BYD's aggressive rollout of megawatt flash-charging is causing anxiety among smaller carmakers and battery manufacturers, according to Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a leading voice on battery technology. Speaking at the 33rd annual meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers of China, Ouyang said the scale of investment needed to build flash-charging networks is a heavy burden for most players.
"After BYD launched its flash charging, other smaller manufacturers are anxious, battery makers are anxious, and carmakers are anxious, because flash charging requires very large investment—hundreds of billions of yuan to build the infrastructure," Ouyang said, according to Tencent Auto, as reported by Chinese tech outlet Kuaikeji.
Ouyang noted that it is unrealistic for every carmaker to build 100,000 flash-charging stations, and that ultra-fast charging as a technical system is difficult to share. He suggested that third-party organizations such as the Society of Automotive Engineers of China take the lead in establishing a common technical framework, with standard batteries and shared infrastructure. State-owned energy giants Sinopec and PetroChina could participate in the investment, he added, to reduce the burden on carmakers.
BYD's megawatt push
The comments come after BYD unveiled its second-generation Blade battery and megawatt flash-charging technology in March, claiming the system can charge a vehicle in five minutes for a short boost and reach full charge in nine minutes. BYD also launched its "Flash Charge China" strategy, aiming to build 20,000 flash-charging stations by the end of this year—18,000 of them retrofitted into existing stations and 2,000 covering highway service areas—with total investment at the level of tens of billions of yuan.
By late August, BYD had completed its 10,000th flash-charging station, spanning 332 cities, and had struck a "technology-for-network" cooperation deal with Sinopec. The scale of the rollout helps explain the anxiety among rivals, Ouyang said.
Battery market outlook and solid-state caution
Ouyang also offered a broader industry forecast, predicting that China's power battery shipments will nearly double from 1,875 GWh in 2025 to around 3,700 GWh by 2030. He said lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries will continue to dominate the domestic power and energy storage market over the next decade, but urged the industry to pursue two parallel technology routes: one focused on low cost, high safety and long life, represented by LFP; the other aimed at higher energy density, represented by ternary lithium batteries.
On vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, Ouyang said the key to wider adoption is lowering the barrier for users. He suggested that bidirectional charging capability in onboard chargers be included in new-vehicle entry requirements. To reach a national target of 50 million kW of V2G discharge capacity by 2030, roughly 10 million vehicles would need to participate, assuming each vehicle provides about 5 kW of discharge power.
Ouyang also poured cold water on the solid-state battery hype, saying that many products currently marketed as "semi-solid-state" are essentially solid-liquid hybrid batteries and should not be conflated with true all-solid-state batteries. He cautioned that adopting solid-liquid hybrid technology does not automatically mean a battery is safer, and that high-energy-density battery development must still prioritize safety and proceed step by step.
