on the plummeting cost of batteries and how they enable megawatt scale charging. What were the reactions about? Battery swapping, which many people seem to think is the bees knees and should be everywhere. I disagreed, and people willingly shared data which challenged my argument, for which I thank them. It doesn’t, however, change my opinion much, at least not yet.
An example are cement trucks in a large urban area, where a set of identical electric trucks are running from the concrete batching plant to work sites in the city, driving to the sites, pouring their concrete and returning for a fresh batch multiple times per day, with multiple shifts per day.
However, there isn’t much potential for port ground vehicles because there are only about 120,000 of them in the 900 or so big container ports in the world, there are three or four very differently shaped and sized vehicles, and there are a bunch of different manufacturers. However, at a recent seminar in my India series where I was speaking with assembled electrical utilities resources about storage, I spoke about the lower merit of vehicle to grid vs demand management of charged batteries, and referenced the significant opportunities provided by dirt cheap batteries in terms of buffering electricity at truck stops.
They do sell their cars in 13 other countries, and in Europe have some swapping stations, in Norway , Germany , the Netherlands , Sweden , and Denmark . NIO also operates around 2,179 supercharging stations in China, offering 10,028 chargers. Meanwhile there are about 470,000 high-speed chargers among the roughly 2.1 million public chargers in the country. There are 100,000 gas stations in the country as well.