Source: Phoenix Weekly Finance
Around the electric vehicle replenishment, the Ningde era has drawn a new "big cake".
On January 18, CATL held a power exchange brand conference, and its times electric service officially released the power exchange brand "EVOGO" and the overall solution of combined power exchange.
Following the style of conciseness and conciseness, this conference, which symbolizes the opening up of a new circuit for power exchange, the NINGDE era still controls the time in 10 minutes, and even the chairman of the NINGDE era, Hong Kong's richest man Zeng Yuqun, only has a few frames to ask "Come to a piece?" "The lens.
However, the content of its conference is still "dry goods". Although the live stream is only 10 minutes long, the technical details, key parameters, and planning layout of the EVOGO brand are all revealed.
At the meeting, Chen Weifeng, general manager of Times Electric Service, also said that the battery should be separated as a shared asset, "so that the battery is no longer a personal consumer product."
The planning and layout of the Ningde era, in the eyes of many people in the industry, is the key "chess piece" to drive the development of the power exchange field, especially in the C-end market.
In the future, can the Ningde era do as desired and provoke the beam of "changing electricity"?
"Change the battery for 3 minutes, wait for 1 hour"
At 10:30 p.m., at the Jiangzhuang Lake Replacement Power Station in Beijing, there was a car waiting to be replaced. "I usually come to change the electricity at 10:30 p.m., and people change the electricity quickly." A Weilai owner told Phoenix Weekly Finance that the vehicle replacement speed is much faster than in the public supercharger pile, but this time it is not satisfactory.
The Weilai APP shows that the 75kWh usable battery of the substation has been replaced, and the next battery still needs to wait for 34 minutes, which means that the owner cannot complete the replacement within 3 minutes. "I prefer household charging piles, but the community does not have the conditions for installation." The above-mentioned owners believe that Weilai is also a good choice to change electricity.
It is reported that the replacement power station is the second generation of Weilai replacement power station, which can accommodate up to 13 batteries, including 7 70/75kWh batteries and 6 100kWh batteries, with an average battery replacement time of 3 minutes. According to the observation of Phoenix WEELY Finance, the replacement power station can reach nearly 10 people in the queue during peak periods under the premise of no available batteries.
According to the feedback of car owners in the WEILAI APP community, the Weilai Replacement Power Station located in the Beijing Ideal International Building has had 35 people queuing up.
It is worth mentioning that on January 9, a Weilai car owner presented a pennant to Nantong Weilai Automobile Sales Co., Ltd., with a blessing of "3 minutes to change the power, wait for 1 hour", in order to spit out the waiting time for the power change.
In its view, the advantages of Weilai's convenient and fast power exchange cannot be maintained at all times.
Aodong New Energy, which mainly replaces the electricity of BAIC's operating vehicles, also often encounters the above situation. Even in the middle of the night, there are many substations labeled "busy", and some taxi drivers say that the longest queue takes 1 hour.
There is still no shortage of queuers at the 12:00 a.m. Olympic power station
The root cause of the above problems is that the charging/swapping infrastructure has not kept up with the expansion of the new energy vehicle market.
By the end of 2021, the total delivery volume of WEILAI Automobile has exceeded 160,000 units, but the construction speed of the substation has not matched its delivery volume. As early as 2018, WEILAI made a vow to "build 1100 substations in 2020". However, by the end of 2021, the total number of replacement power stations in Weilai will not exceed 800, and the construction speed is far less than originally envisaged.
The China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance (hereinafter referred to as the "Charging Alliance") pointed out that in 2021, the number of replacement power stations in the mainland will total 1298, and by brand, Weilai and Aodong occupy the vast majority of the market. Among them, Weilai has 789 substations, accounting for 60.8%; Aodong has 402 substations, accounting for 31%.
The ambition of the Ningde era: to unify the rivers and lakes
What the Ningde era wants to solve is the diversification of energy replenishment methods and faster power exchange speed.
From the perspective of sharing and service, 48 batteries can be stored in the substation built by THE NINGDE era, and each battery takes 1 minute to change power, and the endurance is about 200km. Consumers can choose one or more batteries at will when changing the power, flexibly matching the needs of different mileages. According to the current endurance limit, the time spent by consumers at the substation will not exceed 5 minutes.
In other words, what the Ningde era wants to do is to "unify the rivers and lakes" of standardized power stations, like the gas stations of traditional fuel vehicles, to achieve the integration of energy storage, management and recycling of energy batteries.
The same standard of battery mass production, which is naturally much faster than different brands of car companies to change batteries, sounds like a good business.
Yuan Jiancong, chief analyst of the new energy automobile industry at CITIC Securities, believes in the research report that under the background of carbon neutrality, power exchange has become an inevitable form of promoting the popularization of new energy vehicles in all scenarios, which is an effective supplement to charging. A number of institutions predict that in 2025, passenger cars and commercial vehicles will add more than 10,000 new power stations, and the corresponding investment in new equipment will be close to 100 billion yuan.
