Text | Little Lu fish
Edit | Yang Xuran
In the capital market, the new energy sector has signs of stabilizing and rebounding.
As you can see, this is closely related to the confidence boost that supercharging brings to the industry. On April 10, Tesla said on its official account that the number of superchargers it has built worldwide has reached 45,000. In the US domestic market, Tesla completely dominates the current new energy vehicle fast charging market.
At the end of March, Huawei's new internal testing supercharger in Shenzhen was also exposed. It is said that the nameplate of these supercharging piles proudly states that the maximum output current is 600A and the maximum output power is 600kW, while Tesla's V3 supercharge has a maximum power of only 250kW.
That is, in theory, Huawei's supercharging pile charging speed is more than twice that of Tesla V3, and it can fill the Han EV Qianshan Cui with a range of more than 700 kilometers in about 10 minutes. The first model equipped with Huawei's 1000V high-voltage platform is probably the flagship SUV M9, which will be launched soon.
As soon as the news came out, the fans of the "boiling plant" boiled again.
With the acceleration of the application of the third generation of semiconductor technology, similar "scientific and technological work" will only increase, and some bottlenecks in the new energy industry will also break through, bringing more development space to the industry.
01 Break the mileage anxiety
Short battery life and long charging time have always been the most important reasons restricting the market penetration of new energy vehicles and further replacing fuel vehicles.
In order to solve the problem of charging difficulties for new energy vehicles, some head cars have embarked on the road of building charging piles. Tesla is committed to building its own Supercharging network. From June 2022 to April 2023, the number of Superchargers built by Tesla grew from 35,000 to 45,000 in less than a year.
Tesla's superchargers are not only growing at an amazing rate, but also covering a wide range of sites, with more than 5,000 sites around the world, allowing Tesla to dominate the fast charging market in many countries. In the first quarter of 2023, Tesla installed more Superchargers in the United States than all other car companies combined.
The self-operated Supercharging network itself is one of the important reasons for Tesla's market success.
In 2022, Mainland China's new energy passenger vehicle wholesale reached 6.498 million units and retail sales of 5.674 million units, up 96.3% and 90.0% year-on-year, respectively. This level of market growth means that the number and efficiency of charging piles are put forward greater demand and higher requirements.
In February this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other eight departments jointly issued the Notice on Organizing and Carrying out the Pilot Work of the Pilot Zone for the Comprehensive Electrification of Public Sector Vehicles, proposing that the ratio of new public charging piles (standard piles) to the number of new energy vehicles in the public sector (standard vehicles) should strive to reach 1:1.
Domestic new energy vehicle companies such as NIO and Li have also accelerated the construction of superchargers. During the Spring Festival this year, NIO charging pile charging service orders exceeded 900,000 times, of which 76% of the electricity served non-NIO brands.
Interestingly, NIO announced shortly afterwards that it would adjust the power replacement rights of new car buyers, and the number of free power replacements for new car owners was uniformly adjusted from 6 to 4 times (there is a charge for installing home charging piles). NIO, which has been betting on the battery replacement mode for a long time, seems to have begun to consider supercharging more.
On the one hand, because the cost of replacing the power station is actually significantly higher than that of the new charging pile, and NIO has entered the stage of no longer "burning money to occupy the market" and must improve profitability, and it is more realistic to choose the supercharging mode.
On the other hand, the technological breakthrough of the third generation of semiconductors for vehicles has made more efficient supercharging piles emerge one after another, such as Huawei's new 600kw charging pile, which will definitely not be the ceiling of the development of this industry. And because Huawei insists that it does not build cars, new energy vehicle brands outside the boundary may also cooperate with Huawei to share these technologies.
A little observation will find that whether in the sales market or in the capital market, the market trend of charging piles and new energy vehicles is highly similar.
If the continuous breakthrough of automotive semiconductor technology can eventually bring ultra-high power superchargers, making it as convenient and fast as filling up new energy vehicles as fuel vehicles, the mileage anxiety of new energy vehicles is expected to be completely broken. At that time, the space and prospects of the entire industry will be broader.
02 Enrich application scenarios
The so-called supercharging is essentially DC charging, but it is constantly evolving in the direction of lower losses, higher power, and smaller volume. The breakthrough and landing of the third generation of semiconductor technology has made supercharging more and more "super".
Compared with the first generation of silicon-based semiconductors, the third generation semiconductors based on SiC carbide and gallium nitride GaN can reduce energy loss by more than 50% and reduce the volume of equipment by more than 75%. This property is critical for consumer electronics products that pursue lightness.
Therefore, the third generation of semiconductor materials is considered to be the new driving force for the development of today's electronics industry, and the term "fast charging" also first appeared in consumer electronics such as smartphones. In September 2019, OPPO released the first domestic gallium nitride charger SuperVOOC 2.0 with a charging power of 65W.
Compared with consumer electronics, the charging problem of new energy vehicles is more urgent. There have been many similar paragraphs on the Internet that "if you encounter other NIO owners on the highway, you must overtake, otherwise you will not be able to occupy the charging pile when you run out of power", which reflects the problem of difficulty in charging new energy vehicles.
