GM and EVgo To Build 400 Ultra-Fast EV Chargers Across the US (insideevs.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from InsideEVs: General Motors is joining forces with EVgo, one of the biggest electric vehicle charging operators in the United States, to build 400 ultra-fast DC chargers nationwide to support the growing number of battery-powered cars hitting U.S. roads. To be clear, these are individual stalls, not charging stations. However, the two companies describe the new locations as "flagship destinations" which will feature 350-kilowatt DC chargers, ample lighting, canopies, pull-through spots and security cameras. Most locations will feature up to 20 ultra-fast charging stalls, but some will have even more -- good news for those crowded holiday road trips. GM and EVgo said the fancy new stations would be located near shopping areas offering dining, coffee shops and other amenities.
We don't know exactly where the new stations will be built, but EVgo mentioned that the "flagship destinations" will be deployed coast to coast, including in metropolitan areas in states like Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York and Texas. The stalls will be co-branded EVgo and GM Energy -- the automaker's charging and energy management division. The first new "flagship station" is expected to open next year. The new stalls will make use of EVgo's prefabrication approach which can reduce the total cost of a new station by 15% and the deployment time by 50%. Similar to Tesla's prefabricated Supercharger stalls, EVgo's ready-made structures come with stalls and accompanying equipment already mounted on a metal base plate which is transported from the factory to the charging site.
We don't know exactly where the new stations will be built, but EVgo mentioned that the "flagship destinations" will be deployed coast to coast, including in metropolitan areas in states like Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York and Texas. The stalls will be co-branded EVgo and GM Energy -- the automaker's charging and energy management division. The first new "flagship station" is expected to open next year. The new stalls will make use of EVgo's prefabrication approach which can reduce the total cost of a new station by 15% and the deployment time by 50%. Similar to Tesla's prefabricated Supercharger stalls, EVgo's ready-made structures come with stalls and accompanying equipment already mounted on a metal base plate which is transported from the factory to the charging site.
Hell..make them Buc-ee's... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell I like to stop at those even if I don't need gas....
Re:Hell..make them Buc-ee's... (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like it's happening but somebody isn't a fan [youtube.com].
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Stop acting like one morning all vehicles will suddenly be an EV and have to all plug in at the same time.
Sorry but there will be no EV/electric grid doomsday, no matter how much you want to see it.
Re: Hell..make them Buc-ee's... (Score:1)
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Stop acting like one morning all vehicles will suddenly be an EV and have to all plug in at the same time.
As soon as you stop pretending that nobody will be manufacturing internal combustion vehicles by 2030.
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Technically ti's the other way around. Buc-ee's is convenience store that happens to sell gas, not a gas station that sells other stuff. (Gas stations make very little profit - all the profit is in the convenience side of things).
Of course, they have many gas pumps because filling gas is basically the chore part of the equation - you start the pump then go into the store and spend half an
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Makes sense to me. Tesla is already installing Supercharger stations at Buc-ee locations.
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Buc-ee's has been expanding into Florida in the last couple of years; their stores in St Augustine & Daytona have a long row of Tesla chargers to go with the 30-odd gas pumps. Don't know if they're retrofitting them into their existing footprints but I'm guessing yes.
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It's disappointing that they are installing old technology though. We have had 400kW chargers deployed since last year.
Current gen Xpeng cars are getting close to 350kW peak, and will sustain around 300kW for much of the charge cycle. The 400kW chargers split that between two vehicles, with the first to plug in getting priority, so even an additional 50kW helps.
Maybe they don't have 800V cars that can take advantage of it.
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Below 100kW is really annoying if you don't have something else to do for a reasonable amount of time such as a meeting at a business complex.
Over 100kW is ok if you combine it with a meal break so ok for a road trip.
The real appeal of the 250kW+ charging is the traditional gas station stand around and wait experience that will appeal to people who
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I have only had to wait for a charging stall about one a year, far less often than I used to have to wait for a
sooo... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:sooo... (Score:5, Informative)
How many total would be needed in the US? 40 000? 400 000?
