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450 kilowatts is about 600 horsepower or so. That's a lot, but it's in the range of the sort of power that a high-end electric car motor might draw now, and they somehow manage it with not-too-unreasonably-thick electric cabling. Granted, there probably aren't many electric cars designed to output 600 horsepower for ten minutes: eventually, the cables and the batteries will just get too hot.

I'm not an electrical engineer; I don't know what the proper cable size is for this application with all the correct safety margins, but it doesn't seem too terribly unreasonable as long as the voltages are pretty high and the battery can tolerate it. If heat is a problem, then water cooled cables can help.




> it's in the range of the sort of power that a high-end electric car motor might draw

... for a very brief period of time.

Please don't use horsepower as a measure of electrical power, it's misleading. All the stuff around us that is commonly measured in horsepower is fossil-fuel-burning equipment with fossil-fuel-levels of energy density at any given cost point. They make hard things seem easy because they don't have to be rechargeable.


Why not? One horsepower is about 746 watts. That's a useful way to compare things sometimes. (Though with the caveat that gas engines generally have horsepower ratings that reflect maximum power, often in an RPM range that you don't normally use in everyday use. Thus an 200 horsepower electric motor might often out-perform a 300 horsepower gas engine, because the former generally has maximum torque from zero RPM whereas the latter has to be in an optimal RPM band. Also the gas engine at the same time produces about 2x or 3x its mechanical power in heat.)

With electric motors it seems to be at least fairly common to refer to an electric motor's mechanical power output in kilowatts rather than horsepower. In a lot of ways that makes sense, but horsepower is a unit that more people are familiar with.




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