Hey Charger!

Mention electric vehicle technology and the average person is likely to think first of China, the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles (EVs), or possibly the USA, home to Tesla, the poster-boy for the category.

Few would think of Australia, let alone Brisbane, as being at the epicentre of this rapidly growing automotive sector, but tucked away beneath that city’s Gateway Bridge is one of the world’s leading exponents of EV charging technology.

Founded in 2001 by three former electrical engineering students who met at the University of Queensland (UQ), Tritium launched its first DC fast-charger DC fast-chargers for EVs in 2014 and has since gone on to establish itself as a global leader in their design, development and manufacture.

Speaking to carsales.com.au recently, founder Paul Sernia explained that he and his two business partners worked together as students on several World Solar Challenges in the late 1990s, including the 1999 event in which UQ’s ‘Sunshark’ solar car placed third.

The trio’s business idea grew out of the interest generated by other teams wanting to know how they could get their hands on the technology they had developed.

“And so after we graduated we formed Tritium, to supply that market with those electronics and it’s really grown from there,” said Sernia.

Initially established to provide power-electronic systems and battery energy-storage applications, the partners soon decided to focus their efforts and expertise on DC charging solutions, since that was the best known way to get high power into EVs quickly.

“What we really want to do is make it as convenient as possible for drivers, which means replicating the petrol station experience; where you come in, you fill up quickly and you move on,” he said.

“Really DC charging is the only way to do that. It may be that one day in the future electric vehicles won’t support AC charging at all.”

Since launching its first DC fast-charger in 2014, Tritium has ridden the gathering EV wave, establishing itself as a leading global supplier with installations in more than 29 countries and a workforce of more than 300 people, spread across Brisbane, Los Angeles and Amsterdam.

The company claims it currently holds around 50 per cent of the DC charging market in Norway, the world’s highest per-capita market for EVs, and around 15 per cent of the wider global market for 50kW fast-chargers.

Earlier this year Tritium opened a new state-of-the-art research and development (R&D) centre as part of a major expansion of its Brisbane operations. Carsales gained a sneak peek of the E-Mobility Innovation Centre while touring the company’s manufacturing facility in nearby Murarrie.

It’s here that Tritium makes its current generation Veefil-RT 50kW fast-charger, and its new-generation flagship Veefil-PK 350kW DC High Power Charger.

While Tritium’s 50kW DC Fast Charger have been at the forefront of EV charging technology since 2014, it’s the new 350kW high-power chargers which are expected to help drive future EV take-up, given they offer charge speeds up to seven times faster than the existing units.

As an example of how much faster the Tritium DC chargers are compared to other options, charging a Hyundai Kona’s 64kwh lithium-ion battery from zero to 100 per cent on a standard household power outlet takes nearly 28 hours. The same charge on an AC fast-charger takes around nine hours. Meanwhile, Tritium’s 50kW DC fast-charger takes between 60 to 90 minutes.

Tritium’s new 350kW charger, which the company describes as “the most powerful DC charger in the world”, will do the job in just 10 minutes.

The new-generation chargers are currently being rolled out at 100 locations across Europe by the IONITY Network, a joint-venture of the BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford Motor Company and the Volkswagen Group, including Audi and Porsche.

At the time of signing the deal last July, a spokesperson for IONITYsaid the company had chosen Tritium due to its “world-leading technology and ability to provide rapid delivery.”

Charging network Chargefox is set to be the first Australian operation to deploy the new ultra-rapid chargers at Brisbane’s Toombul Shopping Centre today (Friday, May 10).

Tritium says the two new 350kW chargers can charge two cars simultaneously, adding up to 400km of range in just 15 minutes, or 200km in eight minutes.

Meanwhile, around 3500 of Tritium’s Veefil-RT 50kW DC Fast Chargers have already been installed worldwide, with some 55 units deployed in Australia, and a further 100 in the pipeline.

Tritium says this represents “more than 70 per cent of the publicly-available DC chargers in Australia,” with its chargers making up “the backbone of the NRMA’s network of a planned 40 sites across New South Wales, as well as nearly all of the chargers along the Queensland Electric Super Highway.”

Tritium’s global head of marketing and communications Melanie Dooley said the Australian market was “taking off, with a number of companies now building out privately owned EV charging networks”.

Tritium is understandably sensitive about the world-class technology in its chargers, but one of the key attributes they are prepared to talk about is their unique approach to charger cooling.

A lot of heat is generated in the process of charging an EV and Tritium’s way of dealing with this challenge is quite literally at the heart of its charger’s efficiency.

Inside the user units are coolant hoses that circulate ethylene glycol – the same stuff you put into your car radiator – over a series of liquid cooling plates with a manifold at the base of the chargers.

“Part of our intellectual property is around understanding how we get the heat from the electronics into those cooling plates, and then it comes out via the automotive grade fans and radiators,” Sernia said.

The fans and radiators within the units and are manufactured by Gold Coast business PWR, which also supplies cooling systems to various motorsport series including F1, NASCAR and the Supercar series.

Sernia said the chargers have a lifetime expectation of “10-years plus” but notes that because the charging market is still so new, this projection could prove pessimistic.

Tritium also boasts a strong local supply chain with about 60 per cent of the thousands of components that go into its chargers being sourced from Australian suppliers. This includes the aluminium chassis, sourced from Yatala, and the plastic outer cases from a Qld-based body-panel manufacturer.

Tritium’s 50kWh DC fast-chargers are already dotted along Queensland’s coastline thanks to its relationship with energy company Yurika, which manages the Sunshine State’s so-called Electric Superhighway, stretching from Coolangatta to Cairns, and inland from Brisbane to Toowoomba.

Given the company’s rapid growth and its global leadership in the EV charging space, it’s a fair bet you’ll be seeing many more of Tritium’s Aussie-designed and manufactured DC fast-chargers popping up at locations both here and abroad, as the EV revolution continues to grow apace.