Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, it’s happened again. The tech press is in full swoon, the Twitterati are high-fiving in the digital aisles, and the battery boys at Huawei are strutting around like they’ve just reinvented fire.
“Solid-state battery! 1,800 miles of range! Five-minute charge!”
The headlines practically write themselves. If you believe the hype, we’ll soon be zipping across continents on a single charge, stopping only long enough to grab a coffee while our car slurps down enough energy to power a small hospital. Here’s Huawei’s claim:
Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, has recently made waves in the electric vehicle (EV) industry with claims of a groundbreaking solid-state battery that could redefine the future of transportation.
According to reports from TechRadar, Huawei asserts that this new battery technology can deliver an astonishing range of up to 1,800 miles on a single charge while achieving a full recharge in under five minutes. If verified, these specifications could position Huawei as a formidable player in the EV battery race, challenging established leaders like Tesla, BYD, and CATL.
But, as usual, reality is hiding out in the fine print, ducking the spotlight while the PR machine does its victory lap. Nobody wants to talk about physics. Nobody asks how, exactly, you’re supposed to pour Niagara Falls through a garden hose.
Let’s start with the chemistry, because that’s what gets the headlines. Huawei, CATL, BYD, and every battery startup with a logo and a LinkedIn page are racing to show off lab results with solid electrolytes, nitrogen-doped sulfide electrodes, and energy densities that would make a Tesla blush. Yes, it’s impressive. Yes, it’s real science. Yes, the batteries likely exist, even if only in lab versions.
But chemistry is only half the story—the easy half, frankly. The hard part is what comes after: getting all that energy in and out of the battery without melting the neighborhood. Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math, my favorite kind.
Charging a 600 kWh battery in 5 minutes isn’t a “nice to have” kind of deal. It’s a “requires the power output of a small hydroelectric dam” situation.
Energy equals power multiplied by time. So: 600 kWh divided by (5/60) hours is 7,200 kW—7.2 megawatts—per car. That’s not a typo. MEGAwatts. Per car. That’s the kind of load that would make your local substation break out in hives.
And it’s not just the grid. You’ll need:
- High-voltage wiring thicker than your wrist
- Transformers the size of shipping containers
- Power cables with active cooling, or else they’ll melt like a cheap extension cord at a Fourth of July barbecue
- Buffer batteries to keep the grid from doing a faceplant every time someone plugs in their new wonder-car
And don’t get me started on “green electricity.” The fantasy is that we’ll run this whole show on wind and solar, but unless you’re planning to build a solar farm the size of Luxembourg in every city, you’re dreaming. Fast charging at this scale is not compatible with the current “green” grid, and won’t be for decades—if ever. A couple of charging poles and a few rooftop panels aren’t going to cut it. We’re talking industrial-scale power plants, and even then, you’re right on the edge.
Here’s the cold hand of physics. Car batteries are at around 400 volts or so. 7.2 megawatts divided by 400 volts gives us 18,000 amperes. Per car. The typical US house has a 90 amp service, coming in on large overhead or underground cables. I’m sure you can see the problem …
To deliver 18,000 amps per car, you need connectors that look more like fire hoses than anything you’ve seen at a gas station. These electrical cables must be actively cooled, or they’ll turn into modern art. Cables are rated by their “ampacity”, which is how many amps of electricity they can carry safely without overheating. According to the NEC ampacity charts, the largest standard copper wire size, 2000 kcmil, has an ampacity of only 750 amps at 90°C, and we need an ampacity of 18,000 amps. (A “cmil” is a circular mil, which is the area of a circle 1/1000 of an inch in diameter. A “kcmil” is a thousand cmils. And no, I don’t know how many cmils there are in a bushel …)
A 2000 kcmil cable is about an inch and a half (3.8 cm) in diameter. Here’s a single 2000 kcmil underground direct-burial cable … and you’d need 24 of them to handle 18,000 amps.
The problem is that if you put more amperes of electricity through the cable and exceed the cable’s ampacity, it melts. Which is why you’d need a serious cooling system for charging cables if they are to be of a useable size … and if the cooling fails, you don’t want to be anywhere near the cable.
