Best of LinkedIn: Electrification & Battery Technology CW 04/ 05

00:00:00: Brought to you by Thomas Allgaier and Franus, this edition highlights key LinkedIn posts on electrification and battery technology in weeks four and five.

00:00:09: Franus supports automotive enterprises and consultancies with market and competitive intelligence, so product teams and strategy leaders do have the optimal base for their strategic decisions.

00:00:21: You know, when we sit down to look at the mobility feed, it's usually, well, it's a lot of noise, shiny concept cars, press releases about partnerships that might happen in twenty thirty.

00:00:30: Maybe, potentially.

00:00:31: Exactly.

00:00:32: But looking at the data from weeks four and five of twenty twenty six, something just felt.

00:00:39: It definitely felt heavier.

00:00:40: The whole conversation has shifted.

00:00:41: We're past the dreams phase and straight into the concrete phase.

00:00:45: We're not seeing posts anymore about if we're going to electrify.

00:00:48: No, that debate feels pretty settled.

00:00:50: Right.

00:00:50: Now we are in the messy, expensive, but also fascinating phase of figuring out how to actually plumb all this hardware into a grid that, well, it just wasn't designed for it precisely.

00:01:00: So our mission for you today is to cut through that noise and find the real signal.

00:01:05: And the signal we found covers four I think really distinct clusters.

00:01:10: We're going to talk about the grid, which is spoiler alert, basically the boss of every project now.

00:01:15: We're looking at heavy duty charging, moving from PowerPoint slides to, you know, actual pavement.

00:01:21: We've got a really uncomfortable comparison between US and EU reliability.

00:01:26: Sorry, in advance to our American listeners.

00:01:28: Yeah, that was a bit spicy.

00:01:29: And finally, the battery loop where regulations might be writing checks that reality can't cash just yet.

00:01:35: It's a packed agenda.

00:01:36: And what I really like about this specific stack of sources is that they aren't glossing over the problems.

00:01:42: They're highlighting the friction.

00:01:43: And for anyone listening who's in strategy or product, I mean, the friction is where the opportunity is.

00:01:49: So let's

00:01:49: start with the biggest source of friction, theme one, grid and system integration, or as I've kind of started calling it the project killer.

00:01:56: It's a fair nickname, unfortunately.

00:01:58: It used to be all about the charter itself, right?

00:02:00: Does it look cool?

00:02:01: How fast is it?

00:02:02: But a post from Jordan Marsden this week just made it so clear that era is gone.

00:02:08: He was pretty blunt about it.

00:02:09: Oh, blunt is the right word.

00:02:11: Marsden basically argues that the grid isn't just a technical detail you saw out at the end.

00:02:17: He says, and this is the quote, the grid is the project.

00:02:21: Wow.

00:02:21: Yeah.

00:02:22: If you don't have that connection, you don't have a business model.

00:02:25: It is that simple.

00:02:26: But why is it such a bottleneck right now?

00:02:28: I mean, are we just running out of power?

00:02:31: It's not necessarily a lack of generation.

00:02:33: You know, it's more about access in the process.

00:02:36: Marsden flags three specific pain points.

00:02:39: First, oversized cues.

00:02:40: Everybody's trying to plug in at once.

00:02:42: Okay.

00:02:43: Second, reinforcement cost that he literally described as eye watering.

00:02:47: But the third one, this is the real killer for anyone trying to build a plan.

00:02:51: Timeline uncertainty

00:02:52: that's the one that got me.

00:02:53: he mentioned projects could take anywhere from eighteen months to

00:02:57: four years

00:02:57: to four years.

00:02:59: I mean how do you even build a financial model when the utility says we might connect you next year or Maybe in four?

00:03:05: you can't.

00:03:05: that's the thing.

00:03:06: you're just burning capital while you wait.

00:03:08: So the insight here is you have to treat the grid as your first step

00:03:11: from day one.

00:03:13: You don't design the site and then ask for power.

00:03:15: you find the power and then you design the site around what's actually available.

00:03:19: Okay, but even if you get connected, the pain doesn't stop.

00:03:23: This next point, it actually blew my mind.

00:03:26: I'd never thought about the physics of, well, doing nothing.

00:03:29: The post from Micah Zoisa about reactive power.

00:03:33: Oh, this is fantastic technical nuance.

00:03:35: And it is costing CPOs, charge point operators, thousands.

00:03:40: Many of them don't even realize why.

00:03:42: Okay, so break this down for me and for anyone listening who didn't major in electrical engineering.

