Large cities await a solution for mass electric vehicle charging. Curbside charging might be it.
Gravity, an infrastructure startup that recently launched a 500-kilowatt station in New York City, now proposes high-power curbside chargers for city streets, explaining that slow AC curbside charging points are "a profound waste of scarce street space and time."
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Electric vehicles require charging places—either standard AC points for overnight charging or DC fast charging points to replenish the range in minutes. In cities, the issue is that drivers rarely have their own parking space.
Gravity's new curbside charger—called Distributed Energy Access Point (DEAP)—is a 200-kilowatt DC charging dispenser (the actual charger, aka power electronics, is installed nearby). A dispenser is relatively small (comparable to an AC charging point) and can be pole-mounted.
In theory, EV drivers could simply park, connect, and quickly recharge. The company explains that at 200 kilowatts, it's possible to replenish 200 miles of range in 13 minutes.
Gravity even says that this charging rate is the equivalent of 960 miles per hour: "These speeds mean chargers can be deployed on metered curbs in the busiest parts of a city, where drivers can charge seamlessly without a dedicated trip. Each DEAP can provide dozens of charge sessions per parking space each day—maximizing turnover and minimizing drivers' downtime."
We imagine that there would be a high number of DC curbside dispensers in the crucial parts of cities, acting sort of like DC fast charging stations.
Moshe Cohen, Founder and CEO of Gravity, Inc. said: "An urban parking spot is valuable real estate. So is people's time. If cities install slow, outdated chargers at the curb, they're wasting people's time and blocking the ability to fully utilize the latent potential in parked EV batteries. Gravity was the first to bring DEAP-speed to indoor charging, and now we're doing it again on city streets. There is nothing else like these 200kW chargers on the curbside anywhere in America. Cities like New York should lead from the front with nothing short of the most advanced technology in the world."
Only time will tell whether the cities will turn to curbside DC chargers or perhaps we will see mass adoption of curbside AC charging on most streets. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the majority of charging points in the U.S. will be AC.
