DC Fast Charging Is Our Biggest Problem To Mass EV Adoption

hello and welcome to a windy day here in estes park colorado it's absolutely beautiful you can see the snow is hitting the mountains over this way and that is nothing to do with this video what we're doing in this video is we are talking about dc fast charging and just charging stations in general a little bit on the economics behind them but i really want to open the door for conversation of charging electric vehicles you know we review a lot of the cars here on this channel the cars are getting amazing i think we have some major major major issues in terms of dc charging forgive some of the wind but there are some unique solutions which is why we came here to estes park to take a look at this freewire dc fast charger we're going to talk a little bit about why this is so special it weighs about the same as that tesla model 3 right there actually it's pretty amazing and then we'll talk about some level 2 stuff some trickery when it comes to station installations and some of the problems that are that site hosts are facing let's just start talking about dc charging we'll go in depth next year into a whole series but i want to open the door see your opinions love to hear what you guys think in the comment section of this video especially because this is an area we're going to be covering a lot more as time goes on out of spec has partnered with charity stars to give away a 2022 tesla model y performance now this particular car is a dual motor but if you win the sweepstakes you can actually win or have a chance to win a tesla model live performance 0 to 60 in three and a half seconds bigger breaks gonna be awesome so all you have to do is go to charitystars.com reviews where you can have a chance to enter to win the sweepstakes of the tesla model y performance once you enter and go to check out you'll have 250 bonus points applied at your cart at checkout charity stars is a groundbreaking platform that helps raise money for charitable causes so again visit charitystars.com reviews for 250 free entries into the sweepstakes the charity that we're supporting is the jamie kimball foundation it's a charity whose mission is to reduce the amount of interrelationship violence in families and we are so happy to partner with charity stars to give away a tesla model y performance this is the freewire boost 150 and it was actually just installed here in estes park only two three weeks ago brand new installation and uh what was so great is i just got to meet the site host here we had a quick conversation about the economics of the station so i'll be able to share a little bit more about the cost of dc charging why this station is so important to use as a dc fast charger we're also going to try it out because i kind of want to see how it works so what do you say we start with connecting and activating the tesla using the chatimo adapter the ccs adapters that are out there it was ctec now it's electron the aftermarket ones don't seem to have good reliability based off of initial reports by people like my friend tom malogne who is really the charging guru love tom and what we're going to be doing though is using the provided not provided purchase tesla chatimo adapter the problem with this though is it's only 125 amp adapter so the way dc charging works is the charger has to match the voltage of the car's battery pack in this case our model 3 is at about 21 state of charge so it's going to be really low so we might get 30 kilowatts out of this thing i don't know we'll see so join me over here i'm going to load up the ev connect app which is by the way not the best app to use this should be on like chargepoint or something like that we're going to go to dc fast charging we're going to go to chatimo it says 120 kilowatt available on chademo i'm going to tell you right now i don't think that's possible this by the way might be one of the last versions of the old freewire i believe they do 150 kilowatts now this one says only 120 i'm not sure what it is the price here is 45 cents per kilowatt hour remember that it's important we'll talk about the economics here in a little bit at least with the ev connect app i can pay with apple pay so i'm going to show my face double click hopefully there's enough money in the account if you guys keep watching our videos we can do that uh it says submitting payment connecting take a look at this plug-in vehicle to start it says charging session starting up oh that worked well and now the car says it's communicating and charging look at that the car says about two hours one hour and a bit no it's going down check that out 38 kilowatts right there and then take a look here on the screen this is super neat it'll show our battery pack percentage at 20 percent the chargers delivering 43 kilowatts but the cars only getting 37 the rest is going to battery pack heating on the vehicle there's also always some charging losses but tesla's got some weird thermal management stuff that as soon as you plug in to even a kind of a low power situation uh it targets the hottest temperature required for dc fast charging so it's just running the two motors inefficiently that's how model 3 heats up its pack about seven kilowatts and that'll go so we're going to charge up here and let this go you can actually charge two different vehicles on this particular unit at once but there's some things depending so before we get into the whole site let me explain this free wire charger let me explain a little bit about how this works why it's special because i haven't yet told you the secret sauce under here is a 160 kilowatt hour battery pack and that is so important for number one reason being site demand charges the other reason of course is you can install this in areas with less available power for example the grid connection to this charger is only 37 kilowatts i believe peak 36 kilowatts it might be and we are currently outputting 43 kilowatts so what it's doing in theory is maxing out the grid and then using the internal battery pack to supply the rest now this type of solution doesn't work well for high utilization chargers but up here in the mountains you could probably charge 10 12 15 vehicles in a day without really any issue and by the way worst case you'll get 36 37 kilowatts still not bad so the free wire charger itself has two different 75 kilowatt modules inside this is for the boost charger 150 and i don't know exactly which one this is i know they just had some updates recently but i let's just proceed it might be a 150 i don't know but anyway you have two different 75 kilowatt basically ac to dc converters or really dc boosters that feed off the battery pack i guess in this particular case and what the car is doing right now is it's using one of those to supply the 43 kilowatts so if we rolled up with a another i don't know ccs powered vehicle let's just say it's a pulse star 2 whatever it is we'd plug the ccs connection in by the way site design for tesla stuff it's kind of awkward you know it's never perfect to have i guess you really can't have a perfect site layout with stations uh plugs on either side of the car of course but that's you know just another situation we can get into we i really want to do a whole video on site design especially especially with ada requirements wheelchair access disabled person charging well we have a whole project going into that i think is really important but essentially if you plug in another vehicle here it can only accept up to 75 kilowatts i believe it's one brick per port and then if you have a high power vehicle here like if we plugged in a rivien and it was taking you know 150 kilowatts maxed out at that point you would not be able to charge two vehicles until that vehicle ramps down and then you only have one brick available we saw a similar type of solution to this when we were in europe with the enb chargers they have individual bricks i think four of them four 75 kilowatt bricks leading to those 300 kilowatt chargers and then it kind of just dynamically chooses how and when to prioritize different uh vehicles in terms of charging power one question i did have for the freewire team which they kindly answered was if we're charging a uh high power vehicle at i don't know let's just say we have a leaf uh charging at 50 kilowatts on the chatimo or 60 kilowatts on the chatimo and again the polestar's here getting 75. when the leaf unplugs it will ramp and then convert that second brick to charge the existing charging car which is great i know that sounds really crazy if you've never dc charged before you've probably already clicked out of this video but it's a really neat unit uh costs about i would say 160 thousand dollars is what the site host said that he paid for it and this entire charging station installation cost him about 220 230 000 and here's why that's an issue uh colorado has funding for charging station installation depending on certain things now apparently i and i'm not sure exactly how it works what the