These EV charging stations have a secret function to charge your car even faster: Jalopnik

Remember when all those car brands promised a fully electric future? Well, the list of automakers with scaled back EV plans continues to grow, and will likely continue to do so now that the $7,500 EV tax credit is dead. And to be clear, this is a dramatically declining demand situation. According to a new survey from the AAAthe share of adults who are “likely” or “very likely” to buy an electric car on their next trip has fallen to just 16%.

While the top two reasons were related to purchase and repair costs, the next three were all related to charging: 57% of people said electric cars were not suitable for long road trips, 56% were concerned about a lack of public charging stations and 55% expressed concern about range – the fear of running out of electricity while on the road.

Of course, despite the apparent doom and gloom surrounding the current EV scene, people are still hard at work improving charging infrastructure with technologies like battery buffered charging. Any EV charging station with this secret feature should be able to charge your car not only faster, but also more efficiently and at a lower cost. However, keep in mind that this new technology is still in its growth phase. And while this strategy is being used by the likes of EVgo, Costco, and Electrify America, there’s currently no simple solution to finding a battery-buffered charger location — other than trial and error.

In a sense, battery-buffered charging is a new attempt to make the charging process more like filling up a car with gas. Remember, when you do that, the gas pump doesn’t connect to one huge fuel tank shared by all the other gas stations in the area, and then draw fuel from some national reservoir in your car. Instead, stations usually have their own fuel tanks on site to feed their own pumps.

Similarly, battery buffered charging stations do not draw electricity directly from the grid and send it directly to your car’s battery. Instead, they connect to the grid during low-demand hours, store the electricity for their own use, and then charge vehicles from that storage as needed. There are also a number of ways they can manage this. Some battery-buffered charging stations store the electricity in one common location for all individual chargers to draw from, and some store the juice at each charger. Either way, the benefits extend not just to individual drivers, but to the country’s entire charging infrastructure – and that’s in addition to the fact that EV chargers of all types are being installed nationwide at a record pace.

Even if we take electric vehicles out of the equation – which is highly unlikely – America still needs to adapt its electric grid to the modern age. Therefore, any little help with infrastructure is a good thing, and battery buffering can even help a lot. In fact, according to a study by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), “Properly sized battery buffered systems can reduce the need for utility grid service capacity by approximately 50% to 80% compared to a charging station powered entirely by the grid.”

In addition, stations with battery buffering can be built faster and at lower costs. That’s because they don’t need expensive substations and separate power distribution hardware. For example, a NREL project achieved a savings of approximately 65% ​​on capital costs when building a station with battery buffering, as opposed to a traditional setup. Battery buffer stations can also shave two to four years off a project’s estimated construction time.

Another way battery buffering can help the grid is by taking electricity specifically during off-peak hours, rather than piling electricity with everyone else during high-demand periods. This reduces peak demand overall, meaning the grid hardware doesn’t have to work as hard or undergo as much stress – and there can be longer intervals between repair and/or replacement.

Additionally, some battery buffered charging configurations can work in both directions. This means that in certain situations the charging stations can sell their stored electricity back to the grid.