With the gradual improvement of mainland policies and breakthroughs in power exchange technology, the waiting time of consumers, the profit model of operators, the recycling management of batteries and other development pain points will be broken one by one, and many people in the industry believe that power exchange will usher in the development of the outlet.
Zhang Xiang, an analyst in the automotive industry, pointed out that it is based on the dual role of policy and capital market that ningde times have made up their minds to upgrade electricity to their main business.
However, the Ningde era also had its own anxieties.
In the field of power batteries, successive "latecomers" are robbing customers of the Ningde era, and they urgently need to open up new fields to consolidate the position of "Ning Wang".
According to the data of the Charging Alliance, in 2021, the first place in the loading volume of domestic power battery companies is still the Ningde era, but bydir and Zhongxin Airlines (formerly known as: AVIC Lithium Battery), which ranks 2nd and 3rd, have shown a growth rate of nearly 3 times; in contrast, the growth rate of the Ningde era is slightly inferior. Among them, China Innovation Airlines is only 4th in 2020.
In addition, customers such as Xiaopeng Automobile and GUANGZHOU AUTOMOBILE Group in the past Ningde era will also flow into the "hands" of China New Ventures in 2021. As for Tesla, BMW China and other customers in the Ningde era, they were also shared by BYD and EWELL Lithium.
In response to the current situation, Zhou Ershuang, an analyst at Soochow Securities, believes that "the leading position of 'Ning Wang' is currently difficult to be shaken, but the gap with other battery manufacturers may gradually narrow." ”
Are car companies willing to admit it?
As a "representative" who has been pioneering in the field of power exchange for several years, although the speed of power change of each vehicle of Weilai and Aodong can be controlled within 5 minutes, it still faces many problems.
A notable conundrum is profitability.
Previously, the person in charge of Aodong New Energy had revealed a set of data in Beijing in an interview with the media: in the 34 substations operating in the city, the general replacement vehicles maintained about 70-80 per day, and the number of replacement vehicles in the transportation hub power station was slightly higher than 100 per day, but the load rate was also much lower than that of each station that could bear nearly 300 times of power exchanges within 24 hours.
According to calculations, if a single replacement power station wants to achieve breakeven, the load rate needs to reach 50%, that is to say, this group of replacement power stations needs more than 150 electric vehicles to change power every day to maintain no loss.
Of course, for the Ningde era of "not bad money", this is not the most important issue. As of the end of September 2021, NINGDE still has 80.7 billion yuan of monetary funds on its account.
But even if it is not bad money, car companies may not be in line with the ideas of the Ningde era, which is the second problem.
"The pure electric platform and chassis architecture of each car brand are different, and if the standard is to be unified, many OEMs should make corrections from the development platform, which will increase the research and development costs of car companies." There are unnamed car company management analysis, there will not be a large number of car companies specifically for the Ningde era of power exchange model and increase the cost of car manufacturing.
According to beijing daily, Chen Quanshi, director of the Automotive Research Institute of Tsinghua University, also expressed the same view. In his view, the biggest problem facing the power exchange model is whether it is economically cost-effective.
As early as 10 years ago, the multinational company Better Place finally declared bankruptcy liquidation in 2013 due to the difficulty of balancing operational investment and revenue. In 2013, Tesla also briefly tested the water to change electricity, but finally gave up due to the high price of the power exchange, inconvenient operation and other reasons.
The third challenge is the layout.
In the view of Liu Kai, director of the Technology and Certification Department of the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance, the standardization of substations is a major pain point at present. He believes that due to the difficulty of unifying battery specifications and the low versatility of power exchange facilities, a replacement power station can only serve a single vehicle brand or even a single model, if you want to promote the power exchange mode on a large scale, it will lead to the increasing demand for station construction and the contradiction of limited land and power resources is further highlighted.
However, at the press conference, Chen Weifeng swore that "the overall solution of combined power exchange can adapt to the models developed by 80% of the pure electric platforms that have been listed in the world and will be listed in the next 3 years, and the EVOGO power exchange service will be launched in the first batch of 10 cities in the future." ”
In the view of the Ningde era, electric vehicles are like remote control cars with unified battery models, unified standards, on-demand installation, plug and play, and replacement when there is no electricity.
Some people also believe that the power exchange mode faces greater resistance from the main engine factory, and the main engine factory faces the risk of losing the core technology.
Zhang Xiang, an analyst in the automotive industry, said: "In addition to the head of the new car-making forces, there are also large mainstream car companies such as BYD and Geely, which will not cooperate with the Ningde era to change electricity, mainly because they do not want to open the core technology to a third party." There may be some companies with poor market performance, such as the second and third echelon car companies, who will cooperate based on the traffic and popularity of the Ningde era to increase their sales. ”
In its view, although CATL has reached a cooperation agreement with FAW Besturn NAT models, how to break through the mainstream brand and reach cooperation with it still needs to be solved urgently.