Not even remotely that many. The vast majority of charging for the population is done at home or at L2 charging stations. These kinds high power ultra fast chargers are designed for long range driving only. Why would you need 400000 high speed chargers when there are currently less than 200000 total gas stations in all of America and when oil companies themselves estimate a 90-99% drop in service station use as a result of EVs not being charged mid-trip?
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My office has L2 chargers in the parking lot and gives us 4 hours/day of free charging. The fast chargers are going in mainly along the interstates and major roads for drivers taking longer trips. Some of the big-box stores are getting into the game on the assumption you're spending 20-25 minutes shopping and want to 'top up' while you're there. The mall just down the road has an eight-stall charging station, half of them DCFC.
If you go by the assumption that most EV owners are charging at home, then the
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My local grocery store has an EV charger, but it's only a 6.5 kw charger. What's the point in that? Unless you work at the grocery store, you're not going to be there for enough time to get a meaningful amount of charge. At that rate, it would take 12 hours to fully charge a modern EV.
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it would take 12 hours to fully charge a modern EV.
I guess but if we reframe it knowing that on avverage you get 3mi/kwH and shop for 1/2 an hour, that's 3.25kwh or 9.75mi.
That basically the grocery store providing you free gas for your trip to get there. If they offered this with actual gasoline I feel like everybody and their mother would be lined up even to get a free 1/2 gallon every trip.
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The fast chargers are going in mainly along the interstates and major roads for drivers taking longer trips.
My point exactly. You're not going to install twice as many fast chargers on interstates as there are gas stations in the whole of America. Look at the EU, currently 5+ years ahead of America when it comes to EV adoption. And in all of the EU there's less than 10,000 of these ultra fast chargers out of some 700000 total.
No one needs 400000 fast chargers in America in the coming decade.
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I'm on your side, but your post is just as misleading. You can't compare stations to individual chargers, you have to consider total locations AND number of vehicles served per hour. Given that there are "less than 200000 gas stations", perhaps you could assume that 100000 EV fast charging stations may be enough, but where 1 gas pump could serve 10 vehicles an hour, a charging bay may serve only 1-2. That would suggest 500,000 charging stations could be needed. There's your number. Of course, that assu
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PHEV are the perfect bridge for this transition. An apartment dweller who buys a Prius Prime today might just fuel it with gas for now, but can gradually get more of their mileage on e
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You make a lot of fair points, but let's not assume that people who can't charge at home now will ever be able to do so.
I can't charge at home. That doesn't mean I don't use destination charging. I have charged my car twice this year mid trip. Twice. In 9 months. All my charging is destination charging with L2 chargers (which is far cheaper than DC fast charging).
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PHEV are the perfect bridge for this transition. An apartment dweller who buys a Prius Prime today might just fuel it with gas for now, but can gradually get more of their mileage on electric as it becomes more prevalent and the cost comes down.
I would not buy a PHEV if I was not going to plug it in regularly for the immediately foreseeable future. The battery might corrode/degrade for never being used and I am paying extra for that battery capability compared to an all-ICE vehicle.
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While these types of deployments don't
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You can't compare stations to individual chargers
You can't, but since we don't have a number of sites available it becomes irrelevant.
you have to consider total locations AND number of vehicles served per hour
I did. That's kind of the point of the 90-99% reduction in use. And that assumes a lot of commercial use - which will be laggard when it comes to EV adoption.
L2 charging only affects local driving, not long distance.
And welcome back to my point. No one here is talking about L2 charging. The existence of L2 charging only reduces the use of L3 charging - i.e. we don't in any foreseeable future need 400000 such points in the USA. That would be 2 orders of magnitude higher than what i
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I think we are comparing apples to oranges here, I guess I got it started. Lets talk about chargers/pumps versus stations.
