buildings are transformers.

Transformers come with power ratings, usually in kilovolt-amperes (kVa). You can figure out the power rating in kilowatts with a simple calculation, multiplied by 0.8, according to an article in Consulting-Specifying Engineer from 2011, and trust me, the ratio hasn’t changed since then. A typical small commercial building of 460 square meters (5,000 square feet) may have a 112.5 kVA transformer which will be able to deliver 90 kW of power. The larger ones are 450 kVA, providing about 360 kW of power. They can be assembled in a modular way to enable more power from larger distribution lines.

It goes without saying that current truck stops and other places where large trucks may be charged do not have 6250 kVA transformers idle. But they usually have fairly large inverters, especially the newer ones, because electric cars are coming and everything is running out of electricity, including all the pumps. All truck stop refrigeration and refrigeration operations are taken from them. A fairly large size is very typical.

And remember, 450 kilowatts or 900 kilowatts of new power usually takes a few months.

Delivering more power through a wire is much easier than increasing the power rating of the wire. Places with inflexible generation like Ontario with its nuclear fleet would probably love to have behind-the-meter batteries drawing electricity 24/7/365. Certainly the best rates in Quebec are for sites that use 95% of the same energy throughout the year.

Distribution network utilization is low, only 40% to 50%, in the United States according to the EIA. This means that utilities are doubling energy delivery as they already are to support periods of peak demand. There is a lot of power delivery capacity at idle on the grid, and cheap batteries can take advantage of that. Utilities can see a 20% increase in usage and thus 20% higher revenue for the same maintenance costs for their network, which is a clear win.

So let’s run some numbers. Let’s assume the truck stop has available capacity on 112.5 kVA, 450 kVA, and 900 kVA transformers. How many kilowatt hours can they deliver if they are at peak power 24 hours a day? This will be the battery size. How much does this battery cost with the 2022, 2025 and 2030 battery prices shown above? While there are other parts that contain batteries, the equivalent of factory balance in hydrogen electrolysis facilities, they are relatively insignificant by comparison, and the batteries themselves account for the vast majority of the cost. As such, let’s use the battery price plus 10% for add-ons and installation. (Feel free to correct me if this is a bad assumption.)

How many trucks can be charged in one day, assuming the average truck needs 800 kWh to fill its 1.1 MW battery, enough to travel another 730 kilometers (450 miles) on the road?

Dollars are rounded because accuracy is low. In 2022, napkin mathematics will likely render the idea of ​​battery caching untenable. In 2025, given CATL’s upcoming rates, dropping a $1 million battery on major truck stops as a temporary measure to allow trucks to access megawatt charging within a year and starting a grid upgrade project to get more power to the site, it seems like a reasonable idea.

In 2030, smaller locations that only see a few electric trucks per day, for example smaller distribution centers, may find it more reasonable to spend $300,000 on a battery to enable electric trucking with rapid turnaround. This is much cheaper than a hydrogen compression and pumping system, and maintaining the battery means not touching it, unlike the compressors that constantly break down at hydrogen refueling stations.

Of course, cheap batteries start making electricity price arbitrage viable as well. Consider Ontario’s price of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour overnight. Reducing the production of their nuclear fleet costs them a lot of money and it costs them a lot of money to pay neighboring jurisdictions when they have too much, so they make it cheap at night to shift demand to periods of low demand. Peak rates are US$0.21 per kWh.

This difference of $0.19 per kilowatt-hour, assuming that the large 17-megawatt-hour battery saw 33% of its charge from the lowest rates, and that 33% was consumed during peak periods – a simplistic assumption, but not an unreasonable way to look at it – would be worth… 400 thousand dollars. every year. Suddenly, a $570,000 battery doesn’t seem that high when the ROI is 17 months, right?

Especially when the truck stop doesn’t charge industrial electricity rates to truckers who get electricity. In California, DC fast charging rates can reach $0.45 per kilowatt hour. The charging range for electric vehicles in the United States ranges from $0.08 to $0.27 per kilowatt-hour, with an average of about $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, according to the Department of Energy. Megawatt meter charging will be at the upper end of the scale because time is money for truck drivers. Off-peak rates in California range from $0.20 to $0.25, and if you’re charging truck drivers $0.45, that’s a great profit.

Put cheap solar on all the rooftops and awnings at the truck stop and the value proposition improves. Even when increased demand is modeled and grid upgrades are ordered, the likelihood of the battery continuing and perhaps expanding to further buffer cheap electricity until peak hours and retail prices will be well reduced, as well as reduced. Upgrade the power itself for even more savings.

At these price points and today’s solar prices, providing adequate charging at many distribution centers is more viable than it was a couple of years ago. This is a challenge that David Sibon, founder of the Center for Sustainable Road Freight in Cambridge, has pointed out several times, and why he is a strong proponent of electrified road systems and dynamic charging. Getting a lot of power to smaller distribution centers is expensive and slow. Getting a lot of power for them is almost no big deal. I suspect that these price points will cause some recalculations in position models. As always, I do the paper calculations and sometimes this leads to careful studies by others.

The Swedish study I participated in did not model battery buffering at all, but assumed industrial averages for electricity and that grid modernization would be completed in 2035, a defensible simplification twelve years from now. One study I evaluated, a bad study from the International Council on Clean Transportation that magically found that hydrogen generated from electricity at the same truck stop where electric trucks would be charged would only be 10% more expensive than electricity for the same distance traveled, when electricity would be needed Three times more electricity, assuming no battery buffering was possible at all, when all fast chargers have some buffering already, was a winning argument for hydrogen.

Cheap batteries start to make charging trucks and fleets more viable because they replace the problem of peak power with 24-hour power supplies, and because they will pay for themselves through arbitrage in electricity prices. Incidentally, this applies to most of the distribution network upgrade problems that the USA faces. I used to say that betting against batteries in the 2020s is like betting against bandwidth in 1999. It’s just a losing bet.