Why Can Huawei Build 100,000 Overfilled Charging Piles A Year?

In March last year, Huawei, together with the China Electricity Council, the China Electric Vehicle 100 Association, and other organizations, released a report on the development of China's high-voltage fast charging industry (2023-2025).
Looking at it now, Huawei's report, which discusses the development trend and application prospects of high-voltage fast charging technology, somewhat paves the way for its own supercharging business.

Nine months later, at the 2023 World New Energy Vehicle Conference, Huawei finally made a big move: by the end of 2024, it will provide more than 100,000 fully liquid-cooled supercharging equipment, 700,000 public charging guns, covering 340 cities across the country, and build more than 4,500 high-speed supercharging stations.

You must know that Huawei's liquid-cooled supercharging pile was only offline in October last year, and it currently covers only 300 stations, corresponding to thousands of smaller charging guns. Moreover, the market expectation was to build 10,000 units in 2024, which is a 10-fold increase that really shocked the industry.

As a comparison, NIO, which has the largest number of charging piles in China, has built a total of 20,455 charging piles by the end of 2023, of which only 9,300 are supercharging piles; The joint venture between BMW and Mercedes-Benz plans to build about 7,000 supercharging piles in China by 2026. Tesla, the world's No. 1 company, has a total of 55,000 supercharging piles as of 2023.

In other words, Huawei will not only leave the new forces and traditional oil vehicles behind, but also pick Tesla off the horse in a year, can it do it?

1.What is Supercharge?
Before discussing whether Huawei can do it, let's explain what supercharging is.

According to the length of charging time, electric vehicle charging piles can be divided into three categories: slow charging, fast charging and overcharging. The difference lies in voltage and power, for example, the input voltage of slow charging is 220V, and the charging power is mostly 7kW, while fast charging rises to 380V and 60kW.

Supercharging uses the same direct current as fast charging, but with more power and shorter charging times. Overcharging is generally defined in the industry as: a single gun charging power of not less than 350kW, the maximum output voltage of not less than 1000V, and the continuous charging current of not less than 400A.

Generally speaking, the three-phase 120kW-360kW supercharging pile can fully charge the 40kWh capacity battery in only 10-20 minutes, while the single-phase 7.2kW slow charging pile takes 6 hours, the difference is not obvious.

The disparity leads to a one-sided user demand.

According to the "2022 White Paper on the Charging Behavior of Chinese Electric Vehicle Users" released by the China Charging Alliance and Nenglian Zhidian, up to 72% of users choose high-power charging facilities of 120kW and above when charging, and only 2% of users choose charging facilities below 30kW.

However, the charging piles that have been built so far are mainly low-power slow charging, and the market share of high-power piles with more than 150kW of public DC charging piles in China in 2022 will only be 5%.

The main reason for the lack of high-power fast charging infrastructure is that there are too few corresponding models. Of the 6.887 million new energy vehicles sold in 2022, only about 500,000 800V high-voltage fast-charging models will be sold.

Entering 2023, 800V high-voltage fast charging models will be launched in a bunch. Huaan Securities previously estimated that the sales of high-voltage fast charging models in 2023 will be about 1.21 million units, accounting for 21% of pure electric vehicles. That is, 1 out of every 5 pure electric vehicles is a high-voltage fast charging model.

Theoretically, the intensively listed 800V high-voltage models can bring a supercharge, but in fact the effect is limited, as of December 31, 2023, ZEEKR, NIO, Xiaopeng, and Ideal add up to only 3,861.

The reason for the slow progress is, on the one hand, that the cost of self-built supercharging stations by car companies is too high, on the other hand, just like there is no cotton in marshmallows, there is no fish in the fish-flavored shredded meat, and the 800V high-voltage models that car companies are promoting are also watery.

The so-called 800V is not an accurate value, but as an intermediate value, which refers to the high-voltage architecture of the whole vehicle with a voltage range of 550V-930V on the market, covering a full set of high-voltage components such as battery system, electric drive system, charging system, and power devices.

Therefore, models with a rated voltage of 551V for power batteries like Xpeng G6 can also be regarded as a pressure line to enter the 800V field, but the rated voltage of only 530V is open to discussion.
Moreover, most of the 800V high-voltage models are equipped with boosters, such as NIO NT3.0, Li MEGA, and Zhiji LS6, which feature a backward compatible, universal 500V charging pile.

Although the parameters are discounted, the 800V model is still more efficient than the 400V model. For example, Xpeng G6 can reach a voltage of 580V, a current of 492A, and a power of 285kW on its own ultra-fast charging pile; On the third-party national standard pile, the voltage is 558V, the current is 250A, and the power is 140kW.

This means that even at third-party charging piles, the overall charging speed is twice as fast as that of 400V models. With the launch of more 800V high-voltage models, the user group of electric vehicles has shifted from pioneer users to mass users, and the main demand of consumers has changed from cruising range to energy replenishment efficiency, and the laying of more charging piles that support ultra-fast charging has been put on the agenda.

2.Why is it difficult to land?

Soon after the release of the Zhijie S7, it was happy to mention a nickname - "electric car that can only add 95 gasoline", because the car only supports fast charging above 750V, and cannot adapt to 500V low-voltage piles.

The reason for the lack of backward compatibility,The response of customer service is that Zhijie S7 uses a full range of 800V high-voltage platforms,There is speculation that the cost may be limited, so the booster is castrated.