For the stations part, they still need to be in a reasonable range for everyone who is on a trip. The density of gas stations per unit area is not movitaved by total requirement for throughput much, nor is it going to be for charger stations. It's about the length of the detour you have to take to get a full tank - it's about the convenience factor.
Now for chargers per station, that's an
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The biggest time waste is for people trying to charge to 100% when the car's ability to take charge falls off near full charge. Usually bett
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Except for that 1/3 to nearly 1/2 of Americans that rent or cannot charge at home for some reason.....
This is NOT an insignificant number of people that EVs are not a good fit due to not being able to charge at home.
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Firstly the road trippers you mention. In this case often the stop is combined with other break needs so even 'slower' charging at 125kW is ok, but faster is always nicer. There is always going to be a need for these so more is good but once you get up the limits of what most 400V cars can handle more kW is probably less important that toilets, food and shelter from the weather.
The group you missed are the people who are dai
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How many total would be needed in the US? 40 000? 400 000?
We're all nerds here, so let's do the math:
America has 200k gas stations, with an average of six pumps each, for 1.2 million fueling points.
But gas cars must go to a gas station, while EV owners do 95% of their charging at home.
TFA says these chargers are 350kw. My EV has a capacity of 80kwh. So that's 15 minutes of charging. But my 9-year-old EV isn't capable of fast charging. So, let's say an average of 30 minutes of charging vs. 5 minutes to refuel a gas car.
1.2M * (1 - 0.95) * 30/5 = 360,000
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...while EV owners do 95% of their charging at home.
While that figure might be true for present EV owners, what about all the millions of car owners who would like to make the switch to EV, but cannot charge at home or work?
Until there's a great many more convenient charging points available, these millions of ICE drivers can't - not won't, but can't - make the change to EV.
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You jest, but consider everyone who doesn't have a driveway, and has to park on the street. How do they charge an EV? They can't run a trip-hazard cable across the sidewalk, even if they manage to park right outside their house.
Charge at work? What few companies (outside California) that have any at all typically have just enough for the senior management to use... and woe betide any mere peon who dares to plug in.
The only solution I can see is to mandate that car parks at shopping malls, supermarkets and o
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There should be credit card-capable L2 municipal chargers at more street parking spots. These can be cheaper, relatively low-power units, say 3.8kW (240V @ 20A) as the car is going to be left there overnight - it doesn't need to charge in 3 hours. There is probably already spare capacity on the streetlight circuits as they were originally specd for sodium lights which have since been swapped for more efficient LEDs. Charge a slight premium to pay for maintenance plus some extra as income for the city. It
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"But gas cars must go to a gas station, while EV owners do 95% of their charging at home."
Any stats about EV usage today don't matter. All that matters is what the stats would be if EV adoption goals were met. NO way that number remains as high as 95% as adoption increases, both because more drivers will not have access to home charging and fewer drivers that drive long distances will avoid EV. Right now, homes can consider EV as a second car and/or if they have a private garage and do not road trip too
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Whether it was the infrastructure bill or the IRA, the standard set in law is one station [not necessarily a single unit per] per 50 miles of interstate.
Per google, there are approximately 47-49k miles of interstate. There's also a statutory limit on the number of miles [in 1956 it was 41k].
So, if we assume that there's a lot of redundancy like California's I-880 vs I-580 vs I-280 included in that number, let's make it 100 miles.
So ~500 is the minimum. Number of locations, not the minimum number of DCFC cha
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Except for the many millions (at least 1/3 or more of US households?)....that cannot charge at home, due to living in large apartment complexes, no private charging there...live in homes with no off street parking...those renting houses with no permission to install chargers from landlords, etc.
There a a LOT of people out there that EVs make no sense to own...and without large numbers of fast charging stations, will never be a fit for them.
These are a lot
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due to living in large apartment complexes
Many apartment complexes have parking spaces with chargers.
renting houses with no permission to install chargers from landlords, etc.
California requires landlords to install chargers if the tenant is willing to pay the expense.
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Are you talking about the US?
I've NEVER seen a single charger in a large apartment complex.
