The novel Megawatt Charging System standard: Impact on battery size and cell requirements for battery-electric long-haul trucks

Abstract

The new Megawatt Charging System (MCS) standard will enable battery electric trucks (BETs) to recharge a large share of their battery during mandatory rest periods in the EU. We investigated the impact of this new standard on the required battery size and the cell properties required to reach functional parity with a diesel truck (DT) for various operation strategies. EU truck driving regulations allow a one-stop operating strategy, in which a truck can be charged during the mandatory 45-minute break following 4.5 h of driving. In addition, we analyze the impact of additional charging stops and relaxing EU regulations by allowing free distribution of rest durations. For the one-stop operating strategy, we find that a charging power of at least 761 kW is needed to match the operating patterns with a 798 kWh battery. Higher charging powers are only beneficial in terms of downsizing the battery if multi-stop-strategies are deployed. In our scenarios, a charging power of 2802 kW is the highest beneficial charging power, which is significantly lower than the proposed MCS standard and suggests that the maximal charging power of 3.75 MW in the MCS standard is oversized for the long-haul truck application. The resulting cell requirements for achieving package capability, payload-, lifetime and total cost of ownership (TCO) parity demonstrate that multi-stop-strategies benefit from a smaller battery size in terms of cell price, volumetric and gravimetric energy density, but pose higher requirements on C-Rate, charging power and cycle stability. State of the art automotive cells are close to reach the required gravimetric and volumetric energy densities, but need to improve their cycle stability.