site host was telling me was that for estes park most of the money allocated for this town went to a charge point installation which is i believe four dc fast chargers at 62.5 kilowatts each actually i'm pretty sure it should be a 125 split but it was never set up correctly so each post is only 62 and a half and we can get into the cpe 250 situation which are those charge point units those are only 200 amp limited so i was told by some of the free wire engineers here by the way that the chatimo is limited to 160 amp and this one's limited to 200 amp um and it might be even a little bit more or less i i wasn't totally sure on all the specs on this thing but either way it's pretty cool so 200 something thousand dollars to put this installation in and let's talk about why or the the government incentives for for example each one of these blink posts is 12 000 to put in and what's special and the reason that the site host went with blink in this particular case was it was the only level two solution that he could find that could deliver 80 amp output that could be billed so clipper creek has great 80 amp units charge point you know those stations there those are usually only 6.6 maybe 7.2 kilowatts which to me is just like come on guys 32 amps out of those things that's just crazy so here 12 grand a piece colorado only provided 12 000 worth of assistance for this entire site installation and that was for these particular posts now the site host wanted to just put in one post of level twos but then his grant would go down to half so he said okay we'll put in four 80 amp level two chargers but technically they're not 80 amps because he also did something pretty creative the reason that that has a battery pack the dc fast charger is for site demand charges so let's just break down the pricing of dc charging really quickly come on over here with me this is a meter that's fed directly from his transformer it runs at 240 volts and this right here has a limitation of 35 kilowatts here in this town set by the energy provider if he goes over 35 kilowatts which they're capable of delivering the power of course then he gets build demand charges and if you get two demand charges in a month you build it the entire year at this crazy high electricity rate that just makes it astronomical to run so the whole goal of this site installation which i really love is to have no demand charges ever which might lead to possibly a business case to dc fast charging which is the ultimate goal of my next one to two to three years of research is to find profitable ways to charge electric cars and yeah okay anyway what he's done is he ran a separate line a separate grid connection for each one of these posts so technically this charger and that charger are treated as two separate entities it's a really smart idea to put each charger on its own thing he has two uh you know 19 point something kilowatt chargers and that will actually put him over his demand charge so they're software limited to 17 kilowatts each 17 and a half something like that and that puts him right before he will ever dip over his demand charge so you can plug in all these level twos he'll max out his grid connection and he'll never go over the only thing he does have to pay is a 26 dollar per month grid connection fee to have these connected but i think that's a really smart idea rather than what running one meter for all four chargers and then if four rivians pull up for example you're screwed here is another blank space for another free wired dc fast charger down the line but again at 160 000 it's a lot of money and the site host wants to see if there's utilization and things like that so that's why having the battery pack here is so important there's a grid fed connection to this unit of 35 kilowatts which maxes out his you know grid connection before it goes into demand charge and then feeds into the 160 kilowatt hour battery pack and then you can dump into a cart up to 150 kilowatts on ccs it's a great idea it really is but then you start factoring in costs so the site host here is charging 43 cents per kilowatt hour which is identical to electrify america's rack rate by the way uh the reason he did that was just competitive research he said well there's no eas in the area but that if that's what they're charging that's what he'll be able to charge and it's actually profitable for him to get charged so the more people that use this charger the more money he can make which is a huge huge huge win in the dc fast charging world if this did not have a battery pack buffer and he was billed on demand charges like any other dc fast charger would be that's grid connected even he and i both agree that if if he got the whole installation for free if he just showed up and someone said we'll put in the entire installation he said look it i would never turn it on it would just lose money you'd be paying every time someone plugs in because uh you'd have to charge a couple dollars per kilowatt hour and maybe more to break even so at the end of the day there's two things that need to happen to summarize this video for dc fast charging to become i would say prevalent in the future we need either demand charges to go away for dc fast charging installations which i don't think is the answer because demand charges are there for a reason we don't want to stress our grid we want to have the cleanest electricity and honestly that that to me doesn't seem like a great solution and then secondly is having some sort of battery buffer or on-site energy buffer storage situation to then make it at least somewhat enticing for site hosts to put in installations like this and support the electric vehicle driving community and for not for it to not lose money every time you plug in now in this particular case this whole installation again a little over two hundred thousand dollars is is the site host ever gonna make their money back on the electricity costs he and i agree probably not but he's a a eevee enthusiast he drives a model y he wanted to host charging for people coming to s this park and honestly it was really cool of him to put this installation in it's an awesome installation and you know when we go off-roading with a whole bunch of riviens in the future we'll have those you know 80 amp or 72 amp chargers at this point to charge them up and that's going to be really great we'll have this thing here we're going to be doing a lot more with this charger in the future as well let us know what you want to see again it's close to our house only about an hour away a little bit less and some of my biggest concerns here are the charger itself is only rated to work to minus four degrees fahrenheit gets colder than that here what's going to happen will it shut down and restart itself how is it going to keep the battery you know warm or cool it gets hot here in the summertime too so we'll be looking at the charger thermal management we'll be looking at you know sort of the utilization we'll be looking at the costs we might even interview with the site host and get his impressions after having this site run for a year or so and see what the numbers work out to my biggest concern for the electric future is not the cars the cars are great i really enjoy driving them we review them here on this channel my biggest concern is charging all of the cars we need to focus on level 2 home charging even just wall outlets in places like airports or condo centers are so important and then of course utilizing dc charging a only when you need it but then when you need it it needs to not lose money so we have a serious situation on our hands here i don't think it's being talked about widely enough i put a thing on twitter the other day about the tesla supercharger network you know you know no there's no profitable business case tesla owners were like well superchargers are profitable because it sells cars yeah but the charging itself loses money and there's no way around that right now except for maybe a solution like this big props to free wire for making this solution seemingly so beautiful by the way this little thing is a i guess energy status indicator so this will go up as the battery fills that's pretty cool and um i think it's just this top one here so right now we're at like 30 percent it'll fill up that's kind of a cool idea great looking chargers really high quality nice screens good implementation i don't like you have to use this weird ev connect app to charge them as like an ev road tripper i didn't even have that app i had to download it but people who live in areas with blink chargers probably have it at the end of the day charging is our biggest issue moving forwards in my opinion and we're going deep into the coverage of the chargers of the units of the installations and the costs and uh hope you'll join us for some of these videos over the next year thanks so much for watching another out of spec reviews video thank you to cherry charity stars for sponsoring today's video and we'll see you on the next one bye-bye

