and Cost– is the cold weather.
How does cold weather affect EV battery life?
We know cold weather impacts EV battery life, but why? Let’s take a look at what happens to an electric vehicle’s battery in cold weather and what steps you can take to mitigate the adverse effects. When the temperature gets low enough, the electrolyte fluid inside an electric vehicle’s lithium-ion battery becomes more viscous, which slows down the chemical reactions responsible for transferring electrons. This impacts not only
the range an EV can get on a charge but also how fast it can recharge.
Anna Stefanopoulou, director of the University of Michigan Energy Institute, says in a items for Wired that “batteries are like humans”, meaning they don’t perform well outside of a certain temperature range. For an electric vehicle battery, this range is between 40 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything above or below that will cause problems.
To help maintain proper operating temperature, modern electric vehicles are built with battery heating and cooling systems. But these systems consume energy to heat the battery since, unlike a gasoline engine, an electric motor does not generate its own heat. Heating the car’s cabin, running the defroster, and running on-board computer systems also require power, which drains the battery faster than in hot weather.
Lithium-ion batteries take longer to charge when cold, and regenerative braking the features don’t work as well either. Taken together, the adverse effects of cold weather can reduce EV battery capacity by up to 41%.
Although all electric vehicles lose some capacity in cold weather, not all of them
handle winter the same way. Recurring Battery Manufacturer conducted a study in 2021 comparing cold weather charge loss in thousands of electric vehicles and found that some hold up better than others.
Over the next few years, we may see lithium-ion EV batteries with no liquid inside, largely mitigating the charge loss that comes with cold weather. Until this technology becomes widely available, EV drivers must find workarounds.
How to help protect electric vehicle batteries from the cold.
There are several ways to help an electric vehicle’s battery last longer in the cold, or at least minimize the amount of charge lost. For starters, don’t let the battery drop below 20% charge, even if you’re near a charging station. The car’s systems must warm up the battery before charging can begin, and the battery must have enough power for these systems to work. You will also need enough power to run the cabin heater, especially in extremely cold weather.
If you can, park the vehicle in a heated or enclosed garage to help keep it at a stable temperature. Parking the vehicle in the sun can also give you some heat. If possible, park in a public garage with an outlet you can connect to at work or elsewhere. This will allow the car to draw power from the grid to run battery warming systems instead of the battery itself.
A home charger can make a big difference in improving range in cold weather. You can leave the vehicle connected in freezing weather to run the battery warming systems because it takes less energy to maintain the battery temperature than to raise it. This won’t be an option for many people, as home chargers can be expensive, but even plugging into a level 1 wall outlet will help somewhat.
Some electric vehicles have an “eco mode” that automatically adjusts performance to conserve battery power. Setting systems like the cabin heater to a lower temperature can also draw more juice from an electric vehicle’s charge. If there are features like heated seats that aren’t absolutely necessary to keep you warm, turning them off will leave more power for the battery. Reducing driving speed in cold weather puts less strain on the battery and requires less electricity.
As for charging, take the time to preheat the battery before connecting it to a charger.
Even if the battery is low, heating it up to facilitate faster charging will use less energy
than running it cold. Warm up the cabin and the battery while remaining connected to
power before setting off again.
Cold weather remains a challenge.
The reality is that EV drivers face some setbacks when operating these vehicles in cold weather. They work best in temperate climates, but most people in the United States live in areas where the climate can change, sometimes drastically. That doesn’t mean they’re unusable, but people buying an EV and living in colder regions need to know what they’re getting into and plan accordingly.
RELATED: How long do electric car batteries actually last?
Those of us living in extreme climates bump into one common hurdle when it comes to electric vehicles: How will battery life cope with the weather? The further north you go,
the more whispers you hear about the catastrophic effect winters have on battery life, rendering your EV little more than an expensive mistake. Let’s take a closer look at how EV batteries react to the cold and compare it to extreme heat effects.
© Provided by Digital TrendsNAF
Does cold reduce EV battery life?
A study of 20 of the bestselling electric car models in Norway shows that
the cold reduces range by an average of 18.5% compared to their rated range.
