Huawei Patents 3,000km Solid-State Battery with 5-Minute Charge (opens in new tab)

No, not at all. The battery in the article is still 30 times less energy dense by weight as jet fuel. And 10x less by volume. You’ll see synthetic sustainable biofuels and hydrogen way before batteries are in the sky.

The USA did not cede. They got beaten. Own it

The demand for energy isn't changing. If you're charging 5 times as much, but only charging 1/5th as often, you aren't taking more from the grid, you're just making demand on the grid more inconsistent.

There are two main ways of handling that randomness.

1. Spread it over a large number of vehicles, and let statistics average out the demand spikes. We're doing this at a significant rate, adding > 1 million EV's to American roads every year. Also, we already have superchargers with 98 stalls. There's going to be little demand difference between 98 350kW chargers vs 32 1MW chargers. 9 350kW vs 3 1MW chargers loads a grid harder, but 98 vs 32 not so much.

2. Batteries. Charging stations are already large enough that many are utilizing batteries to smooth electricity demands.

> throughput of 2200 kWh

the physical dimension you're looking for is power (kW)

443 kWh / 5 minutes = 443 kWh * (1/12 h) = 5316kW

Those numbers. The hydro power plant I visited can charge 34 cars and India has built most of its possible dams.

The 5 minute charge would be great but as long as i can get the 3000 km range that makes the recharge time a non issue. Planning trips around charging a car every few hundred kilometers is a hassle, but planning around a monthly recharge even if it takes a few hours is no problem.

Capacitors are the exact technology to solve this.

Looks like you were a bit too early. One thing I've learned is that tech like this always takes longer than people realize. And when I say "like this" I mean something that doesn't fit the contemporary supply chain mold, something that conceptually should work but still needs research to be commercially viable and something that needs to be manufactured at scale to reap the most benefit. It takes a long time for all the pieces to fall into place, even under intense industry and consumer pressure.

Don't be so unimaginative. It's for flying cars. They can simply top up by hovering over high-voltage transmission lines, extending flexible tentacles downwards, to suck up some juice.

4 MW chargers are currently being rolled out for electric ferries, so I don't see anything impossible about this future tech.

Seems silly for passenger car usage though where you could just use a much smaller battery using the same tech to get plenty of rang and so cut weight and get better efficiency.

BYD are building a bunch of 1MW chargers in China. That seems fast enough for practical purposes - 250 miles of range in five minutes. I'll normally stop for a coffee every 120 miles or so if driving long distances anyway even if not needing charge/gas.

Is swapping batteries socially acceptable now?

IIUC, the big problem is that people didn't want to end up with a worse battery than their current one.

structural batteries that have competitive power densities will require precision 3D manufacturing at the same level as silicone processors, and is altogether theoretical for the forseable future. what we are seeing with huawaei is an example of excess engineering capacity of a large high tech company, much like Honda, when it gets bored, and starts making jets, or robots, or rockets...instead of mini bikes huawei is a bit different in that there big business of phones,routers, and cell infrastucture equipment got largely shut down, and so they are returning serve with a vengance in order to redeem there place as a player in high tech infrastructure industry.

Carbon fibre is incredibly expensive to manufacture. It requires a lot of manual part manipulation and yields can be poor.

BMW made a big bet that batteries would remain expensive and weight would matter for EVs. i3 and i8 were studies in scaling up structural carbon fibre mass production based on that bet that failed pretty badly.

Structural batteries are already a thing. Carbon fibre won't be the housing without a bunch of innovations.