And if a few hundred cars plug in at once without a buffer? Say hello to an instant blackout.
The battery companies don’t care. Their job is chemistry. The rest is “someone else’s problem”—which is to say, yours. Or your city’s. Or your utility’s.
Who’s going to pay for the grid upgrades, the transformers, the buffer batteries, the land, the cooling systems, the huge connectors, the maintenance, the insurance? If you don’t own an electric car, are you ready to pay for your neighbor’s five-minute charge via higher taxes or utility rates? And if you do own an EV, are you prepared to shell out $500–600 per charge just to cover the infrastructure?
Here’s the bottom line: rapid charging is a lab dream, not a real-world solution for EVs. Technically, it absolutely works. Practically, fuggetaboudit. For most people, charging will still be a 30–90 minute affair—if not longer. Maybe that’s why Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes are quietly tiptoeing back to hydrogen, hybrids, and expensive e-fuels made from hydrogen plus CO2.
The electric car revolution is here, but the real revolution that’s needed isn’t in the battery—it’s in the ground, in the cables, in the substations, in the cable cooling systems, in the grid, in the generators, in the transformers, and in the cold, hard economics of power delivery. So before you run out and buy that car with “five-minute charging,” maybe ask yourself: Who’s building the grid? Who’s cooling the cables? And who, exactly, is paying for this party?
Because until someone answers those questions, the only thing getting charged in five minutes is your credit card.
My best to all, petrolheads and ampereheads alike.
w.
Yeah, I know you know, and I’ll tell you again anyhow: When you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. It avoids endless misunderstandings.
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Yet another great post by Willis, putting the reality spotlights of math and physics onto the musings and unfounded claims of dreamers and marketers.
Not specifically mentioned in this article (as if more techno “piling on” is needed):
the combination of ohmic and basic chemical reaction waste heat when electrically recharging a chemistry-based battery, that is, one using electrolytes, even those asserted to be “solid state”. These parasitic losses typically run in range of 3-5% under the best of conditions (that would be during a slow charge at low amperage) and can approach 50% for certain battery chemistries under very fast, high amperage charging conditions.
So if we very optimistically assume just a 4% ohmic/chemistry loss for this new, currently-hypothetical Huawei battery at a practical EV size, we’d be looking at having to remove about .04*7.2 megawatts = 290 kilowatts of thermal power during the 5 minutes of charging the battery pack. That isn’t gonna be done by cooling fans! Gonna need a high volume (>50 gpm for a ~40 deg-F water temperature rise) pumped water cooling system surrounding any such battery pack, otherwise it will just melt down or explode.
Is the field of Application of Novel Technologies becoming the poster-child for the expanding list of –
THINGS THAT NEVER GET THOUGHT THROUGH PROPERLY
?
I guess you couldn’t wear a pacemaker and fill-er-up at the same time or it might also rewire your brain.
If you could actually travel 1800mi on a charge, overnight recharging is OK. You no longer need 5min recharging. Realistically, no-one will ever drive 1800 miles in a single day … it’s simply not practical. 1800 miles on a charge might prove handy in the Outback though. But most people will drive for 12 or 14 hours a day before stopping for the night. 12-14 hours at 70mph is 840-980 miles (about half of an 1800 mile battery capacity) so overnight charging would still need to pump in hundreds of KWh’s but in 8-10 hours instead of 5 minutes.
There has been enough said on various media about the impossible charging aspects of high-capacity/high-recharge batteries that it seems to be seeping into the collective consciousness that claims such as this are PRBS. But thanks for clearly and amusingly summarizing it again!
BTW, my old pop was a WW2 sailor on the USS Raton, a diesel/electric sub. He said the big busbars for the drive were made of U.S. Treasury silver. Identified as such and carefully retrieved when the subs were scrapped.
That was done to save copper for making brass cartridge cases.
Similarly, copper was in too much demand for use in the massive magnet windings used in the Manhattan Project’s electromagnetic separation process. Somebody suggested silver. The Project had a AAA priority, and the Treasury agreed, and asked how much was needed. “About a thousand tons to start with”. The Treasury official icily noted “We measure silver in troy ounces”. So, there they are with a slide rule converting tons to troy ounces.