To figure out why, we need to look at the nature of electrical resistance. Resistance is how any given material opposes an electrical current. Metals like copper have low resistance, which is why we use them to make circuits. Meanwhile, rubber has high resistance, so we put it on the outside of cables to prevent users from getting zapped.
This conductivity is mostly dictated by how much room the atoms of these materials have in their outermost electron layer for more electrons to whiz through. As heat goes up, those atoms start moving a lot more, making it harder for electrons to move across the material efficiently without bumping into one another. On the flip side, a colder material has atoms that aren’t moving around as much, making it easier for electrons to traverse. This phenomenon allows for superconductors, which can hold an electrical charge indefinitely provided the temperature stays super low.
That sounds great, but why then does battery performance plummet in the cold? After all, shouldn’t low temperatures make electrical transmission easier? One problem is that an EV is using a lot of supplementary systems in the cold that they don’t use otherwise.
AAA estimates that when you factor in cabin heating, EV range drops by 41%.
Cold negatively affects battery chemistry as well. There are graphite layers at the anode side of a battery cell, between which lithium ions rest. When discharged, those ions cross the liquid electrolyte separator over to the cathode side to meet up with the electrons that have taken the scenic route through the EV motor. The liquid electrolyte gets more viscous with cold and eventually freezes. This state change increases resistance, thus decreasing battery performance.
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With that increased resistance, lithium ions have a hard time nestling between graphite layers during charging, so they instead begin to plate directly on the surface of the graphite. This lithium builds up over time, especially when fast charging in the cold into structures called dendrites. Those dendrites make it harder for ions to properly settle between graphite layers in the future, reducing your maximum battery capacity. Worse still, if those dendrites get big enough to pierce the anode/cathode separator layer, your battery short circuits and it’s kaput. EV battery packs have thermal layers woven throughout their cells to regulate temperature, avoid the accelerated growth of dendrites, and maintain conductivity of electrolytes at low temperatures, but you’d often be lucky to break even on the power needed to heat batteries to a usable level.
The advent of solid-state batteries may someday help us avoid the problems of a solid-liquid shift in electrolytes. That said, dendrites will still be a long-term issue, plus solid-state batteries still need relatively high temperatures to conduct power.
Let’s cross our fingers for future advancements.
Heating is one area where gas cars have a distinct advantage. Internal combustion engines waste about 60% of their energy as heat, much of which is cycled back into the cabin for heating during winter. Summers are a bit more work, but even then, air conditioning shouldn’t affect mileage by more than 20%.
Does heat reduce EV battery capacity?
As bad as cold sounds, extreme heat is even worse for EV batteries. High heat initiates chemical reactions that produce gas and other byproducts that deteriorate a battery’s ability to charge. That gas can then expand and breach a battery cell casing. This is why you’ll sometimes see “spicy pillows” — bloated batteries on the brink of failure — in personal electronics. In the worst case, this volatility leads to explosions, though EV battery management systems are advanced enough to give warnings well before things get that bad.
Despite needing a fairly comfortable temperature range to operate EV batteries, range has improved considerably from earlier years. Even with steep cuts in range, you should still be fine for day-to-day urban driving with an EV in winter. If range anxiety is still hard to overcome before taking the plunge, consider a hybrid so you can have that gas backup when things get especially cold. How does weather affect EV battery life?
Polar Science Center » Kristin Laidre (uw.edu)
Can Polar Bears Adapt to Climate Change? Here Is One Hopeful Sign.
Kristin Laidre is currently a research scientist at the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington. She is partially supported by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, Greenland. Her primary research interests lie in spatial modeling of movement and spatially-explicit foraging ecology of top marine predators.
She is interested in how environmental features and habitat variables manifest themselves as constraints on movement and behavior, and how these constraints differentially impact demographics of sub-populations or metapopulations of marine species.
Her research is focused on exploring these relationships using satellite and archival telemetry, in combination with remotely-sensed satellite data and quantitative spatial models in a Geographic Information System (GIS). Her research also links spatial environmental fluctuation to bioenergetic models and food webs in the marine ecosystem. Much of her research is focused in the high Arctic, where both short food chains and very limited and specific production periods strongly shape the behavior of top predators.
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