Charging stations for electric vehicles

A major problem for the change from fossil fuels to electric is the availability of charging points, and the time it takes to fully charge a battery.

Possible solution:

Instead of charging stations there should be swapping stations for batteries. This means of course that batteries will have to be standardized and modular. Similar to existing 'gas stations' for liquid fuels there should only be a maximum of say 3 different kinds/sizes of battery available for any vehicle.

This way, there would be no more wait at the station than before with fossil fuels, and also stations could make use of nighttime electric energy for recharging, acting as energy storage facilities.

Another problem will be the state of wear of any battery module. As an idea, there could be an indicator for the battery state/age on each module, and stations would sell older modules cheaper, and top quality batteries at a premium.


Would that work?? :smokin:

With the current battery technology, I think this approach would be quite a challenge. The batteries are large and heavy so a quick-change battery would likely require some sizeable equipment to change the batteries out. It may be able to be automated, but that's an added expense. The batteries would need to be mounted in such a way that they can be changed out rather quickly and easily, but would also have to be secure enough that the batteries will be protected during crashes from puncture and from becoming projectiles.

Setting up such changing stations would require a large financial investment for the expensive equipment as well as a lot of land to be able to service a large number of vehicles in heavy traffic areas, both for the equipment as well as the spare battery storage. This could lead to a waiting period to get a battery changed out. If it takes 30 minutes or more to either wait in line and/or change the battery out, now you're back to basically requiring the same amount of time as a Supercharger type of station needs to provide an 80% charge. And what happens if you get to one of the changing stations and the are out of stock of your particular battery size but you don't have sufficient range to get to the next station. I suppose then maybe there's the plug in charger option at these same stations?

As battery technology continues to evolve and provide higher energy density, improvements also continue to be made in the charging speed. I'm not sure which one will advance more substantially, but if charging speed, that would outweigh the desire to be able to swap batteries out.

These are just my thoughts relative to existing technology. I certainly don't intend this to discourage you from continuing to think outside the box.

-Rod

You are right, that would be quite a challenge to get the changing process automated. I suppose if batteries were mounted to the underside of cars in a standard way, then the changing stations could have an underground conveyor system for the modules and a mechanism to swap them out.

And a big station would need to recharge and store hundreds of them in various states. Maybe a bit more expensive than pumps and tanks!