1. The vast majority of EV charging is at home or work. Low and slow like a BBQ. Plug it in once or twice a week and walk away. Good chance you already have a plug you can use. Most people use fast chargers once or twice a month, or less.
2. For fast charging on road trips, battery swapping is already doing the job in under 5 minutes in China.
3. If you don’t like swapping, the biggest passenger vehicle batteries in the US today are about 200kWh, so divide your math by three. Tesla’s semi truck charging network puts out about 2 MW. Small network, rapidly expanding. It would get the job done in about 5 minutes if any car could accept that much power. The conductors on the vehicle don’t have to be massive. They can use liquid cooling.
There’s lots of reasonable objections to EVs. They’re not for everyone. This isn’t one of them.
I love your work on climate studies, BTW. I read every one of them I see.
The devil is in the details.
It’s good to know that since EV’s are going to be so much better than anything else, we won’t have to subsidize anything to do with the technology.
The plan was always to only allow EVs, and then to not build a way to charge them. That’s because the goal on the left has always been to eliminate the private automobile in favor of their public transportation fantasies.
Mandating EVs, without providing a way to charge them, was just a handy way to accomplish that.
It’s good to see an article like this expose the fantasy world that EV proponents occupy. In Canada we have a parallel with a federal mandate for all new cars sold to be EVs by 2035. Except the CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis have approached recently-elected Prime Minister Mark Carney to back off on this demand for the simplest of reasons. EV sales in the country fell by 53% between the 4th quarter of last year and the first of 2025. In fact, last December they were 18.29% of new car sales, but by April they had fallen to 7.5%, largely because rebates have been removed federally and in British Columbia and Quebec. So the cars are still considered to be overpriced and have been proven to be less reliable that ICEVs. As well, consumers don’t appreciate the fact that subsidies rely on their tax dollars and resale values are low. Nor are they particularly concerned about any effects EVs would have on reducing emissions. So when they see information like what’s presented above, they have all the more reasons to be suspicious about promotions of a product whose shortcomings are longer than their arms.
I often marvel at the oscillations of the poplar leaves when the wind blows, and wonder why other leaves don’t do that. It helps to have slight understanding of aerodynamics. And then a journalist, 30years of age had to ask her father how many thousands are in a million. Where is the minimalist understanding of physics, the rise in the back of the neck ‘ this does not sound right’. Does not everybody reflect a few seconds on what reality in existence means? How can one float in ether and never wonder over, or even ask for help for understanding gravitational effects? How can one exist without physical awareness?
Yes, the stove looks black, but it might burn you. How would a car charger look like to handle gazillions of amps? Would you able to hold it in your hands? Cannot anyone reason with himself just a little bit? But sure, Huawei says so…..
I remember as a young schoolboy having been shown copper plating of a key in a sollution of copper sulphate using an electric current. At the housing estate where I lived we had a large commu nal lawn with a couple of power points to plug in the electric lawnmower. I was completely ignorant about electricity. With a plug and a cable with a couple of wires I connected a key hanging in a copper sulphate solution and switched on. It blew up with a poof. That was an end to the power point. I never confessed to my foolish experiment. These people Willis writes about are not ignorant youngsters. They should understand the science and electricity and be honest adults.
Hehehe. Ask your local utility what it will cost for a 10MVA drop including the transformer and associated hardware. My guess is more than $2 million.
And wait times of up to or over 2 years.
Probably a lot more than that, since they will have to upgrade your feed all the way back to the power plant.
A (not good, but better) approach first suggested in the 1970s would be to have “swap-out” stations where the battery is replaced with a charged one in a few minutes. Assuming a sufficient reserve of batteries (and electrical power), they can then be recharged at the station more leisurely. You don’t “own” a particular battery but are paying for the charge in the replacement one.
Don, Not the 1970s, but 1897.
Battery “swap-out” stations were developed in London for The Bersey Cab, (known as ‘Humming Birds’) which used a 40-cell battery and 3.5 horsepower electric motor, could be driven 50 miles between charges. The batteries were swapped in under 2 mins by one man using a hydraulic lift.
