The key elements include six high speed charging hubs on motorways capable of charging eight vehicles simultaneously; 16 high speed charging hubs capable of charging four vehicles simultaneously; additional high power chargers at 34 current 50 kW locations; upgrading over 50 22 kW chargers to 50 kW, and replacing up to 264 locations with 528 charge points at the pre-existing pilot grade of 22 kW to next generation high reliability models.
So you're suggesting that everyone that has or wants to charge at home (which is connected directly to the AC grid), would need to changeover or install domestic DC charging units, which are also more expensive than AC units?
Sounds like a brain fart.
DC home charging means fewer charging losses due to conversion - which will better facilitate vehicle to grid in the future - and also remove the AC charger from the build-list of components within the vehicle. It may also interface better with inverters and direct solar too as well as home storage systems, so it has potential.
Will it really happen in all homes? I'm not sure - I suspect that AC charging is sufficient for the majority and DC doesn't hold enough benefits for the masses, yet.
Yes, the cars you'd buy wouldn't need an AC charger on board so money would be saved there also
Key word is "yet"
You're just shifting the losses around, instead of losses happening in the onboard charger in the car you'll have losses in the DC charger
I don't see OBCs disappearing from cars anytime soon, you'd want to see a dramatic cost reduction in DC chargers, even a fairly small scale one seems to cost several thousand
It isn't like you'd get any more power, most houses are limited to 12kW anyway and you probably don't want to go right to the limit all the time
Part of me wishes 43kW AC had caught on more, it would mean every car effectively carries around it's own fast charger but the cost of the charging stations would decrease dramatically since it's just an AC supply point
Of course it never went beyond 43kW which is too slow nowadays, but if it had gone up to the 200kW that Ecars are installing now you could in theory have a cheaper hub supplying the same power. Or a much bigger hub for the same price
I'm more than happy to keep my onboard AC charger. I like the comfort in knowing that in the highly unlikely event I did run out of juice, I'm actually never too far away from a potential charging point with my granny charger.
There will still be losses, both convert from AC to DC . and you lose the ability on granny charge and top of from many of the millions of sockets around the country. It’s daft to think they’ll remove it
I see no benefit with interfacing with solar. Export during the day. Charge at night.
If you're going to have DC charging then you're also going to have DC batteries or solar. You're not doing DC just for the weight saving on the EV alone.
But if it's all patched into a single DC charge-controller combined with the solar MPPT, AC inverter with export controller and large battery attached, then you have nirvana in terms of functionality.
Stepping up the DC of battery or solar will introduce losses.
Vehicle DC systems work at 400v or 800v. HV solar battery systems are around 400v and string-inverter solar DC is up to 550v. It will then be the 48/52v LV DC solar batteries which will induce the most losses in a DC system.
Probably 99% of my charging is AC, and for probably the vast majority of EV owners out there, greater than 95% of their charging would be AC charging.
The idea of removing AC chargers from cars is bonkers...
If it's not broken, don't fix it...
That's one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever heard on these boards, in 15+ years that says a lot.
My charging is over 90% AC at home, with a further few percentage points on opportunity public AC charging.
Swings and roundabouts with AC43, fast charging stations would be cheaper as no need to convert to DC but cars would be more expensive as the OBC would need to be significantly bigger to reach the charging speeds we are capable of today
Not commonplace at the moment but as far as I am aware it's not impossible for a granny charger to have a small AC/DC inverter inside capable of the 2kW so you wouldn't really loose anything there
Could you replace the term "AC charging" with "Home charging?" In a world with no OBC the house would have the DC charger
Car companies offering fewer features to cut costs is a ridiculous idea now? Ok then...
Eh, hello! I'm discussing the concept, not rewriting the standards!
Vehicles are natively DC. Why have multiple HV DC systems in a house if they aren't linked? It's kinda obvious!
I can see them switching to DC to save money and weight. But not for a long time and after all battery concerns are finally put to bed.
Maybe there will come a time when you'll have the option of an AC charger as an add-on. That's entirely feasible.
Like the CCS was an option for some cars (I think)
Gonna go wildly off topic here, but I was reading an article years ago that part of the Smart house project involved replacing the AC power distribution with a low powered DC system
The idea was that having lots of 2-3kW AC sockets supplying DC appliances which only need a couple hundred watts was very wasteful. Particularly when most of those appliances were used their own inefficient AC-DC power brick.
I'm sure many people have experienced the fun of using a laptop power brick to warm their hands or feet (or an entire room!)
So you'd have a few AC sockets in your kitchen/utility room for you high powered appliances (cooking, laundry, etc) and there'd be a highly efficient DC rectifier and converter in your consumer unit which distributes to the rest of the house. It was supposed to me more energy efficient and cheaper overall to install
I think the DC system was supposed to operate at 48V, so you'd only need wires rated for 10A or less
Since the smart home never really caught on, the DC system never went anywhere despite having a bunch of manufacturers signed up
It's a bit of a shame because nowadays most of the stuff we're plugging into the mains only requires around 100W or even less
It'd be particularly cool for anyone with home solar because you wouldn't need to have all your loads connected to an inverter and could use the more efficient DC system a lot more
Maybe if it had become normal then we'd be looking at more lower powered DC charging of cars. Not hard to imagine a boost converter to take your 48V up to the ~400V needed for an EV, although you'd want it close to the distribution system to avoid having a 150A or so conductor all the way to your charger
DC was mooted alright from pretty far back, especially with step-down transformers of old (before switch-mode PSU's) due to their bulk, inefficiency and weight. The problem, as far as I know, was a lack of standardisation on everything from sockets to voltage. Some suggested 24v, other 48v. Some suggested a combi-socket of mixed DC voltage and/or AC.
Nice document on that here:
But it still stands to reason as DC-DC conversion is less lossy than AC-DC conversion, plus it does away with many of the pF (power factor) issues and harmonic problems of AC.
Any update on Carrickmines?
Open to correction but I don't think any car ever had CCS as an option. Nissan Leafs had a chademo option and plenty of cars had no DC option at all such as the Renaults Zoe and Fluence. Early EVs such as the ioniq had CCS as standard
Renault Zoe were available with optional CCS for a period of time. I think there were also some early BMW I3's that were available with AC only.
All well and good until you need to wire your 5v DC socket with 30sq mm cable because of volt drop.
early i3 had optional CCS and standard 7kW AC
Is there no better thread for all this technical talk?
The bin, which is where all talk about domestic DC belongs
Casey's Londis, Roscommon, now has a 2XCCS charger and a chademo/CCS charger, interestingly ecars have stopped using the word "hub" to define these small stations
😀 We found your bugbear, have we?
Seen a few people use the new hub in blanch center, which it good because it isn't that obvious to find. Saw a rare HondaE one day..
Was in the Blanch industrial estate yday and needed a charge before heading west. Great feeling knowing I needed a charge and didnt have to play ecars lotto. Traffic was fine heading into the shopping centre.
Had the place to myself the whole time as I suspect a lot of users are not aware with the site yet.
but they still placed the 50kW unit in such a way that someone can park in a space thats served by the 150kW unit and plug into the 50kW unit...
The last time I ever used a site in this configuration was in Kilcullen about 3 years ago, and I will never ever plan to charge at such a site as long as I drive an EV.