00:03:47: So Wisa is saying, operators are losing money even when they aren't charging cars.

00:03:52: Essentially,

00:03:52: yeah.

00:03:53: In an AC system, you have active power.

00:03:55: That's the good stuff, the juice that charges the battery.

00:03:57: But you also have this thing called reactive power, which is energy that just sort of bounces back and forth on the wire to maintain voltage.

00:04:03: It doesn't do any real work.

00:04:05: It's like the foam on a beer.

00:04:06: That is the classic analogy, yes.

00:04:08: You pay for the whole pint.

00:04:10: But if half of it is foam, you aren't getting what you paid for.

00:04:13: And Zoisa points out that utilities will actually penalize you if your power factor, your beard to foam ratio, is too low.

00:04:22: And the chargers themselves are the problem.

00:04:24: Correct.

00:04:25: He notes that a lot of high-end chargers will advertise a point nine nine power factor, which is great.

00:04:30: But that's only when they're running at full blast.

00:04:33: When they're idle or just trickling a charge into a car, they're efficiency tanks.

00:04:38: They start generating a lot of that foam,

00:04:41: so to speak.

00:04:42: So you have these super expensive assets just sitting there, not making any money, and they're racking up utility fines because of bad physics?

00:04:49: Precisely.

00:04:50: And his takeaway isn't just pay the fine.

00:04:52: It's a call to action for the hardware manufacturers.

00:04:55: We need better firmware, better filters to handle these low load scenarios.

00:04:59: So, okay, the grid is slow to connect and it's expensive if you mess up the physics.

00:05:02: It sounds like a complete nightmare.

00:05:04: But we did see some hope in the feed.

00:05:06: People aren't just sitting around waiting.

00:05:08: No, absolutely not.

00:05:09: Necessity is the mother of invention, right?

00:05:11: Right.

00:05:11: And you just have to look at the story from Luke Van Cook about DHL.

00:05:15: This is a massive rollout, something like twenty five hundred electric vans.

00:05:19: It's huge.

00:05:20: And traditionally, if you go to a grid operator and ask for enough power to charge twenty five hundred vans at once, they would.

00:05:27: Well, they'd laugh you out of the room and tell you to come back in ten years.

00:05:30: So DHL didn't wait.

00:05:32: They

00:05:32: used software to, let's say, optimize the system.

00:05:35: Luke detailed this hybrid energy management system.

00:05:39: It's got local controls on site reacting second by second, but it's also connected to cloud oversight.

00:05:44: So like if the office building turns on the air conditioning, the chargers automatically dial back a little.

00:05:49: Exactly.

00:05:50: And the result is just staggering.

00:05:52: They're charging almost twice as many vehicles per night as their grid connection should.

00:05:57: theoretically allow.

00:05:58: No new cables in the ground, they just squash the peaks.

00:06:01: That ties in perfectly with what Nicholas Lurch was talking about with the FLA Xbox.

00:06:05: Yes, the FLA and Xbox is kind of the hardware answer to that software problem.

00:06:10: It's a controller built specifically to meet these really strict grid requirements like the ones in Germany without delaying the rollout.

00:06:19: So the bottleneck isn't always the wire?

00:06:22: No, sometimes it's just about having the right brain controlling the flow.

00:06:25: And Philip Graf made a great point on this too, saying battery storage alone isn't some magic wand.

00:06:31: You need intelligent logic to decide when to charge the battery and when to sell.

00:06:35: back to the grid.

00:06:36: Right.

00:06:37: So the summary for this whole grid cluster is pretty clear.

00:06:39: The era of plug and play is completely over.

00:06:42: We are now in the era of plug, manage, optimize, and pray you did your math right.

00:06:47: That's a good way to put it.

00:06:48: Which

00:06:48: brings us to theme two.

00:06:50: If the grid is already stressed out by delivery vans, what on earth happens when we start plugging in the real monsters?

00:06:57: We're talking about heavy duty charging, moving the megawatts.

00:07:00: This is where the numbers get, well, both scary and exciting.

00:07:03: We're going from kilowatts to megawatts.

00:07:05: And the big headline this week came from the US.

00:07:09: We saw a bunch of posts.

00:07:10: Jovan Filipowicz, Jason Gies, Peter Diamond, Jean-Jerique, all talking about the same huge partnership.

00:07:17: Tesla

00:07:17: and Pilot Flying J. Exactly.

00:07:19: And this is significant.

00:07:21: For a long time, the Tesla semi felt like this, you know, captive project.

00:07:25: You only saw them hauling chips for Tesla or soda for Pepsi.