More details …
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/archive/august-1897-the-london-electrical-cab
London Electric cabs compared
1897 ‘Bersey Taxi’
High headroom;
Average speed in London = 9mph;
Rear wheel drive;
Weight = 2 ton;
Range = 35 miles;
Recharge time 2 mins.
2017 LEVC TX black cab.
High headroom;
Average speed in London = 9mph;
Rear wheel drive;
Weight = 2.2 ton;
Range = 70 miles (EV mode);
Recharge time 30 mins.
So what’s changed in 128yrs ?
More comfort for driver, heating, better springing, twice the range.
But re-charge is now x15 times longer than 1897, that’s some progress !!
I understand a bit about solid state physics and conductivity through solid ceramics. It is not possible to charge a 100 kWh version that fast. A conversed with AI a bit about it to check my memory, as I do unrelated engineering work nowadays, and it said, “The claims of charging a 100 kWh solid-state battery in five minutes are not supported by the fundamental physics of ion transport, thermal management, or current material science. Even with ideal solid electrolytes, the heat generated and the required current densities would destroy the battery before it could charge that quickly at scale. The claims are not physically realistic given the constraints of solid-state materials and current engineering.”
I’m baffled by the claims. I assume the decision was made by bureaucrats for PR purposes without consideration for anything real.
This story is so far out of touch with reality it would make some 1950’s sci-fi movies seem plausible. No need to try to calculate anything about this hallucination.
Oh my bad, a few of those movies came close to reality today.
Battery energy density is approaching that of gunpowder.
Now consider the safety of 1000 pounds of gunpowder under your car seat.
While my 240 , 200 amp service , here in the Sacramento, CA area, might be able to charge the 600 kwhr battery in 12+ hours, Aptera in San Diego has gone a different way.
It is an aerodynamic 3 wheel , 2 seat car, needing only 100 whr per mile. So with a 100 kWhr battery it can go [ maybe] 1,000 miles.
But, the really great engineering, is that they have incorporated 800 watts of PV in the hood, and roof.
They claim that the Sun will charge 40 miles of driving a day. So, it may not need to be plugged in if one drives less than 40 mi/day.!!
[ I do have a reservation to buy one ]
What percent of the car’s weight is batteries?
And what is the actual weight of this vehicle?
A major problem with EVs is that they are extremely heavy compared to comparable ICE vehicles. Between the batteries, regenerative braking, and inverter+solar PV in your Aptera case – this adds huge weight which directly reduces range. Yes, the EV motors are lighter but that does not remotely offset the weight of the rest. That’s why Teslas and what not have to use carbon fiber – to offset the massive density of the battery packs.
I rode on a Caltrain to and from meeting an old ex-workmate. Even disregarding the power outage where 3 stops from my destination where we sat for 45 minutes while the crew worked to restore power – the cars on this train are literally 20% to 30% battery by volume. As in: compared to the old passenger cars, the new passenger cars have visibly less seating because of massive battery banks on each end of each passenger car. At least, I can think of no other possible reason why there are 2 deep banks of closets on each end of each car, the full height of the car. And no, this is not just the one I was on. I got on this train from the back because I was almost too late to get on. As we approached the end (my destination), I walked the entire length of the train – 8 passenger cars or so – and saw these closets in every one of them.
And to be clear: there are viable use cases for EVs: electric bikes work well. Not well against an actual motorcycle but well enough vs a human fueled bicycle. A SouthEast Asian style puttputt vehicle would likely work well too except for the suicidal nature of using such a vehicle on a road with 2500 lb ICE cars and 3500 lb EVs…
Lots of people that once had homes thought electric bikes were cool, too.
Up until the fire.
Assuming average efficiency, 800 watts if solar panels is going to be some 60 to 70 square feet of solar panels. That pretty much covers every square inch of that small car of yours.
You do realize that you are only going to get 800 watts out of those panels at noon when the sun is directly overhead and every square inch of those panels is exactly perpendicular to the sun’s rays?
