Electrify America’s speediest 350-kW fast chargers may be as close as the nearest Walmart
By Bengt Halvorson
Just a couple of years ago, there was growing concern that when the second wave of electric vehicles — models like the Jaguar I-Pace, the Porsche Mission E, and the Audi e-tron — first arrived, there might not be enough chargers. Especially those of the sort that would let drivers take advantage of the longer driving ranges and, particularly, the speedier charging that the newer vehicles allow.
But at this point it looks as if, thanks to one turn of events — the Volkswagen diesel-emissions settlement — these models will have the charging networks they need to succeed. Electrify America, the settlement-created organization that’s part of Volkswagen’s required atonement, is installing the needed infrastructure over a period of 10 years under a “big spend” of $2 billion.
While most of the new charging stations will be installed to operate at a peak 50 kW or 150 kW, they’ll all be future-proof, according to the National ZEV Investment Plan, and capable of being upgraded to 350 kW. A big enabler here is a newly certified cooled-cable system that allows higher-power, 350-amp charging without the cables becoming prohibitively heavy and unwieldy. These stations are intended to grow with the Combined Charging System (CCS) standard that most EVs will use moving forward, but they’ll still offer CHAdeMO compatibility from at least one connector per site. That will make them crosscompatible with the Nissan Leaf, for instance, or Tesla vehicles with an adapter.
With 350-kW CCS charging, vehicles could recover up to 20 miles of driving range per minute, versus about three miles per minute at best with current 50-kW charging and not much more than five miles a minute with Tesla Supercharging (officially 120 kW). The Porsche Mission E will arrive (potentially with a different name) later next year and be capable of utilizing that 350-kW charging power thanks to its 800V architecture, allowing 250 miles to be regained in as little as 15 minutes.
CHARGE YOUR MISSION E IN CHICOPEE
In all, roughly half of the 484 stations will be either 150 kW or 350 kW from the start. The first 350-kW pièce de résistance was dedicated in late April at the Chicopee Marketplace in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Visitors to the shopping center will be able to charge while visiting a shopping center that includes the Home Depot, Marshalls, Party City, Dollar Tree, and Staples. Based on a quick look at Google Maps, it appears to be in the midst of various dining and shopping options and, even more important, just off I-90.
The Massachusetts ultra-highpower DC fast-charging station is just one example of many on the way over the next year or so. Partners in the location of 100 stations include Target, Sheetz, Casey’s General Stores, and several property development companies that operate shopping centers. The retail giant Walmart has announced that it will host similar high-power chargers at another 100 locations in 34 states, all to be installed by June 2019 and related to a separate Walmart effort to add more than 1000 charging stations (many of them with lower power, obviously) at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores around the country.
Although developed and sourced by four different charger companies—ABB, Efacec, Signet, and BTC Power—they’ll all fit a format, at eight feet tall, to allow easier positioning of the cable to various charge-port locations, with a 15-inch color touchscreen for managing the charging session and payment using credit cards or mobile-pay systems. They’re also ready for a plug and charge standard that would recognize a vehicle-unique code from the charge port and take credit cards, membership cards, and smartphones out of the equation.
This is all part of a $500 million Cycle 1 investment ($200 million for California and $300 million for the rest of the country) that’s due to be finished by the end of 2019, including plans to install highpower DC fast chargers at 484 sites in 39 states and 17 metropolitan areas. More information about locations, hosts, and partners for the other 284 fast chargers that are part of this cycle will follow soon from Electrify America.
IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME?
The publicly accessible 350-kW charger is new territory — and a serious leap into a future that isn’t quite here yet. Up until now, the 350-kW charging level has only been tested in a few locations that are not open to the public. At present, not a single production vehicle can charge at that rate — not even at 150 kW. Only the Hyundai Ioniq Electric can charge with more than 50 kW (Hyundai maintains 100 kW as a figure, but real-world accounts continue to show it’s software-throttled to lower power). That leaves the soon-on-sale Jaguar I-Pace as the sole non-Tesla model able to handle even 100 kW. The 60-kWh Nissan Leaf that is expected later this year will likely be rated to handle a 100-kW CHAdeMO charge, but that’s another matter. Porsche is also building up its own, smaller network of 350-kW charging stations to make sure there are enough for its Mission E, though.
Electrify America doesn’t expect Porsche to be alone for long in being able to use 350 kW, or for 150 kW to be the domain of a few luxury makers. “We expect most of the new-generation EVs using our network by 2020 to be capable of 150-kW charging power,” the group said.
The flip side of why the 350-kW rollout may be a bit slow is siting — and especially the excessive demand charges that can plague those operating chargers that are used sporadically. Electrify America told C/D that it’s handling that by adding a battery-buffer system to all of the 350-kW sites.
That will help smooth some costly and potentially grid-destabilizing power demands — but those power demands are enormous. To put it into perspective, the power needed by the typical grocery store adds up to about 400 kW. Electrify America concedes that its largest highway stations, capable of charging two vehicles at 350 kW each and eight others at somewhat lower power, take about 2 megawatts, generally requiring the installation of a new transformer from the public utility and a dedicated utility server.
At the beginning, Electrify America says that metropolitanarea stations will have three to six charge points, while highway stations will have four to 10. Highway-adjacent stations will offer the 350-kW capability, while the metro sites will have a mix of 50-kW and 150-kW capabilities — all upgradable to 350 kW, though. By the time Electrify America’s decade is up, this upgradability promises the potential of 350-kW charging for thousands of cars at once. That could mean the game-changing critical mass that tips the market toward electric vehicles is the end product of the diesel cheating scandal.