Every festival, the charging piles in the high-speed service area are lined up in a long line, looking at the endless gas stations on the side, the heart is unspeakably bitter and helpless. Nowadays, endurance is no longer the reason for people to reject pure electric vehicles, after all, the cruising range of 600 to 700 kilometers has been equivalent to many fuel vehicles, and the most headache problem of pure electric vehicles today is that the energy replenishment is too slow.
The power exchange mode is also becoming a powerful means to solve the problem of pure electric vehicle charging, which can not only achieve the efficient energy replenishment of 3 minutes of "full blood resurrection" like fuel vehicles, but more importantly, it can centralize the management of the battery, which is conducive to battery safety monitoring and later battery recycling, and realize the development of a recyclable economy.
Just recently, the CATL EVOGO brand was officially put into use in the first batch of 4 express stations in Xiamen, and it is expected that by the end of this year, 30 express change stations will be completed in Xiamen. It is understood that the power of each piece of "chocolate exchange block" in the quick change station is 26.5kWh, and the minimum preferential price of the monthly rent is 399 yuan per block, and the rental price will be dynamically adjusted according to the different use conditions of the user.
It is worth mentioning that it is reported that the "chocolate exchange block" of the EVOGO brand of the Ningde era can adapt to 80% of the pure electric models that have been listed in the world and will be listed in the next 3 years. In this way, the minimum monthly rent cost of relatively close to the people plus the high adaptability does this mean that the popularization of electricity replacement is not far away from us?
The cost of user use is not low
In fact, when it comes to the power exchange mode, the first thing we think of should be Weilai. As a pioneer in the field of power exchange, NIO has built a total of 900 substations nationwide, and WEILAI users have changed electricity more than 8 million times. It is reported that 59.40% of the residence or office location of WEILAI users is within 3 kilometers from the Weilai power station. According to the plan, WEILAI will build more than 1,300 substations in the Chinese market this year.
However, compared with the power exchange scheme of the whole battery of Weilai, the EVOGO of the Ningde era adopts the "chocolate power exchange block", which is equivalent to splitting a large battery pack into smaller units, which is more convenient to achieve shared power exchange. EVOGO's current "chocolate exchange block" adopts the latest CTP technology of the Ningde era, with a weight energy density of more than 160Wh/kg, a volume energy density of more than 325Wh/L, and a single battery can provide about 200 kilometers of endurance.
The advantage of this combination power exchange scheme is undoubtedly that it has higher adaptability, according to EVOGO, "chocolate power exchange block" can be applied to passenger cars from A00 class to B class, C class, and even logistics vehicles.
As for the cost of use, the battery rental service fee of THE LONG-LIFE BATTERY PACK (100kWh) of WEILAI is 1680 yuan / month, and the battery rental service of the standard battery pack (75kWh) is 980 yuan / month, which is equivalent to the unit price of 16.8 yuan / month and 13.07 yuan / month per kWh. The previously mentioned "chocolate exchange block" is 26.5kWh per piece of electricity, and the minimum monthly rent fee is 399 yuan per block, which is equivalent to the unit price of 15.06 yuan / month per kilowatt hour of electricity. From this point of view, although the minimum monthly rent cost of "chocolate for electricity block" is relatively low, in fact, from the unit price of each kilowatt hour of electricity, it does not have much advantage.
Another point is that in terms of the actual cost of use of users, the unit price of the general fast charging pile per kilowatt hour is not more than 2 yuan, and for ordinary consumers, charging will still be the mainstream choice. However, considering that the battery monthly rent method will save a large amount of money to directly buy out the battery, as well as the problem of battery loss attenuation in the later stage, in the long run, the advantages of the power exchange mode will gradually become prominent.
The policy is pushing hard, and the general trend of changing electricity is the trend
The development significance of the power exchange mode is not only to solve the problem of charging difficulties, compared with the current mainstream charging mode, the power exchange mode in addition to greatly shortening the energy replenishment time, improving the efficiency of consumer vehicles, but also has the convenience of battery maintenance, management and later recycling, and with the future penetration rate of pure electric vehicles is getting higher and higher, the power exchange mode is also conducive to reducing the load of the power grid.