Every square inch that is not perpendicular is receiving less power. God forbid some of those arrays should be in shadow.
I hope those panels have sufficient shock absorption, or you never hit any potholes. Solar cells are rather fragile after all.
Don’t forget to wash your car daily, don’t use anything abrasive. Otherwise the dirt and grime are going to significantly cut down the amount of power you get from your cells.
How many hours of cloudless sunlight is needed in order to get this alleged 40 mile range?
I hope you can get your deposit back.
The time for this kind of nonsense has past. It is past time to hold these mongrels accountable for what they are saying. Have them agree to a demonstration. If they prove themselves, we believe them if not we fine them $100,000. Let’s see what they have.
Electric trains use quite a lot of electricity, and some get it from overhead lines rubbing on a pantograph attached to the train.
Amperage is of the order of 300 A, at 25 kV or so. No fancy connectors needed. A bit irrelevant, as 25 kV at ground level, in the hands of the average citizen is a recipe for disaster. I wouldn’t even be happy using a public (possibly defective) 800 V charger, or working on a broken EV with 800 V possibly lurking about.
But anyway, a giant (presently imaginary) capacitor charged to an appropriate voltage, and a vehicle with appropriate direct connectors, will deliver its electrons as fast as the load will allow, and can be recharged slowly, without the need for lengthy cables handling thousands of amps or thousands of volts.
Alas, it’s all a bit late for the standardisation which would be needed – docking port size, location etc.
Oh, and the imaginary capacitors needed are a bit of a problem, too.
I’m sticking with high octane liquid fuel for now. A one day 1500 km road trip needs only 2 or 3 stops to refuel car and passengers, stretch legs, pit stop – and off again!
Charging a capacitor has exactly the same issues as charging a battery. You still need a way to get a lot of electrons, at high voltage into the device.
Mark, yes but . . .
An (Imaginary) capacitor can be charged to say 800 V slowly, at reasonable current rates, but dump its charge into an EV as rapidly as the EV will allow.
All imagination, just as spinning an enormous flywheel up slowly, gradually increasing its store of energy, and then extracting that energy more quickly.
Or you could just use compressed sunlight (gasoline), let it evaporate, and make it go bang in a simple mechanism to drive a vehicle.
Someone else must’ve already covered this, but what does the AC to DC converter look like? What is the highest efficiency battery charger circuit? That is to query, how much energy will be dissipated by the charging circuitry to transfer 600 kWh into the battery. Let us assume a 99% efficient charger. Carry the one and we have to dissipate 6 kWh from said circuit in 5 minutes. Stealing from the article and dividing by 100, that is 72,000 W of waste heat. A charger inside the car will have to dissipate the heat of 720, 100 W incandescent bulbs. Even if the charger is located outside of the car, 720, 100 W incandescent bulbs is MOAR than a large grow house. The time at which such hardware becomes available will be long after cars are powered by Mr. Fusion modules described in, “Back to the Future.”
My money is on the Chinese firm lying about their accomplishments. So, it’s an energy drain trying to verify their claims. And hydrocarbons are still the best energy source for cars and almost every other source of energy generation.
“Yes, it’s real science. Yes, the batteries likely exist, even if only in lab versions.”
Science is no practical benefit to Man unless and until it can be engineered.
Technology is no practical benefit to Man unless and until it has a use.
Then of course, that notwithstanding, there’s economics and that ghastly thing “profit”.
There are no “Twitterati”. Twitter doesn’t exist. Why can’t people let go of what was a silly name in the first place for anything but frivolity?
Seriously? Out of everything discussed on this thread, your one and only comment is to bust me for using a humorous aside?
Get a life.
w.
Yep, that’s what I did. Or maybe you “could care less”.
Calculations using Ohm’s Law exposes many lies. It also handy to look a chart that shows AWG wire size by amperage required (for example: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wire-gauges-d_419.html).
There is a 2-4 year wait on substation transformers. I believe there is only one US manufacturer of transformer steel. Yes, transformers require special metallurgy.
Substation design requires a PE licensed electrical engineer that specializes in substation design and there are not many of them around.