Why the EV Plug War is Far From Over

It's the EV headline you can't miss. And it's a story we dug into as well. The race to build charging stations in support of the pending rush of EV drivers. Cities have ramped up efforts to meet the demand, but that won't necessarily prevent a charging desert. As experts say, the real secret in scaling EV infrastructure lies an open and interoperable solutions. Solutions that have to do with the adapter used to charge the car, along with the software to manage the hardware and payments across the station. Today, we'll dig into the first of the two, the adapters, a controversy that's come to me known as the plug war. Right now, there are three different versions of those charger adapters that actually plug into those vehicles, which present some unique problems. Ron Stupai of Bureau of Veritas. oversees the construction and permitting of charging stations across North America where you'll find a patchwork of stations that many say still need work. The fast charging stations are the top concern. These are the chargers found along highways and busy roads where you can juice up your car in about 20 minutes. There are three types of adapters that offer this type of charge and it's up to the car manufacturers to decide which one the EV will use. to use CCS and others use a CHAdeMO standard. Tesla's all run off its own proprietary connector. If you have a Tesla vehicle, you have to go to a Tesla charging station to do that. So that really prevents kind of the full scale of all the charging stations and pedestals that are out there across the nation from having one standard. I will say that Tesla recently announced that they plan on having adopters available at their charging stations, but they also said that was likely to take another two to five years, right? That's a significant capital investment on their part, and it will take some time. So right now in the U .S., there aren't a lot of regulations around, hey, everybody has to use this standard or so on and so forth. It might not seem like that big of a deal, but these standards are much more than a cord. They're a communication protocol that allow for the vehicle to control the charger, dictating how much power it needs and the speed by which it needs it. There's many vehicles that they think that the charging station is malfunctioning, but it's actually the vehicle doesn't know how to properly talk to the charger and the charger doesn't properly talk to the vehicle, so it is broken. But it's not. It's by design. David Patterson works with the Chathamo Associates. Association, CHAdeMO was the first standard to hit the market in 2009. It continues to lead the market in Japan and emerging countries like India, Indonesia, South Africa and Thailand. But it's come to face roadblocks in Europe, where the EU Commission has promoted CCS as the common standard. And recently, France took action, announcing that CHAdeMO chargers are no longer required at fast charging stations. Electrify America in the United States... also announced that it will phase out chathamo chargers starting in 2022 it comes as an increased number of car manufacturers shift towards the ccs standard but older evs like the nissan leaf still use the chathamo standard what are they going to do with their vehicle wreck them just send them to the wrecking yard because you won't let me charge my vehicle anymore what we look forward with cities the most important thing is to make it open, because we don't know all the answers right now." Already, that's become harder to achieve with the rise of CCS. The standard adopted in Europe is different from the one in North America. That's because there's no level one charging in Europe, where household electricity is nearly twice the voltage as what's used overseas. Instead, all manufacturers except Tesla use the Menikey standard in Europe, formally called the IEC 6- That's resulted in a different CCS standard in European DC fast charge stations, which combine the Type 2 connector with DC fast charge pins. CHAdeMO is a global standard. If you take a vehicle from anywhere in the world and you put it on any CHAdeMO charger anywhere, it will charge. Plus CHAdeMO's different from CCS in that it offers bidirectional charging. This means the standard allows for power to flow from a vehicle to a building or from a vehicle back to the grid. What CHAdeMO does is it relies on an off -board device to take the direct current directly off the battery and then change it into AC what you plug into the wall and then supply that to the house and that they are doing that successfully in japan and they're also doing that in europe there's been a number of demonstrations in europe with fleet vehicles that fleet vehicles that aren't being used in the during the day or during the evening can be parked in the parking lot connected to the grid and charged when there's excess energy on the grid and then discharged when the grid needs energy the certifications and design guidelines are also key here. The Chathamo Association requires that all of its equipment is certified by a third party, something it says isn't required by CCS in the States. Yet drivers say both chargers are often found broken in the field. Chathamo says that's because car manufacturers aren't required to have its equipment certified before installation. And then they want to ask the vehicle, the charging companies to change their chargers to work with their vehicles but that's backwards it's a point underscored in this survey by plug in america finding that 54 percent of ev owners reported problems with public charging usually because the charger was broken so how do we go about future proofing this equipment i think the biggest thing is is to certify the chargers and the vehicles to make sure that they are compliant to the standard that they are indicated. We're also noticing a number of cities turning to dual chargers as a fix. It's the individual investor putting the fast charger on site. What are they choosing to do to meet the demand? But the joke in the industry is kind of like, well, yeah, people are putting in other connections, but CCS seems to be the one that from our data is getting the most use. It might be getting 80 percent of. use even if you have both cables there so is it worth it to offer that second plug the benefit i guess is is that it's not that costly to come back and to swap out that plug later and i think that's the thought process right now is buy the capital equipment and then if you have to come back a year from now and go okay the winner is ccs or the winner is whoever it's merely swapping out that cable on the same charger and using it as long as you're getting a charger that has that capability it's one of the many ways the industry is tackling the plug wars but unfortunately it's not the only challenge facing this market charging stations also have a number of networks and softwares that they use to come to life and those two need to be interoperable stay tuned for our next story when we dig into that