GE’s New EV Charging Station Project Aims to Reduce Installation Costs, Boost EV Growth

January 9, 2012

The electric vehicle (EV) market has been stuck in low gear. One of the big opportunities where this can be changed is in the commercial vehicle sector. There are over 230 million commercial cars and light-duty trucks on U.S. roads—a huge potential source for widespread EV adoption. But large companies, federal, state and local governments and other fleet operators have hesitated to make the switch.

GE just started on a project that drives at chaning that. Researchers at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York, will design and build a better commercial fleet charging station that will incorporate GE’s existing smart grid technology and help dramatically cut installation costs in the depots and garages housing bus, vehicle delivery and other commercial and government fleets. The project also received support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

They are in charge: Researchers in GE’s Smart Grid lab will be developing advanced communication systems and controls to reduce charging station installation costs for fleet operators. The technology will also help utilities more effectively monitor and manage larger electric vehicle loads on the grid.

Currently, fleet operators need to install a separate charging station for each EV, which can be very expensive. In the current set up, each charging station has its own dedicated power and networking cables to supply and monitor energy usage.

The new technologies that GE researchers are developing will contain fewer electronics parts and use advanced communication systems to exchange information with the Smart Grid. The new design could reduce the total number of the physical stations required while still providing the same number of charging cords.

GE will be working with utilities and fleet operators to develop and test a prototype system. The company has been experimenting with many different kinds of EV charging stations and options, from the Yves Behar-designed WattStation for home garages, which is available on Amazon.com, to a super-renewable solar-powered carport in Plainville, Connecticut. The Plainville project will be equipped with six Level 2 GE DuraStation 1 EV charging stations.


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  • Vernon Smith

    What is needed is a charging station that can recharge a battery in 30 minutes or less. That way if stop to get something to eat your EV can be recharging while you are recharging.

  • Russell

    I agree with Vernon on the 30 minute recharge. However the issue is not the charging station, but the batteries themselves. To make EV’s practical, you need to have around a three hour run time between charges. On the highway at 70mph, that’s going to be around 200 miles. Then you pull off at your service station and recharge for 30 minutes, grab something to eat, use the facilities and then get on your way.
    Until someone develops a battery which can be recharged in 30 minutes and then is good for around 200 miles (figure three hours of run time), EV’s will not be able to realize their full potential.

  • Eduardo Dos Reis

    I also agree and wish we could develop means to charge batteries in 30 minutes. This also releases the station for another user.

  • Peter Yawei.Zhang

    30 minutes? I think even 3 min’s a worse charging time, if we want to take EV in mainstream, we ought to make the charging time as less as possible.

    just like the fast booting time for PC, as Steve Jobs stated, don’t waste people’s life.

    30 min just ridiculous! You got to make a faster charging time. Otherwise you have no chance make EV mainstream, it will fake away like any other booms and fashions.

    Don’t forget GE also put efforts on computer technology when it is hot, how many of you have a GE brand laptop or desktop?

    Business is business, fashion is fashion, fashion will fade way, and it costs money, business will make money.

    Work hard~! and achieve results.

  • Jacek Cebula

    i would add one more important item to the requirements – car battery life should be at least half of the expected car usage period (10-15 years) and during this time their capacity should stay level similar to brand new condition.

  • Walter Watt

    I must be missing something here. EV’s are good for 40 or so miles between charges today. Commercial vehicles probably run 120+ miles/day. Likely much more. Even if the recharge time can be pulled down to 30 minutes, how can the multi-hour/day time spent waiting for the batteries to be charged make any economic sense? And the 30 minute figure assumes the charging station will be right where the vehicle needs it when the battery goes flat.

    Sorry, but until EV range is extended to 100+ mile/charge, I don’t see the commercial fleet market being viable.