Hell, here in New Orleans, the whole city...looking at the maps I've been giving links to...It is very rare to find a public facing charger at all.
I've seen a few at the Winn-Dixie grocery store..and 2-3 in front of the Whole Foods here...that's about it.
Aside from those...hard to find any in this area...none for apartments that I can see.
I've not seen
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I've NEVER seen a single charger in a large apartment complex.
I've seen many.
Hell, here in New Orleans ...
That's your problem, right there.
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You know...if lack of EV chargers is the only thing negative about living in the NOLA area...I'll take it.
The Friendly people...the bounty of seafood, cheap food costs, low fuel prices...low cost of living overall, combined with the extremely active social scene with music and food festivals pretty much overlapping each week....yeah, I'll take that in lieu of an EV charger for a type car I don't see being ready for for at least another decade or so.....
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Except for the many millions (at least 1/3 or more of US households?)....that cannot charge at home, due to living in large apartment complexes, no private charging there...live in homes with no off street parking...those renting houses with no permission to install chargers from landlords, etc.
eh... this will change over time.
More rentals (apartment complexes & homes) will have chargers. If there is a demand, landlords will provide it in order to turn a profit.
The law can change to prohibit prohibitions on installing chargers (as was done with satellite tv dishes).
Public on-street charging infrastructure is being built in various areas (I just saw an article about LA adding streetlight-pole chargers.... although I expect they will have problems with theft/vandalism.)
P.S. Glad to see
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Perhaps on new builds of apartment complexes, but not likely in our lifetime for existing ones...tearing up vast parking lots to install chargers...especially now when hardly any of those tenets owns or wants to own an EV?
I just don't see that scale tipping any time soon....why would landlords put up chargers before a demand...and where will demand come from, with te
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tearing up vast parking lots to install chargers
If a parking lot is "vast", it's gonna already have wiring for lights.
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Maybe for a few on pole...I doubt it is set up to wire and power a single charger for every car slot in the lot?
Remember...these things are not assigned, they are first come first serve, so they'd need one at every slot.
Re:sooo... (Score:4, Informative)
> as opposed to what is currently going on with the current Biden project
That article [slashdot.org] is a lie. [slashdot.org]
It was a lie when it was originally published and it becomes even more of a lie to repost it every passing month.
=Smidge=
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Re:sooo... (Score:5, Informative)
You're right, that article is out of date. There are now a whopping 14 operational stations that were directly paid for with NEVI funds.
You can download the list of them here if you don't believe me:
https://afdc.energy.gov/corrid... [energy.gov]
Download the .csv file, and sort it by funding source.
More stations are certainly coming soon, but they're taking forever to get built.
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I asked 9 women to make me a baby and I'm really disappointed that 8 months in they have nothing to show for it. I expected 8 babies by now. /s
These projects take several years to get from concept to commissioning. The majority will arrive in one large batch.
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"8 stations at $1B/piece"
8 stations is the claimed number delivered SO FAR, the article does not say $1B/piece and any fool knows that's an absurd lie. MAGA morons are pathetic.
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Go easier on that MAGA trigger finger. Everything in the world is not about the my guy good/your guy bad shootout.
The project quoted is Biden's, because Trump ain't got one, and the topic here is EV chargers. And the project so far is not getting much done, that's objectively true. It's not the article, it's me who says $1B/piece. If you want to go deeper into this, allow me to make a predicion: nowhere near the 500k stations promised are going to be delivered. The US taxpayer is going to have to be happy i
EVGo chargers suck (Score:1)
I hate EVGo. I got a $500 credit for it when I bought my GM EV, and good god, half the chargers I have tried to use have been broken or had a line for hours because most of not all EVGo chargers can only charge at 30-50kW.
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half the chargers I have tried to use have been broken
I don't understand why so many chargers are "out of order" so often.
It's just a frick'n cable and plug. What is there to break?
