Quote from: K-Dog on Feb 02, 2024, 09:55 PMIf a battery needs to be charged quickly the battery should be swapped for a battery that is already charged.  Flow technology is one way to do that.  There are others.

Whatever the swapping method is, the issue is the number of trucks in a day that arrive with an empty fuel tank (or battery) and need to leave with a full one.

Say it is a relatively quiet stop that fills 100 tanks/day.  If you were swapping batts, the stop would need an inventory of about 200 batts on hand.  100 on chargers + 100 ready to be swapped when the truck rolls in.  Those are mighty big batt packs, and you need an average of 3 for every truck on the road.  That is a shit load of lithium if you are using Li-I technology.  You would also need some type of robotic forklift system to do all the swapping between charge station, drop station, ready station and onto the truck.  This could not be done by the driver alone like pumping diesel.

Then the problem of charging up the packs.  Say you could get the charge time down to 6 hours from empty to full charge.  That station would need to push a lot of juice, and in 24 hours 1 station can charge a max of 4 batt packs.  That means you need 25 of these stations running simultaneously.  Can you imagine how much electricity that is flowing through the supply line wire?  It basically would need its own high voltage cable running in there and transformer substation!  You would need to do this for all the major truckstops along the interstates.  All the TAs, all the Petros, all the Flying Js, all the Pilots.

Bottom line:  Even with flow batteries I don't see how this can be made to work without a grid upgrade that is way beyond what they have planned in even optimistic scenarios.  IMHO, EV trucks can only work for local market deliveries where the truck does a round trip to its home terminal each day and charges up overnight there.  There will need to be a change in the logistics to accomodate that.

The only way I can see is to use the rail system and truck only from rail hubs to distribution points.  However, the rail network would need to absorb all the freight currently using the interstate highways.  I don't think it has the capacity for that.

RE