Replaceable electric car battery solves peak problems
Almost all electrical devices, including electric bicycles, contain batteries that you can change. Why not a replaceable electric car battery? It is possible with Nio.
Imagine you park at a gas station with your new electric car. Instead of a trunk, or a charging station, a robot arm lifts your empty battery from your vehicle and puts a full one in while you pay. You can drive away in a few minutes. science fiction? On the contrary, this idea is perfectly feasible with today’s technology. It would even have some big advantages compared to the system now. The Chinese car manufacturer Nio put its money where its mouth is and even built the first station in Europe where you can use the replaceable electric car battery.
Potentially looted technology from France
The technology behind the replaceable electric car battery is not new. This was developed in France by Renault in collaboration with the Israeli startup Betterplace (now bankrupt). Unfortunately, this concept never got off the ground due to poor execution and the small capacity of batteries at the time. China has obtained this technology through industrial espionage.
It is not unlikely that Nio partly developed the interchangeable electric car battery on the basis of this stolen technology – the Communist Party of China has an iron grip on business, every larger company, such as Nio, has been obliged to include a branch of the Chinese Communist Party within Company. Although the Chinese will say: karma.
Although it is also quite possible that Nio developed this technique independently. After all, it’s not very technically challenging, and Chinese engineers are terrifyingly good at turning a concept into a low-cost, mass-produced product of fairly good quality.
The advantages of the replaceable electric car battery
The big advantage of replaceable batteries is that you can charge them when there is a lot of power. For example, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing through the wind farms in the North Sea. This allows you to store a stock of full batteries that you can use day and night. This way you can prevent peaks and troughs on the power grid. Our power grid is currently unable to absorb these enormous peaks. You solve that problem with the interchangeable electric car battery concept.
If there were a European, uniform standard for interchangeable batteries, you could use a single type of battery for both home use and electric cars. Charging stations would arise everywhere, especially in the vicinity of solar parks, residential areas and wind farms. Electric trucks would transport these to and from exchange stations. Prices would drop considerably, so that we no longer have to allocate a lot of money for the energy transition. And Europe would take back the lead with the interchangeable electric car battery that we have now lost to China and the US.
