That’s hardly surprising considering BYD has been making batteries for 30 years, but the latest packs will help make its rapid chargers quicker and less expensive to install. “The challenge is upgrading your power supply, because we need to deliver one megawatt,” Ge explained.
“For example, our office here only comes with a 250 kilowatt power supply. If you want to deliver one megawatt, you have to upgrade the power grid, which probably would take us at least 12 months. Very likely 18 months to 24 months. That’s something we don’t want.
“I think our solution will be to get batteries in between to store the energy needed. That way you don’t need to upgrade your power supply and can install the charger much more swiftly. That will also make the cost reasonable.”
Ge added that for Flash Chargers “you only need to give us a space for a parking bay that’s already good for the charger and energy storage together. We’ll have a low input, but you’ll get a megawatt output”.
Being able to install its chargers faster and being cheaper than the competition will enable BYD to charge customers less to use them. “If we set up these things, we don’t need to charge them 89p per kWh, we’ll probably only charge them 60p,” Ge added.
