By Jeremy Cook
Half of the cars sold in the US will be electric vehicles by 2030. Across the pond, the EU plans to ban the sale of diesel and gasoline engines by 2035, moving the bloc into the electric (and/or potentially hydrogen) vehicle age once and for all. In Norway, electric car sales have already surpassed combustion engines. For its part, the US’ most populous state of California plans to eliminate the sale of pure fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035. The trend is unmistakably more sustainable electric vehicles, which raises big questions about the future of EV charging.
If you can charge at home every night, you may be immune from this problem. But this setup might not be possible if you live in an apartment. If you want to take a long trip, that massive 300-mile range may feel much smaller.
For ubiquitous electric vehicle usage, we need a reliable high-speed charging network. In this article, we’ll explore the current state of EV charging solutions and where we might see things develop. After all, if you need to drive to Colorado from Florida in an electric vehicle, you’ll need support infrastructure—not next year, not tomorrow, but right now.
The charger is in the car
While the device that hooks up to the car is often called the “charger,” this is technically a bit of a misnomer. The standard type of EV charge solution is more appropriately referred to as electric vehicle supply equipment or EVSE. The EVSE connects your car to grid power, which supplies the actual charger inside your vehicle. This charger converts an AC power input into DC power that directly feeds the battery. In fast charging setups, power is supplied as DC to the EV, bypassing the step of rectifying the current onboard.
This in-car charger paradigm transfers the work of properly supplying the car’s battery to the vehicle itself. External equipment can be simple, so there’s less to worry about when connecting to an unfamiliar new station.
EV charging levels 1 and 2 at home
If you never wander too far from home base, charging your car is akin to plugging in a lamp. Take the Level 1 charging cable that may have come with your vehicle, connect it to a standard 120VAC outlet, plug it into your car’s charging port, and voila! It’s ready to charge, albeit slowly.
Because of power limitations on 120VAC circuits, this type of Level 1 charging typically replenishes your vehicle in a range of ten miles per hour. However, there are different EV charging levels, and Level 2 chargers can speed up the process. Level 2 chargers run on 240VAC and can charge in the 40 miles of range per hour ballpark, depending on several factors. Hooking up faster Level 2 equipment is typically more complicated than Level 1 and may involve hiring an electrician.
Connection-wise (both locally and throughout the US), the interface for most brands is standardized to a specification known as SAE J1772. This standard dictates the physical shape and connection pinout and is compatible with Level 1 and 2 systems. Extra connections are used for DC fast charging, though this wouldn’t typically be available at home.
The exception to this standardization is Tesla, which uses a different type of EV charging connector. However, an adapter is readily available to convert a Tesla port to SAE J1772. Internationally, the EU has settled on a different standard, IEC 62196, while Japan uses the same SAE J1772 connector as the US. China’s charging standard looks like an EU connector, but the electrical pinout differs.
Learn more about the different EV charging levels and standards.
The reality of today’s electric vehicle charging solutions
For charging away from home, current (rough) US numbers break down as follows:
- 50,000 public charging stations and 140,000 individual ports
- 80% of ports charge at a Level 2 rate
- 19% of ports are capable of DC fast charging (the fastest-growing category)
- California has upwards of 15,000 charging locations, followed by New York at 3,600, and Florida at 3,000
- There are ten electric vehicles for each charging port in the US
While these stats may appear quite good at first glance, if chargers are unevenly distributed, this doesn’t facilitate a long journey. Additionally, while the raw number of chargers looks good now, the number of stations will need to keep up as the nation's collective EV fleet increases. And consider that while you might spend five minutes at a gas station, even DC supercharging takes much longer to complete from an “empty tank.”
Tesla has its own charging network, while the rest is a mix of public and private facilities. If you’re using DC supercharging, the J1772 plug adds two extra connectors on the bottom, while Tesla uses the same plug for everything. From a driver’s standpoint, the Tesla charging setup may be more straightforward and integrated, while the world of J1772 has more variety. Both have their pros and cons, similar to how Macintosh products and IBM/Windows PCs provides different user experiences.
EV charging technology: The good, the bad, and the probably impractical
Broadly, the future of EV charging seems somewhat straightforward: more charging stations, more fast-charging DC power. How well government options and competing private sector facilities will play nicely together remains to be seen. Ideally, EV charging options will merge into a seamless operation like typical gas stations: pull up to a charger, plug in, and pay with a credit card, standardized RFID technology, or an unified app to initiate charging.
What’s equally likely is that each charging brand will require its own app, adding burdensome steps to charging while traveling and serving as another tracking method that subjects users to ads and analysis. Finally, with millions of electric cars coming online, our already-strained power grid may have additional supply problems.
Other experimental and/or unrealistic new EV charging technologies include drive-on charging pads for wireless EV charging (using the same technology as a wireless phone charging pad) and onboard EV solar panels. While both seem like great ideas, they are currently impractical.
On the exotic-sounding front, a vehicle’s batteries can potentially power your house during outages. That capability is quite realistic and potentially very beneficial, but it requires special circuitry installation by an electrician. And if you need to leave if the outage and/or emergency stretches beyond battery limits, you have a problem. Without stored or available electricity, your car is stuck until grid power returns.
The future of EV charging
We’re currently seeing a coalescence of charging ports to the SAE J1772 connector, with adapters readily available that cross over to the Tesla standard. While some unanswered questions exist, such as distribution and overall power supplies, this compatibility should facilitate the EV charging buildout.
The good news is that at-home EV charging, where most energy transfers occur, is easy to set up with equipment available for purchase right now. As battery technology develops, we may see a future where remote charging stations become less necessary. If a car could travel 1,000 miles on a charge (or even half that), it would take care of nearly any day-long journey. We may see charging become the purview of hotels, included as a perk with your stay, like WiFi and breakfast.
Of course, the development of electric vehicles requires a variety of electrical devices that Arrow can provide. For example, you might consider the XEV25-200 electric vehicle power fuse from Eaton, capable of handling 200A at 500VDC, or Phoenix Contact’s EV-PLCC-AC1-DC1 programmable charge controller.
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