When a charger displays an "out of order" message, the cable and plug appear to be fine. So, it seems to be mostly software or connectivity problems, which are really human competence problems.
Weirdly, ALL the charging networks have this problem.
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Nope. Not Tesla's.
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Weirdly, ALL the charging networks have this problem.
Nope. Not Tesla's.
Yeah also none outside of the USA. And for the record many of the chargers here were designed and build by US based companies. Let that sink in for a second.
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Lack of use, lack of a responsible business plan (that includes maintenance) and vandalism. Around me, all L2 chargers are broken, all because of clear vandalism.
It's a transitory problem, once there is a steady need and steady profits, maintenance will solve itself. It would be nice if connectors are less easily destroyed, but there is a transition to J3400 anyway, so all those broken connectors we see today will not remain relevant.
And Tesla chargers break too, they just get fixed.
"It's just a frick'n c
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What is there to break?
Usually a transformer.
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It's not just a cable and a plug. When you are dealing with 800V DC circuit drawing 300A and being used by the general public, that cable is going to need all sorts of monitoring and safety interlocks to avoid frying somebody. Many of the cables require active cooling. Is the coolant pump working? Is the coolant flow rate adequate? Are the temperature sensors returning good data? Is the resistance in the cable reading nominal?
Beyond systems failures or damage to the cable itself, a failed or failing se
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I have been using a BEV for 4 years now here in New Zealand and I have never encountered a non-wo
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The Electrify America chargers are usually much faster... when you can find them. Currently, they all seem to be spaced about 40 miles apart from each other and there are always a few broken chargers there once you arrive. It kinda sucks having to plan your road trip based on where they are located if you have a non Tesla EV.
Where does the power come from? (Score:1)
You have to be careful. Many places are putting in '200 kW' chargers, but they only have 30 kW of actual power. Put in the stations now, power comes later.
From the article:
350-kilowatt DC - " locations will feature up to 20 ultra-fast charging stalls, but some will have even more"
So 350 X 20 = 7000. Seven megawatts of power. Enough power for nearly 4700 homes (because we all know that a house only needs 1500 watts). "Hello, power company? I need a 7 megawatt substation out on the freeway.... 8 to 10
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How fast is "ultra-fast?" (Score:2)
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It depends on a number of factors, not least the actual capacity and design of the battery as well as the capacity of a given EV's charging circuitry.
In addition, the "fast" part of the charge cycle is only between 20% and 80% of a battery's capacity - below and above these limits charging has to take place more slowly to (a) preserve the life of the battery, and (b) avoid catastrophic failure. This is why EV makers quote charge-times only for 20%->80%, although the vehicle range is always quoted based o
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For Interstate travel only? (Score:2)
So let's just put these magical charging stations on the interstates only. Today there are about 41000 miles of interstate in the US, so we can have one every 1000 miles or so.
Alright, lets maximize availablility by locating them at Inersections and exchanges as much as possible. Great, now wer're down to only 800 miles between stations.
All we gotta
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Around here most interstate highway rest-stops have 4-8 CCS chargers as well as 10+ NACS. These are spaced out every 40-80 miles or so if you've got a 200mi+ range on your EV you are never in danger of being stranded. On state roads there's usually a fast charger in one of the big box store's parking lots or at a hotel.
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The thing is if you haven't been looking you won't see many of them as they are pretty low key and don't take up much space. For e
WOW (Score:1)
We Need Bike/Scooter cChargers, Too! (Score:2)
economics (Score:2)
As with gas stations, being profitable is about location. Sub-optimal locations need zero support and zero maintenance, or they need something else to profit from like a little convenience store.
JFYI (Score:1)
"Ultra-fast" means, according to the article, 350 kW. All these 400 chargers will be able to give 140 MW of electricity. Caloric value of gasoline is about 45 MJ/kg. So, all this power is comparable with 5 liters of gasoline per second. Standard fuel pumps are able to give 50 l/min. So, all these "400 ultra-fast chargers" are equal to 6 standard fuel pumps or one small gas station.