Channel: Out of Spec Reviews

Views: 29,960

Keywords: EV, charging, Ccd, ccs, chademo, DCFC, Freewire, Estes park, Colorado, Tesla, Model 3, Performance, adapter

Id: -l_Jjpfzr2M

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bmr42]

The model for where the need to be is different than gas and it changes by locations.

Since most users would rather charge at home if its an option then places with lots of garages and driveways need them more for travel. However more rural areas means more mileage between destinations so you still may need good coverage to meet demand.

In places with fewer at home charging spaces you will need stations because these drivers may not have the option of charging anywhere else.

It is going to be a learning curve to figure out where stations are needed based on how people drive but just like gas stations the market will sort it out in time.

There will be lots of wasted money on chargers that never get used put in by people who really don’t understand the needs at first, like the gas station off a highway exit with nothing else in walking distance that installed 2 level 2 chargers instead of dcfc, but as more people actually drive these vehicles it will slowly change.

[u/Speculawyer]

I totally disagree.

The higher price of EVs and the lack of L2 chargers at apartments are the problem.

[u/tksopinion]

I’d say right wing nut jobs that can’t think beyond themselves are the biggest problem. Lack of DCFC infrastructure is just a byproduct of that.

[u/BugFix]

The core point is that the business model of "gas stations"[1] doesn't work for charging. EVs don't charge in the right places and they don't charge as much. And that's true.

So... fix the business model. There's literally an existence proof for how to do this. Tesla installs supercharger infrastructure as what amounts to a marketing expense to sell cars, then operates them more or less at cost. And it works. It's not like they're the only ones capable of doing that. Legacy automakers need to get off their ass.

Instead everyone wants to bitch and whine about "standards" or "subsidies" or whatever. But the solution is clear. It's just that no one wants to do it.

[1] Who make money not by selling gas but by being magnets for random commerce in population areas.