This also allows the outside world to associate Huawei's pile building with car building.

According to Huawei's thinking, the business logic of pile building is the same as that of building a car, and instead of building piles itself, it helps operators build piles well. The purpose of self-built stations in the early stage is mainly to provide a model for the industry, and in the later stage, it is necessary to cooperate with operators such as State Grid, China Southern Power Grid and special calls.

In essence, Huawei's role is to be an exporter of technical solutions, and it can also catch up with a wave of "infrastructure dividends".

In the State Grid fast charging pile bidding, the proportion of 80kW charging piles has decreased from 63% in 2020 to 37% in 2022, while 160kW and 240kW have increased from 35% and 1% to 57% and 4% respectively.

In this case, Huawei's 100,000 supercharging pile plan looks like a sure-fire deal. It can not only export the liquid-cooled supercharging solution to the whole industry to meet the rapid energy replenishment needs of mass users, but also boost its own smart car business.

But nothing is 100%, Brother Zhou Huajian told us that how can we see a rainbow without experiencing wind and rain. For Huawei, wind and rain are the two core factors that hinder the implementation of supercharging: vehicle-side power semiconductors and the burden on the distribution network.

Because the 800V solution has increased hardware requirements, the 400V platform must be upgraded to silicon carbide, and the vehicle side can only meet the standard for supercharging hardware. The shortage of chips has always been a problem in the automotive industry, so it will have an impact on the configuration of 800V, and the vehicle side must also have a power battery suitable for the 800V solution.

But these are not the core factors, and the problems on the distribution network side may be the key.

Under normal circumstances, the design of the existing power distribution network can not meet the overcharging specifications, and the power of the fast charging piles on the market is as small as tens of kW and as large as hundreds of kW, and such high-power charging piles will produce high current and impulse voltage when they are connected and used.

For example, the Xpeng G6 mentioned above has a peak power of up to 287kW when charging at its S4 supercharger. The charging is fast, and the grid has to withstand it.

The unit electricity consumption index of the office building is 30-70W/m², and a 15-storey office building is estimated at 1,500 square meters per floor, with a power of 1.1MW. The Xpeng S4 supercharging pile has a maximum power of 480kW, and three supercharging piles are used at the same time, and the maximum power may be more than 1 office building.

Moreover, the impact of high-voltage fast charging on the grid also includes peak loads. Think of the power grid as a rubber band, it needs to have a certain elasticity to cope with random load peaks, but if the peak load is too large and exceeds the extension limit, the rubber band will break and the grid will have problems.

For the feasibility of the distribution network, the industry proposes to solve the impact of overcharging on the stability of the power grid through microgrids and shared energy storage.

Microgrid refers to a small power generation and distribution system composed of distributed generators, energy storage devices, energy conversion devices, loads, monitoring and protection devices, etc., which is an effective means to solve a series of problems caused by the direct access of distributed generators to the power grid.

However, at present, the above solution may not be optimal in terms of cost.

Take a 350kW high-power supercharging station in Electrify America as an example, equipped with a Tesla 350kWh energy storage system with a power of 210kW, the price is about 210,000 US dollars, about 1.4 million yuan. The total cost of an A480, five 120kW charging piles, and a supercharging station without ground rent is about 1.122 million yuan.

The initial cost of liquid-cooled supercharging piles is high, and the problem of insufficient power grid capacity and grid load adjustment is solved by configuring energy storage, which also increases the initial investment cost.

Yanzhi New Energy Vehicle previously analyzed that if you want to build a supercharging station full of supercharging piles, the cost of a station with energy storage is at least 2 million. The cost of a second-generation battery swap station of NIO without batteries and land rent is about 1.25 million yuan.

However, some institutions believe that the cost of charging electricity should be applied instead of the initial investment to measure the investment income of charging stations.

As an important new infrastructure, the charging network should consider future technology iteration and standard upgrades, change the idea of simply comparing the cost of a single watt, and introduce the whole life cycle of charging LCOE for evaluation.

According to Changhong Group's estimates, the LCOE of Huawei's fully liquid-cooled supercharging solution is much lower than that of the traditional solution, with a 10-year LCOE of 0.34 yuan/kWh, which is 35% and 26% lower than that of integrated piles and air-cooled reactors, respectively, and the payback period is only 6.7 years. With the improvement of technology and manufacturing level, the final cost will come down.

3.Epilogue
From the point of view of cost, although there are not many places that need to be transformed and upgraded to popularize supercharging, they all cost a lot and are uncontrollable. For example, the installation of high-power charging stations requires increasing capacitance, so the power grid needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to transform the city's power infrastructure, which is indeed a bit difficult.

In addition, there is the cost of supercharging stations, and the comprehensive costs of pile station construction, energy storage, and ground rent have exceeded those of battery swap stations, and ordinary operators cannot afford such heavy assets.

Taking Huawei's fully liquid-cooled supercharging terminal as an example, the price of a 600kW fully liquid-cooled supercharging terminal is as high as 600,000 yuan, while the price of a 120kW air-cooled charging pile is only 3-50,000 yuan. For operators, at a time when the market share of ultra-fast charging models is extremely low, 120kW/180kW air-cooled equipment is the choice to close their eyes.

Therefore, whether Huawei can fulfill its commitments in the coming year ultimately depends on how much support the large operators such as State Grid and Three Barrels of Oil can support.