If calculated according to the service efficiency, the single replenishment time of the power exchange mode is about 3-5 minutes, and the maximum energy replenishment capacity of a substation that can store 5-10 batteries is about 100-200 vehicles, which is equivalent to 50 fast charging piles and 200 slow charging piles. As the pure electric vehicle market continues to grow, the utilization rate of the replacement power station will increase, and the profitability will gradually increase, which can be said to be a long-term investment for enterprises.
In recent years, policy support for the power exchange model has been continuously strengthened. In November 2021, the "Electric Vehicle Replacement Safety Requirements" began to be implemented to accelerate the standardization process of the power exchange industry; in February 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other eight departments issued the "Implementation Plan on Accelerating the Comprehensive Utilization of Industrial Resources" to promote the application of waste power batteries in the fields of power backup, charging and replacement; on March 18, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Key Points for Automobile Standardization work in 2022", proposing to accelerate the construction and improvement of the electric vehicle charging and replacing standard system. Promote the formulation of standards for pure electric vehicles such as on-board power exchange systems, power exchange general platforms, and power exchange battery packs; the recently released "14th Five-Year Plan" Modern Energy System Planning also proposes to promote the two-way interaction of energy and information between electric vehicles and smart grids, and carry out pilot demonstrations of new charging and replacing field stations that combine light, storage, charging and replacement.
Under the vigorous promotion of policies, car companies, battery suppliers and other companies have entered the track. In addition to WEILAI Automobile and CATL, Aodong New Energy plans to build more than 10,000 substations by 2025; Sinopec plans to build 5,000 charging and swapping power stations during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period; as one of the main equipment suppliers of WEILAI substations, Bozhong Seiko's substation products have completed 6 iterations; HKUST Intelligent and Geely Automobile work closely together in the field of power exchange.
Layout is difficult, promotion is even more difficult
Although the policy pushes enterprises to exert efforts, from the perspective of promotion, it is still difficult for the power exchange model to enter thousands of households to become the mainstream energy replenishment method for new energy vehicle owners.
At present, the popularity of the power exchange model mainly has two major obstacles, one is that the industry standard is difficult to unify, most of the replacement power stations on the market can only be replaced for their own brand vehicles, due to the brand's market share is not high, the use efficiency of the replacement power station is low, which also leads to the second development obstacle, the investment is large and profitable.
Therefore, if you want to break through the bottleneck of the promotion of the power exchange model, the first thing is to promote the standardization of the industry. But it is not easy to achieve this, there is a competitive relationship between car companies, and different technical routes will be selected in the research and development of battery technology, so we will see such as Tesla 4680 type electrodeless ear battery, BYD blade battery, GAC Aean silicon anode battery, and Ningde era CTP battery, etc., and these various batteries are different in form and basic materials, and there are special requirements for the adaptability of vehicles.
If the implementation of industry standard unification, to a large extent means that car companies have to abolish their own "unique martial arts", which is basically equivalent to losing their core competitiveness, obviously no matter which company is not willing to make such a sacrifice.
However, as strong as "Ning Wang", it is another matter, after all, as the world's largest supplier of power batteries, the battery loading volume of the Ningde era accounts for up to 48%. With the expansion of EVOGO's layout, the power exchange mode will also become a major advantage of the battery model equipped with "chocolate power exchange block", which will undoubtedly bring great pressure to other "single-handed" car companies.
Under the impetus of the policy, the power exchange mode is indeed getting closer and closer to us, but it is believed that it is still far from being expected as the mainstream energy replenishment method. But it is certain that the future must be the era of coexistence of charging and power exchange, for different use scenarios, play the maximum effect of different energy replenishment modes, I believe that the era that truly belongs to pure electric vehicles will also officially arrive.