In order to meet the development needs of the new energy automobile industry, automotive-grade supercharging technology came into being. The head car company rolls the cruising range while rolling the charging pile, otherwise it is backward.
Tesla has further extended its business. At the beginning of this month, its energy storage super factory project was officially announced to settle in Shanghai Lingang, planning to produce Tesla's ultra-large commercial energy storage batteries, with an initial annual output of 10,000 commercial energy storage batteries, and the product scope covers the global market.
While new energy companies are more and more enthusiastic about supercharging, there is also good news about supercharging in laboratory and commercial applications.
In April, the team of Professor Song Li of the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory of the University of Science and Technology of China published the relevant research results of "ammonium root intercalated zinc pentoxide ion battery cathode material with fast charging performance" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It is reported that when the current density is 200 times, the specific capacity of the ammonium intercalated vanadium pentoxide cathode material is still maintained at 101.0 mA per gram, and the charging time is only 18 seconds. This research result lays a foundation for the application of high-performance zinc-ion batteries in fast-charging energy storage devices.
The safe, non-toxic and high theoretical capacity of aqueous zinc-ion batteries has always been one of the most potential sustainable energy storage technologies.
In terms of commercial applications, Sila, a next-generation battery materials company, announced that its high-performance nanocomposite silicon (NCS) anode material Titan Silicon is now available. The anode will be applied to the all-electric Mercedes-Benz EQG to be marketed, which is expected to increase the range by 20% and reduce the charging time to 10 minutes.
Sila also said that with the high-performance anode material Titan Silicon, automakers can reduce battery weight by up to 15 percent and increase space by 20 percent, improving vehicle efficiency and adding innovative design and functionality.
Mercedes-Benz and Sila, Qianjie and Huawei, it is expected that in the future, new energy vehicle companies and professional fast charging technology developers will cooperate more and more, and the immaturity of new energy compared with fuel vehicles will become less and less.
03 Solve the commercialization problem
Since the third generation of semiconductors was written into the "14th Five-Year Plan", the industry has been pushed to the wind.
According to the "2022 Third Generation Semiconductor Industry Development White Paper" recently released by the Beijing Third Generation Semiconductor Industry Technology Innovation Strategic Alliance, the total output value of the mainland's third-generation semiconductor power electronics and microwave RF fields will reach 14.17 billion yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 11.7%.
The release of third-generation semiconductor production capacity is faster, with SiC capacity growth doubling in 2022, GaN production capacity increasing by more than 30%, and new investment expansion plans increasing by 36.7% year-on-year.
Due to the long chain of the third-generation semiconductor industry and the large space for domestic substitution, it has become the key layout direction of many listed companies and investment and financing institutions. For example, Sanan Optoelectronics invested in the construction of third-generation semiconductor R&D and industrialization projects of silicon carbide and other compounds in 2020, and now its 6-inch silicon carbide wafer production capacity has climbed to 200,000 pieces.
The investment and construction of silicon carbide projects began in large quantities last year. Considering that the investment and construction period of such projects generally takes 18-24 months, Chery Automobile R&D Institute is expected to usher in a large wave of production capacity release in 2025. Under the scale effect, the price of domestic third-generation semiconductors is expected to be reduced to a range suitable for industrial development.
Just like the LED industry in the past, through increasing production and reducing costs, it will eventually "fly into ordinary people's homes", but its commercialization process still faces cost problems.
For consumers, household charging piles cost four or five cents a kilowatt-hour of electricity, while those superchargers cost five cents a kilowatt-hour, and the economic cost is too high. Taking Tesla as an example, after the price increase on its supercharging in September last year, the cost of a full charge of Tesla owners was as high as $30, approaching the cost of refueling fuel vehicles.
And in addition to scenarios such as long-distance travel or accidental power consumption, the role of superchargers is not much greater than that of ordinary charging piles, and consumers will naturally mind the issue of cost performance.
For suppliers, only more than 250,000 models are likely to be equipped with 800V high-voltage fast charging platforms, and the number of high-power charging piles is not much. Moreover, the construction cost of supercharging piles is high, and everyone is fighting a price war in order to seize the market, resulting in the commercialization process of high-power charging piles has not been smooth.
The good news is that there will be more new energy vehicles equipped with 800V high-voltage platforms on the market this year, and domestic brands such as BYD and Xpeng have expanded the mass production scale of such models, which is expected to drive the demand for vehicle end and pile end transformation, thereby driving the market demand for SiC power devices, BMS chips and other links.
For example, Joyson Electronics announced on April 12 that it will provide power electronics products for the 800V high-voltage platform of a world-renowned new energy vehicle company, and the total amount of orders for the whole life cycle is expected to be about 13 billion yuan, which exceeds the total number of orders related to the company's 800V high-voltage fast charging last year.
Supercharging is of great significance for new energy vehicles. If the commercialization process of supercharging and third-generation semiconductors can be smoothly promoted, our generation may have the opportunity to witness the whole process of replacing fuel vehicles with new energy vehicles.
Just like a hundred years ago, people driving horse-drawn carriages passed by the first cars.