Saturday, May 19, 2012

EVS: After 24 million EV miles, Ecotality and Blink are ready for both CHAdeMO and SAE

EVS: After 24 million EV miles, Ecotality and Blink are ready for both CHAdeMO and SAE:
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One can think about conspiracy theories that maybe that's the way they wanted it be.
The Nissan Leaf is the most mainstream electric vehicle in the U.S., and it has a CHAdeMO DC fast-charge option. Ecotality's Blink network offers CHAdeMO chargers. Ecotality is the managing organization behind The EV Project, which recently announced it had collected information on 24 million electric vehicle miles. So, if any group would have an opinion about the potential challenge to CHAdeMO from the SAE combo charger announcement, Ecotality would be that group.



To find out, we spoke with Donald Karner, Ecotality's chief innovation officer, who said what others in the charging business told us during the Electric Vehicle Symposium (EVS26): the cars - and EV buyers - will dictate which standard wins.



"We're in the infrastructure business," Karner said. "We supply infrastructure to fuel advanced vehicles. We've done hydrogen, we do level 2 AC. On the DC side, if and when vehicles come to market that utilize the combo connector in sufficient numbers that justifies us making the investment in installing those connectors and developing chargers that will operate under that protocol, of course we will."



Can we accommodate two different standards? Yeah, we can do that. Is it going to cost more? Absolutely.
As you can see in the picture above, the Blink fast charger is dual port. "We did that a year and a half ago," Karner said. "The guys back here [he indicates a competitor's booth] are now saying, 'oh, what everybody should do is dual port so that you can do CHAdeMo on one side and combo on the other side. Well, that's exactly why we did that. A year and a half ago, we went to the SAE and said, 'look, you guys have a problem. You are two years behind schedule. DC fast chargers are coming, the Nissan Leaf with CHAdeMo is coming. We're sitting here as an EVSP [electric vehicle service provider] and we have to build a charger to service this. There's no U.S. standard. What are you guys going to do?' And the answer from the SAE committee was, 'Not our problem. We don't care. We're going to focus on J1772 AC and that's all we can do at one time.'



Now, there are clearly some competitive issues in there (between the automakers) so here the auto industry has shot itself in the foot again. Can we accommodate two different standards? Yeah, we can do that. Is it going to cost more than having one standard? Absolutely it's going to cost more. Fast charging is already very expensive and the auto companies, because they couldn't get along and are going to squabble, just like they did last time with inductive and conductive, are going to shoot themselves in the foot."
Continue reading EVS: After 24 million EV miles, Ecotality and Blink are ready for both CHAdeMO and SAE
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