How Practical is Super Fast Charging in the Formula E Space?

If Formula E, the motorsport championship for electric cars, proceeds to introduce charging pit stops to their races, innovation and funding is likely to accelerate within the E-charging space.

Indeed, a recent announcement sees Jaguar set to supply rival Envision Racing with its new powertrain for next season’s ‘Gen 3’ cars. The joining of these two Formula E teams is predicted to kick-start pit stops for battery charging.

This publicity for the EV charging sector is, of course, very welcome. Formula E is great for lending more credibility to EVs in the minds of people who like fast cars.

And a topic that frequently follows is that of super-fast charging.

But how practical is super-fast charging in the Formula E space?

To start with - I must emphasise that it's not theoretically impossible to charge up a car quickly. To do that you need thicker cables and / or higher voltages at the charge point. This is certainly doable, though the higher the voltage, the easier it is for electricity to bridge air gaps (e.g., to your hand); and the thicker the cable, the more expensive and heavier it gets.

Let’s take a closer look at two of the key challenges.

1. Producing suitable charging cables

The first issue is the bulkiness. CCS charging cables are already fairly clumsy and every time we quadruple the charging rate, we would need to double the cable thickness. For context, 350kW is 2.6x thicker than 50KW.

In addition to thicker electric car charging cables, you must also consider cable length. Once you start extending the cable, for flexibility, this in turn increases the time required to charge.

As a result, short and thick cables are not very convenient for a quick pit-stop.

Find out more about CCS and alternative EV connector types, here.

2. Generating Higher Voltage

The other major issue is the ability to deliver the higher energy rate.

It is possible to have a 350kW charger, which would mean charging 30kW (20% to 80%) in 5 minutes. This sounds great in theory, but remember that this is for one car alone.

If you have, for example, the same number of cars trying to charge as you'd have at a petrol station, perhaps up to 8 cars, then you either have to supply 350kw x 8 = 2.8MW, or you'd have to throttle the charging rates for those cars - which defeats the purpose.

For context, 2.8MW is the power usage for about 2000 homes! So, if we imagine a large village's power requirements crammed into one charging station, that's what is being proposed.

Perhaps, in this instance, it's better to adjust our expectations?

We shouldn't try to think about EVs as being a direct substitute for combustion cars and, therefore, we shouldn't be trying to use them in exactly the same way.

There will be a need for careful consideration when drafting the pit-stop strategy for Formula E competitions.

It'll be interesting to see how this all takes shape.

Watch this space…

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