US-based Greenlane is building charging hubs for medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks. The company’s charging site in the southern California town of Colton is the first of four planned sites along a 280-mile charging corridor between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The Colton site offers more than 40 high-speed chargers with a maximum power of 400 kW. At full build, it will offer 60 chargers—enough to charge 200 trucks per day.
A charging station of this size draws massive amounts of power. EV-haters are fond of comparing the power draw to that of a medium-size sports stadium. That’s fair enough, but sports stadiums don’t crash the grid, and neither will commercial EV charging hubs—as long as proper load management systems are in place.
Shed that load
Greenlane worked closely with electronics giant ABB on a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system. This forms part of an energy management system that safeguards grid stability and enables remote operation and monitoring.
The Colton site uses two load management solutions: a cloud-based Charger Management System (CMS), which balances EV charger loads; and an Energy Management System (EMS), which controls all site loads and power sources, including solar and battery storage systems to be installed in future.
The SCADA system also enables remote operation—it controls and monitors a series of low-voltage (LV) circuit breakers and medium-voltage (MV) switches. “ABB’s system is unique in its ability to remotely and safely open and close all LV and MV circuit breakers,” says Raj Jhaveri, CTO of Greenlane. “This is not typical for EV charging sites today.”
At the Colton site, Greenlane must carefully manage the energy it receives from the grid. If the power draw exceeds power limits set by the local utility, the site could be disconnected from the grid. Reconnection can take 24 hours or more, and time is money. So, it’s vital that Colton’s own protection circuits kick in first.
The site has multiple levels of load control, including the ABB Ability SCADA platform that acts as a back-up to the CMS. If the CMS can’t maintain charging, the SCADA system initiates a prioritized load shedding scheme when the site hits 95% of its budget.
First, 180 kW EV chargers are sequentially disconnected—these stations support long-dwell time use cases, and charging can be resumed at a later time without compromising the ability to fully charge these trucks in time for departure.
If shedding this load doesn’t relieve the overload problem, the 400 kW stations will be disconnected next. At 97.5% of capacity, the SCADA system targets the MV switchgear, cutting power to the entire site to prevent a full blackout from being initiated by utility controls.
Preparing for the MCS future
Even the plethora of power provided by sites like Colton won’t be enough to handle the one million electric trucks that Greenlane estimates will be rolling on US roads by 2030. Current technology will limit the possibility to transition some existing long-haul routes to electric trucks. This is where Megawatt Charging—a technology that’s close to commercial reality—comes in.
Megawatt Charging stations can deliver up to 1.5 MW of power, enough to add as much as 300 miles of range within 30 minutes. That’s equal to the mandated rest period for truck drivers in the US, so EV drivers will be able to keep the same schedule as those driving legacy diesel trucks.
The Colton is designed to be upgraded to Megawatt Charging when it becomes available.
“Megawatt charging really is the Holy Grail of what we’re trying to achieve,” said Patrick Macdonald-King, CEO of Greenlane Infrastructure. “Faster charging times means trucks spend more time moving freight and generating revenue, lowering cost per mile and overall total cost of ownership.”
Source: ABB
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