  • Bob Perkins

    Goal here is to save energy, i get 43 MPG in my Prius. There is a lithium ion upgrade kit offered by a china company that I can install for under $5K, with a 28 mile comute to work and an 8 hour shift I should be able to plug in when I arrive and have close to a zero fuel usage for this trip if the product does what they say it will. This in my opinion would be a quick and easy test to see if this is a worth while effort. Looking forward to any comments,
    Bob

  • Eugene White

    Just some EV facts…

    Nearly all American families own at least 2 vehicles. Nearly all of these vehicles are used to commute from home to work and back daily. The routine daily driving pattern for most Americans involves less than 40 miles per day. EVs marketed to consumers as far back as the mid 1990s have been capable of a 60 to 120 mile driving range. There will always be a vehicle to travel in and the EV will be the daily commuter. Even today’s Li battery systems will require time to fully charge safely. This can be done easily at home in our own garages in most cases in 3-5 hours while we sleep.

    For decades now the auto industry has been stalling on EV production and pointing to consumers who are not happy with range and charge times. Here is what the industry always fails to point out. Most American families are able to easily get around both “problems” because they own more than one car and easily commute daily within the typical EV range. The truth is, EV technology has been ready to go since GM’s EV1 program was launched in the mid 1990s. The industry backed away not because of batteries or charging or even cost. They backed away because of the CARB ZEV proposal which was going to mandate 10% EV sales in Green States by the early 2000s. Large scale production of EVs may also threaten a thriving aftermarket auto parts industry.

    EVs are appearing for sale today in Green States because the large federal tax credit the industry lobbied for allows them to charge very high sale prices for these vehicles. These prices are not warranted in every case. Automakers are using the EVs to get CARB Gold ZEV credits under revise ZEV rules to offset higher emitters.

    Lets stop making excuses and make EVs go. Lets stop being afraid of range and charge times and learn to live with EVs in our daily commute. Lets stop listening to “so called industry experts” who may have other agendas and find out for ourselves what this is about. We might actually like charging at home nightly off peak for the price of a cup of coffee. It might be a pleasant surprise never needing to stop at a gas station (time saved!). We might discover that there is near zero maintenance and enjoy not having to take the EV in for service (time and money saved!). I learned all these things and more by managing a fleet of 6 S10 EVs from 1997 to 2000. They worked and were fun to drive. In 3 years we never had anyone get stranded in one.

    The success was due to a common sense approach. Install a charge station for each EV and make sure the vehicles are on charge when not in use. Chargers will communicate with the charge controller and keep the cells maintained. Plan daily trips. Something we should be doing to conserve energy anyway. Educate vehicle operators on the pros and cons of driving EVs. Make sure EV operators understand the technology and they will get the most from it.

  • j campbell

    let us know how those batteries from China work out…

  • Peter Yawei.Zhang

    Should they make a leasing battary system, instead of charging stations, you can change your battery set, actually you don’t buy any battery with the car, they need to make the battery set standardized and they people can just put in to their car, off they go. instead of charging stations, they build ‘battary lending’ stations, at least that is a way of bypassing the above charging, etc problems.

    yeah, you can have one set of your own, you can also leasing at the station.

    Peter

  • Bob Perkins

    I don’t know how far this technology is out but this seems to be the way we head;
    http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/battery-material-0311.html

    MIT engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries — for cell phones and other devices — that could recharge in seconds rather than hours.

    The work could also allow for the quick recharging of batteries in electric cars, although that particular application would be limited by the amount of power available to a homeowner through the electric grid.

  • Elizabeth

    The carhge station is made by nyko, and doesn’t come with the wii. The wii remote takes 2 AA battery’s, but the nyko carhge station comes with 2 recarhgeable battery’s for the wii remotes so you don’t need to keep buying battery’s.

  • Thomas Kennedy

    I understand that GE has purchased a large number of electric cars for company operations. It seems to me, as a GE stockholder, that this is a good opportunity to experiment with “quick change” batteries” and associated changing stations for car and truck fleet applications where several cars operate out of the same location and it would be justified to maintain a supply of charged and charging batteries.
    In my experience as a bulk electric power system operator, I believe that most practical engineering concepts must be actually tried in real life over a period of time by experienced engineers and technical people to determine if they actually have a real life application.

  • Bob Perkins

    Modular battery system would be great in a lot of ways but I think the solution must depend on the progress of the new materials development for fast charging systems see MIT project above. We need to make progress in size and capacity of batteries. I am buying an 8 KWH battery for my Prius but the range (40 Miles) is still too short for long trips.