Articles
Electric Cars and Battery Swapping Stations (BSS)
Dt: 4/9/23
Electric Cars and Battery Swapping Stations (BSS)
Dr T.H.Chowdary*
In the year 2006 at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) Shimon Peres former Prime Minister & President of Israel and a Nobel Peace Prize winner presented Shai Agassi, an Executive of SAP the largest enterprise software company at the Young Scientist Conference . Agassi in his 30s was bristling with the idea of taking the country like Israel off oil. Automobiles are the largest consumers of oil. His dream was to take Israel off oil which is the petrol dollar earner for Arab countries some of which were nurturing jihadi terrorists. Israel was surrounded by Arab countries swearing to destroy that small state. Shimon Peres two times Prime Minister and one time President and a Nobel Peace Prize winner ( 1994) was the patron to present Agassi’s ideas of electric cars to the world’s largest automobile manufacturers - General Motors , Ford, Chrysler and two others. All those dismissed an electric car as non- starter as it would cost very high. But the CEO of Renault -Nissan , Carols Ghosn who was electrified with the idea of an oil-less said it would be possible.
2. Agassi’s idea was simple. The battery driven electric cars are very costly because of the cost of the battery which is about 40-45% of the cars sales price. Remove the battery and sell the cars , battery shall be owned by another company. Just as petrol and diesel are marketed by several oil companies, oil/gas run automobile users go to gas filling station and pay for the gas. Agassi’s idea is battery companies will market the battery for the electric vehicles EV users. We go to battery swapping stations replace the exhausted battery by a fully charged battery. It is just like filling a car with petrol or diesel.
3. Instead of petrol/diesel filling stations we have battery swapping stations where fully charged batteries are available to replace the batteries discharged in the vehicle that comes for swapping. The battery companies build the battery swapping stations where number of batteries are on charge from the electric power grid . The cost of the batteries is recovered from the charge of a fully charged battery replacing the discharged battery for a price. It is from this price that the battery charging stations recover the cost of the batteries .
4. Engineers and scientists are looking for batteries that store the largest amount of electrical energy in the least of space and weight. The lead acid batteries are not suitable for electrical vehicles because their energy storage density is little. So there is search for batteries which store the highest amount of electrical energy in the least space and weight. Lithium, Sodium and Hydrogen are the fuels that are being developed for the high density storage batteries required for electrical vehicles . Hybrid cars which can run both on battery as well as petrol are characterized as, “route to nowhere”. The hydrogen fuel cars are characterized as “ forever be 10 years away”.
5. Agassi in Israel founded a company “Better Place” and raised $ 200 billion to produce the EV batteries and build up a country-wide charging cum battery swapping network . Lo! We have Israel where cars are running not on petrol or diesel but on electricity through the network of charging / battery swapping stations instead of petrol or diesel filling stations.
6. I gave this idea to Amar Raja Batteries in the year 2010 (!). They were quiet for some time but recently they embarked upon a Rs. 7,500 cr Lithium battery making factory in a village in Palamuru ( Mahbubnagar) district in Telangana. Now in Hyderabad battery charging stations are being built up by the a state-owned company. The correct solution is not that but competing high energy density batteries (lithium/sodium/Hydrogen) companies and their battery swapping stations, where they swap discharged batteries of EVs with fully charged batteries, stored by them, ( just as they store petrol/diesel). Co-operation between the State and the new pioneering companies is essential for Bharat to go off- oil for its automobiles. Bharat imports 84% of oil and 45% of natural gas . Much of it can be saved by electrical vehicles. Today an electrical vehicle with the battery as part of it is priced at about Rs. 45 lakhs . It appears that the cost of the battery is about 40% of the car. If a grid or grids of battery swapping stations is / are established by EV battery companies , EVs can be had at the same prices as oil using automobiles.
7. Besides Amar Raja Batteries, two or three companies and some research organizations are engaged in facilitating Bharat’s switch of its automobiles from patrol/diesel to electric traction. The business model should be battery swapping stations in place petrol/diesel filling stations and EV cars designed for dropping and receiving high energy density batteries. (784 words)
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