00:07:29: This changes that completely.

00:07:31: They're building a public network.

00:07:32: Real

00:07:33: public infrastructure.

00:07:34: Yeah.

00:07:34: We're not talking about some slow charger tucked in a corner.

00:07:37: They're deploying one point two megawatts.

00:07:40: per stall.

00:07:40: One point two megawatts.

00:07:42: Just to give you some context, that's enough power to run a small neighborhood.

00:07:45: All of it channeled into a single cable.

00:07:47: Into

00:07:48: a single truck, yeah.

00:07:49: And they're putting four to eight of these stalls at each site.

00:07:52: Right along the I-five and I-ten corridors.

00:07:54: This is strategic.

00:07:55: These are the main arteries of American logistics.

00:07:57: It

00:07:58: feels like a real turning point, but I did like the counterpoint that Chris Jackson raised.

00:08:02: He saw all this excitement about public charging and basically said, that's cool, but that's not where the real work happens.

00:08:09: Jackson is the voice of operational reality here.

00:08:13: He's arguing that sixty to ninety percent of all heavy-duty charging is going to happen at private depots.

00:08:19: Your depot is the infrastructure.

00:08:21: That was his line.

00:08:22: That

00:08:22: was it.

00:08:22: He's warning fleet operators.

00:08:24: Don't wait for a national network to be finished before you buy trucks.

00:08:28: The depot is where the truck sleeps.

00:08:31: That's where the bulk of the energy transfer is going to happen.

00:08:33: Public charging is just your insurance policy.

00:08:36: But even at the depot, you have to be smart about it.

00:08:38: And this leads to my favorite story of the week.

00:08:41: the Alli-Sud Distribution Center in Germany.

00:08:44: This was shared by Syed Haseeb Hassan.

00:08:47: Ah, yes.

00:08:48: This is a brilliant example of what we call opportunity charging.

00:08:51: So

00:08:51: walk us through this.

00:08:52: Usually a truck drives all day and it charges all night.

00:08:54: What is Aldi doing differently?

00:08:56: So they just looked at their operations and they realized a truck isn't always moving.

00:09:01: It spends about sixty minutes at the dock being loaded with groceries.

00:09:04: Dead time.

00:09:05: Traditionally, yes, but all the installed two hundred and fifty kilowatt chargers right there at the loading dock.

00:09:11: So in that one hour, while the truck is just sitting there anyway, they pump in enough energy for another hundred twenty five to one hundred and forty kilometers of range.

00:09:19: That is.

00:09:20: That's free mileage.

00:09:21: I mean, not electrically free, but operationally free.

00:09:24: You aren't stopping the driver.

00:09:25: Exactly.

00:09:26: And Sy had mentioned they're already future proofing those docks for three hundred and seventy five kilowanders.

00:09:30: And just think about the implications of that.

00:09:32: If you can get your full-routes energy while you load, maybe you don't need a massive heavy battery.

00:09:37: You could use a smaller battery, carry more cargo,

00:09:40: and never stop at a highway charger.

00:09:42: It solves multiple problems at once.

00:09:43: And it's not just trucks.

00:09:45: UiPiatriga and Tommy Renta-Cartano were posting about this tech hitting the maritime

00:09:50: world.

00:09:51: The megawatt charging system, or MCS, imports.

00:09:54: Yes, for those giant electric straddle carriers that stack containers in a port, uptime is everything.

00:09:59: A port never sleeps.

00:10:00: Right.

00:10:00: If a machine takes four hours to charge, you need a second machine.

00:10:04: That just destroys your TCO.

00:10:05: With MCS, you can blast power into it during a shift change and keep your fleet small.

00:10:10: But I have to play the skeptic again.

00:10:12: We just said the grid is constrained.

00:10:14: Now we're talking about blasting megawatts into trucks and port cranes.

00:10:18: Dr.

00:10:18: Hussein Bosma shared a demo suggesting this won't actually crash the grid.

00:10:22: It's a valid fear, but his post about the Kemp power site in Sweden proves it solvable.

00:10:28: They had a site delivering megawatt level charging, but they didn't pull megawatts from the grid.

00:10:35: They brought their own bucket.

00:10:36: A very, very large bucket.

00:10:38: A two point four megawatt hour battery storage system plus four hundred kilowatts of solar panels on site, they buffered everything.

00:10:46: So the grid sees this gentle, steady trickle while the truck sees a fire hose.

00:10:51: So heavy duty is possible, but you basically have to build a mini power plant at your depot.

