- 3ti's Papilio3 ready-made solar-equipped charging station fits on a standard container trailer.
- It has 12 bays and can be installed in just a few hours.
Prefabricated charging stations for electric vehicles are slowly making their way into our lives, even though we might not even realize it. Tesla’s prefabricated Supercharger units come prewired and preassembled onto a concrete slab and significantly cut down the time it takes to bring a new location online. So does EVgo’s prefabricated approach, with just a few days needed to turn the lights on at a new site.
But one company in the United Kingdom wants to prove it can do even better. As you’ll see in the Everything Electric Show video embedded below, 3ti’s Papilio3 EV charging hub can go online in just a few hours. This eliminates the need for lengthy and sometimes expensive parking lot closures and means electric vehicle drivers can benefit from a new charging station quicker.
This particular unit was installed at one of the parking lots at the University of Surrey. It features 12 bays and 42 solar panels and fits on a regular container trailer, so operators won’t need more expensive oversized truck trailers to ship it to their location. It’s very clever, but it’s not perfect.
For starters, it doesn’t offer DC fast charging–just AC charging at speeds of 7, 11 or 22 kilowatts. Moreover, even though it has solar panels, it’s still connected to the grid–although the company offers an off-grid model with built-in 250-kilowatt-hour batteries. This means you won’t juice up your EV using just solar energy, but those photovoltaic arrays will help offset some of the electricity costs for the operator and, hopefully, the end user.
Another interesting thing is that the charging bays don’t even have cables attached. This is quite common in Europe, where public AC charging sometimes requires EV owners to come with their own cable.
The main use case for 3ti’s ready-made charging station is a parking lot where cars usually sit for at least three or four hours. This could be a workplace, a university or maybe a shopping mall where people spend a lot of time inside and away from their cars. Company fleets could also benefit from it.
You can think of it like a fancy home charger that gets some of its energy from the sun and is very easy and fast to install.
