EV charging, coming to a corner near you

The first public charging station was established in the Sydney suburb of Glebe back in May. Named the CT1500 charge station, the first of Chargepoint Australia's new gizmos for replenishing EV batteries was officially opened at the time by the city's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore. According to company spokesman James Brown, that was the "Rolls-Royce" of electric installations, built to an exacting standard. No wonder the Glebe chargestation install took five days -- after the six weeks' wait for approval by all the regulatory bodies.

Brown was one of a number of 'high-powered' types presenting at yesterday's Future Focus Forum, held in the Melbourne premises of Origin Energy. The forum presented an opportunity for members of Mitsubishi's Foundation Customer Group to learn more about the i-MiEV -- and the Chargepoint recharging stations.

"In essence, a Chargepoint charge station is a smart grid-enabled piece of equipment," explained Brown. "The Level One [chargers] aren't smart grid-enabled, the Level Two... is 'smart grid' -- and you've got that two-way communication. The Chargepoint [station] will actually operate as a communication device between the driver, the grid and the vehicle.

"What you're seeing on the Level One is what's available now. We could actually install a Level One charger immediately. The Level Two charger, which is a 32-Amp one, is a faster charger... it can charge between two and four hours for a vehicle; they are actually being rolled out in America at the moment. Why aren't they available in Australia? Well simple answer is we're a bit behind in terms of standards. One of the key things is, what socket do we use? We seem to be a bit caught up on sockets at the moment.

"The Level three charger is what I call the 'big gun' charger. That will charge a car between 10 and 30 minutes. This Level Three charger is available [for Australia]; it's just going through compliance testing. The problem with the Level Three charger is it takes so much juice out of the system, that you've got to not only just look at the charger itself, but the infrastructure around it. That's one of the challenges that all of us are going to face as we start looking at EVs coming in."

Mitsubishi's i-MiEV can charge via a standard household outlet (with a 15-Amp socket) as well as the Level One Chargepoint unit -- and it is compatible with the Level Three charger Chargepoint plans to offer -- but the Level Two charger won't suit the little Mitsu. 

Chargepoint Technology Manager Lance Douglas amplified Brown's remarks, laying out a full and thorough explanation of the current technology -- and what Chargepoint Australia has in store down the track.

"The purpose of our Network Operating System (NOS) is to integrate software solutions and hardware solutions by communications systems," he began.

"Drivers... have their own portals where they can logon and manage their accounts; using mapping software they can locate charging stations -- not just the nearest charging station, but because our systems are real-time, the nearest available charging station.

"Fleet managers can look at their fleets by department or cost account or whatever they want to do... look at cost of ownership, cost of kilowatt-hours used per fleet, etc."

Douglas also explained how the recharging facilities would benefit those companies or individuals operating them and levying a cost for the service.

"Deployed across Australia and shortly to be rolled out in New Zealand, we have our wireless virtual private network. That uses a telco-grade cellular technology. It's all encrypted to 128-bit, which is the kind of strength you use in Internet banking..."

Chargepoint is planning to upgrade the encryption as well, to ensure the security of the stations in the field, each of which has its own wireless modem. Alarms and "abnormal events" are monitored by technicians 24/7, according to Brown.

"Everything's monitored," says Brown, "and we've got response matrices to make sure these things stay on the air."

"This station," continued Brown, pointing to the demonstration unit, "is a Level One charging station -- fully certified, meeting all applicable standards in Australia. It's a single-phase 15-Amp and dispenses 3.6kW at the socket output."

Featuring its own built-in PC (with "central processing units and banks of memory"), the L1 charging station also boasts a two per cent-accurate power meter and "ground fault circuit interrupters" that will trip in 18 milliseconds -- significantly faster than the 30 milliseconds required by Australian standards.

By comparison, the Level Two charging stations double the socket output of the Level One units, from 3.6kW to 7.2kW and basically halve the recharge time.

While the Level One unit is not 'smart grid-enabled', it will communicate with the driver through smart phones like the iPhone -- and Chargepoint is working on apps for the Blackberry also. The chargestation will SMS the driver when the car is fully charged or if there's some problem, such as a third party disconnecting the lead from the chargestation to the car.

Drivers can also 'book' an available chargestation-equipped parking spot (like the one in Glebe). The question was raised in the forum, what if the driver is unable to reach the spot in time, due to traffic? Will the chargestation lock out other drivers also requiring access to that spot in the meantime? Will other drivers fly into 'charge rage'?

"What happens is the iPhone application -- the remote application -- is only valid for about two minutes and then it reverts back to being an available station..." answered Brown.

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