00:10:56: In a lot of cases, yeah, that's the new reality.

00:10:58: All right, let's shift gears.

00:10:59: Theme three, we've connected to the grid, we've bought the big trucks, now we have to actually run the network.

00:11:04: And this is where things get a little embarrassing.

00:11:07: if you're in the U.S.

00:11:07: The transatlantic gap, it is definitely getting wider.

00:11:10: Casper

00:11:11: H. Rasmussen posted some data that really felt like a beat down for the U.S.

00:11:14: market.

00:11:15: It was hard to argue with.

00:11:16: He was comparing the maturity of the EU versus U.S.

00:11:19: infrastructure and the numbers were just stark.

00:11:22: Let's

00:11:22: talk about that utilization stat.

00:11:23: Okay, so he noted that the median public DC charging site in the EU is doing about fifty-seven kilowatt hours per day.

00:11:31: Okay.

00:11:32: In the US,

00:11:33: thirty-three.

00:11:34: Wow, that's almost double the traffic in Europe.

00:11:36: Why?

00:11:36: It's reliability and standardization.

00:11:39: Rasmussen points to the connector soup in the US.

00:11:41: You've got CCS-I, the new NACS, legacy chat demo.

00:11:46: It's a mess.

00:11:47: In Europe, they settled on CCS two years ago.

00:11:49: It's boring, and boring is good for business.

00:11:52: And then there was that uptime issue.

00:11:53: He had that line about rural Nevada.

00:11:55: A broken charger in rural Nevada might wait weeks.

00:11:59: In Europe, the density is higher.

00:12:00: Service networks are tighter.

00:12:02: If a charger breaks in the Netherlands, someone's there the next day.

00:12:05: In the US, you pull up, and it's a coin flip whether it even works.

00:12:08: Which just creates more range anxiety, which lowers utilization.

00:12:11: It's a death spiral.

00:12:13: It is.

00:12:13: And this leads right into what Patrick Roelke was talking about with the Lights Out CPO.

00:12:18: OK, that sounds like a sci-fi concept.

00:12:19: The automated operator.

00:12:21: It's the only way to scale, really.

00:12:23: Rogo argues that right now, CPOs are drowning in support tickets, cable stuck, payment failed, screen is broken.

00:12:31: You just can't hire enough people to answer all those phones.

00:12:33: So the light set idea is what?

00:12:35: Self-healing charters?

00:12:36: Ideally.

00:12:37: Yeah.

00:12:37: Or at the very least, self-diagnosing.

00:12:39: The system should know why a charger is down before a human even looks at it.

00:12:44: It should try to reboot itself or reroute power or automatically dispatch a technician.

00:12:49: That sounds great, but Marco Muller raised a point that suggests maybe we aren't quite there yet.

00:12:53: Muller is the one saying stop testing on your customer.

00:12:57: He says that phrase works in the lab is so dangerous.

00:13:00: Because real-world EVs are messy.

00:13:03: They have old software buggy protocols, the grid fluctuates.

00:13:07: He's pushing for more simulation.

00:13:09: Software in the loop and hardware in the loop testing.

00:13:12: You have to simulate thousands of scenarios, bad weather, a twenty-eighteen car with old firmware, a voltage spike before you deploy.

00:13:19: Because once that charger is in the ground in rural Nevada, it is way too late to debug.

00:13:23: And it's not just bugs we have to worry about.

00:13:26: Kristoff LeFillibur brought up something much darker.

00:13:29: Cyber threats.

00:13:30: This is the elephant in the room.

00:13:32: We treat chargers like simple appliances, like a toaster or something.

00:13:36: But they're internet connected computers controlling extremely high voltage.

00:13:41: And they're payment terminals.

00:13:42: Exactly.

00:13:43: Lafillibird is warning that chargers are already being hacked.

00:13:46: User data is being stolen.

00:13:48: But the bigger risk is business continuity.

00:13:51: Imagine a fleet operator getting hit with ransomware.

00:13:54: Pay us five Bitcoin or your entire truck fleet won't charge tomorrow.

00:13:58: That

00:13:59: stops the whole supply chain cold.

00:14:00: It's not an IT problem anymore.

00:14:02: It's a national security issue.

00:14:03: So reliability isn't just about fixing the plug.

00:14:06: It's about digital defense.

00:14:07: Correct.

00:14:08: Okay.

00:14:08: Let's slide into our final theme.

00:14:10: We've talked about getting power to the vehicle.

00:14:12: Now let's talk about the vessel that holds it.

00:14:15: Battery tech and circularity.

