Geely's 1,100 kW battery and the fight against fast-charging damage

The Chinese automaker revealed a 2.2 megawatt charger at a launch event in Ningbo last week. InsideEVs reported the details on 30 September. In a demo, a Lynk & Co 10 went from 10 to 97 percent in 8 minutes and 40 seconds.

InsideEVs notes that the fastest-charging EVs in the US, the Lucid Gravity and the Porsche Cayenne Electric, peak at 400 kilowatts. The upcoming Mercedes-AMG GT will peak at 600 kW. Most mass-market US models average around 30 minutes for a 10 to 80 percent charge. Geely's own numbers put most of the heat in the current. The company says megawatt speeds accounted for 60 percent of the heat generated in the battery, mainly because current is pushed through the cells' internal paths. About 35 percent came from electrochemical reactions and the rest from what Geely called "entropic" heat.

"We do not advocate fast-charging technologies at the expense of lifespan," Jerry Gan, CEO of Geely Auto Group, said at the launch. "If a battery frequently fast-charged is not maintained or repaired, its lifespan suffers irreversible decline."

The other failure mode is lithium plating, where ions flood the anode faster than they can be absorbed and form dendrites that can short a cell. Ren Xiangfei, Geely's chief engineering scientist, said the company changed the cell, the raw materials, the manufacturing process and added an AI-powered charger management system to keep the pack inside its thermal limits. "In an ideal world, the ions settle into the graphite evenly and smoothly," he said.

The Ultra Short Blade cell comes in two sizes, 395 mm and 370 mm, against Geely's previous 580 mm and what the company says is an industry norm of about 960 mm. Shorter cells mean a shorter migration path for ions, which lowers internal resistance and heat. Geely also widened the cathode pathways with what it calls high entropy elements and restructured the graphite anode. The warranty moves from eight years and 150,000 km to eight years and 200,000 km.

Megawatt charging is a Chinese specialty right now. InsideEVs reports that BYD and Geely have both passed 1,000 kW for passenger cars, while Western peak rates sit at 600 kW with 750 kW chargers planned. Geely says its station is the first where two EVs can pull megawatt speeds from the same gun.

Heavy vehicles are the other place the battery math gets hard. BloombergNEF reported on 30 September that global medium- and heavy-duty electric truck sales hit a record 158,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 75 percent year on year, with more than nine in ten sold in China. Financing for those fleets is increasingly underwritten against the truck's contracted operation rather than its resale value, BNEF says, because residual values are uncertain around battery degradation.

Not every battery story is about speed. The BBC reported on 29 September that San Diego-based Unigrid is shipping a sodium ion home battery using China-made cells, with CEO Darren Tan saying the company expects to ship 1,000 units by the end of the year. Prof Dame Clare Grey of the University of Cambridge warned that chromium-3 in the cathode can form toxic chromium-6 under certain conditions. Tan called those concerns "overblown" and said third-party tests could not produce chromium-6. The BBC notes sodium ion cells are less energy dense than lithium ion, and that LFP batteries traded at $81 per kWh last December against roughly $100 per kWh for Unigrid's product.

The demand side is getting louder. NL Times reported on 30 September that most European data centers refuse to disclose their electricity and water use, three years after the EU's Energy Efficiency Directive took effect. Statistics Netherlands figures put Dutch data center consumption at 5.1 billion kWh in 2024, 4.6 percent of national electricity, roughly double the level five years earlier.