00:14:17: And this is where we run into a math problem.

00:14:19: Right.

00:14:20: Christopher Lund flagged this specifically about the EU battery regulation.

00:14:24: It's a classic case of, well, regulation getting ahead of reality.

00:14:28: The EU has mandated that by twenty thirty one new batteries have to contain specific percentages of recycled cobalt, lithium and nickel.

00:14:38: Which sounds great on paper.

00:14:40: We all want a circular economy.

00:14:41: We want to recycle batteries.

00:14:42: We absolutely do.

00:14:44: But Lund's point is that the urban mine is empty.

00:14:47: The what?

00:14:48: The urban mine?

00:14:49: The pool of old batteries ready for recycling.

00:14:52: It's empty because the cars are lasting too long.

00:14:54: Oh, that's a paradox.

00:14:55: It's a huge paradox.

00:14:57: We're building better batteries that last fifteen maybe twenty years.

00:15:00: That's fantastic for the consumer.

00:15:02: But it means the millions of EVs we're selling today won't be scrapped until the late twenty thirties or even twenty forties.

00:15:08: So

00:15:08: in twenty thirty one the recyclers will be standing there shredders running waiting for batteries that are still happily driving around on the road.

00:15:15: And the regulation mandates recycled content that physically does not exist yet.

00:15:20: We are mandating a harvest before the crop is even grown.

00:15:23: That is going to be a tough squeeze for manufacturers.

00:15:25: But there is a step between the car and the shredder isn't there.

00:15:29: Second life.

00:15:30: Yes, and Tobias Nichelle shared a fascinating case study from Zenova that shows this is happening right now.

00:15:36: This wasn't just let's put an old battery in a shed.

00:15:38: They used second life batteries to solve a real construction problem.

00:15:42: Right, so when you build a massive wind farm, there's this weird catch-twenty-two.

00:15:47: You need power to test all the systems before the final grid connection is live.

00:15:51: Usually they just bring in massive diesel generators.

00:15:53: Burning

00:15:54: diesel to start a wind farm.

00:15:55: The irony is just...

00:15:57: thick.

00:15:57: It is.

00:15:58: Zenobi used second life EV batteries instead.

00:16:01: They provided all that startup power.

00:16:03: And Michelle noted they saved two hundred and sixty thousand liters of diesel.

00:16:07: But more importantly for the business case, they cut six weeks off the commissioning time.

00:16:12: Six weeks is real money in construction.

00:16:14: Huge money.

00:16:15: And it proves that a battery that's maybe too tired for a high performance car is still an incredibly powerful asset for the grid.

00:16:22: And speaking of batteries as assets, we have to mention the movement on V-to-H vehicle to home.

00:16:27: Manfred Prisabilla and Phillip Gotthart were discussing the BMW rollout.

00:16:31: This feels like the final piece of the puzzle.

00:16:33: BMW is rolling this out in thirteen markets.

00:16:36: It's not a pilot anymore.

00:16:37: This is a commercial product.

00:16:38: And this lets the homeowner run their lights or their dishwasher using the battery in their car.

00:16:43: Or keep the whole house running during a blackout.

00:16:46: It fundamentally changes the psychology of an EV.

00:16:49: It's no longer just a car.

00:16:51: It's a backup generator on wheels.

00:16:53: So we've gone from the grid is a bottleneck to the car is now part of the grid.

00:16:58: That is the full circle right there.

00:17:00: So looking back at these two weeks, it really feels like the industry is growing up.

00:17:04: We're dealing with.

00:17:06: Very unglamorous problems, grid cues, reactive power, recycling shortages, but the solutions are getting really sophisticated.

00:17:13: That's

00:17:14: the takeaway for me.

00:17:15: The word is integration.

00:17:16: We're done with the phase of just planting hardware in the ground and hoping it works.

00:17:20: Now the grid connection, the software, the battery storage, the vehicle itself, it all has to talk.

00:17:26: If you're building a site without thinking about flexibility, you're building a liability.

00:17:31: And if you're buying trucks without solving for that dead time charging at the dock, you're just leaving money on the table.

00:17:36: Exactly.

00:17:37: The easy growth is over.

00:17:38: Now comes the smart growth.

00:17:41: Well, that wraps up this deep dive into electrification and battery tech for weeks four and five.

00:17:47: We really hope this helped you find the signal in the noise.

00:17:49: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:17:53: Also, check out our other editions on future mobility and market evolution, next-gen vehicle intelligence, and commercial fleet insights.

00:18:01: Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a deep dive.

00:18:04: Catch you next time!