ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE ISSUE 64 | APRIL-JUNE 2023 | CHARGEDEVS.

COM

Ioniq 6
2023 Hyundai

p. 48

Battery-electric sedans
are a rare breed—that makes
Hyundai’s striking Ioniq 6 a strong new entry

A primer on Off-road EV Processing one Why California

p. 22
wireless EV p. 28
standards p. 34
of the largest p. 72
needs to require
charging are lagging graphite deposits bidirectional EV
technology behind in the US charging

Issue 64.indd 1 6/30/23 1:56 PM

 BATTERY
CYCLERS
AND
SIMULATORS
FLEXIBLE, HIGH PRECISION SOLUTIONS FROM R&D TO END OF LINE

CHARGE/DISCHARGE LIFE CYCLE TEST BATTERY SIMULATION

Battery cell, module and pack level charge/discharge cycle
testing solutions designed to provide high accuracy
measurement with advanced features. Regenerative
systems recycle energy sourced by the battery back to the
channels in the system or to the grid.
Battery simulation for testing battery connected devices in all
applications to confirm if the device under test in performing as
intended. Battery state is simulated which eliminates waiting for the
charge/discharge of an actual battery. Real time test results include
voltage, current, power, SOC%, charge/discharge state and capacity.

To learn more about our Battery Test Solutions visit chromausa.com

Moving Electrical Test Forward

Battery Cell Insulation Tester - 11210 chromausa.com | 949-600-6400 | sales@chromausa.com
A better insulation test to decrease risk of electrical shorts © 2022 Chroma Systems Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.

Issue 64.indd 2 6/30/23 1:56 PM

 THE TECH
CONTENTS
22 A primer on wireless EV
charging technology
22 28 Off-road EV standards
are lagging behind
34 Processing graphite
deposits in the US
28 current events
12 Eaton continues e-mobility expansion in Europe
Metis Engineering releases Cell Guard for battery health monitoring in EVs
13 Rincon Power’s new RXC15 contactor offers 250 amps continuous up to 1,000 VDC
Bitrode launches new generation of battery cyclers
14 Delta-Q Technologies mass-produces its 3.3 kW EV battery charger
INFICON releases ELT3000 PLUS electrolyte leak detector for batteries
15 Aspen Aerogels opens Advanced Thermal Barrier Center in US
16 16 Henkel’s new injectable thermally conductive adhesive for EV battery systems
Ford signs lithium and nickel deals to secure IRA-compliant supply
17 LG Energy to build a $5.5-billion battery manufacturing complex in Arizona
18 Pre-Switch includes remote update and analysis in Pre-Flex controller for SoC
Huber’s new Unimotive offers precise temperature control for battery tests
19 NI’s Software-Defined Battery Lab is designed for continuous improvement
20 Vitesco Technologies presents new electric drive without rare earths

20 21
Piedmont and Sayona to provide lithium from Quebec mines to LG Chem and Tesla
Schaltbau introduces 800-volt contactors

Issue 64.indd 3 6/30/23 1:57 PM

 THE VEHICLES

CONTENTS
48 Hyundai Ioniq 6 48
Korean Model 3 clone, or something
else altogether?

current events
40 Holcim to deploy 1,000 Volvo electric trucks
Mercedes-Benz develops dedicated EV architecture for vans
41 Caterpillar to supply NMG with zero-emission machines and infrastructure 41
GM’s new Envolve business unit to offer tailored solutions for fleet customers
42 Hyundai announces investment plans for EV production
Yutong to deliver 12,000 electric buses to Lagos, Nigeria
Collins Bus introduces Ford E-Transit Type A school bus
43 GreenPower to manufacture electric school buses in West Virginia
44 Dennis Eagle to supply 40 eCollect electric refuse trucks to UK city

45
Frito-Lay to deploy over 700 delivery EVs in 2023
Blue Bird delivers 60 electric school buses in Florida
42
Monarch electric tractors roll off Foxconn assembly lines in Lordstown
46 Jaguar Land Rover to invest $18.9 billion in EV production over next five years
GenH2 and ZeroAvia to develop liquid hydrogen technologies for airports
47 Electrified transit bus sales overtake diesel in the EU

IDENTIFICATION STATEMENT

46
CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine (ISSN: 24742341) April-June 2023, Issue #64 is published quarterly by Electric Vehicles
Magazine LLC, 136 4th St N, STE 201, Saint Petersburg, FL 33701-3889. Periodicals Postage Paid at Saint Petersburg, FL and
additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine, Electric Vehicles
Magazine LLC at 136 4th St N, STE 201, Saint Petersburg, FL 33701-3889.

Issue 64.indd 4 6/30/23 1:57 PM

Issue 64.indd 5 6/30/23 1:58 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE

CONTENTS
64 Clearing the roadblocks 64
for electric trucks
72 Explaining the benefits of
bidirectional EV charging
current events 72
58 SK Signet opens Texas-based EV charger manufacturing facility
Electrify Commercial to install 80 DC fast charger at 20 sites in Utah
59 SolarEdge introduces bidirectional DC-coupled EV charger
Versinetic releases ISO 15118-compliant EV charging software stack
60 New York City to deploy up to 13 fast EV charging hubs at municipal parking lots
Cummins and Heliox to offer EV charging solutions for fleet customers
61 Volvo invests in bidirectional EV charging startup dcbel
ABB E-mobility and Scania successfully test Megawatt Charging System
61
62 Legrand launches Level 2 EV charger for commercial use
Schneider opens large electric truck charging depot in Southern California
63 InCharge Energy launches suite of bidirectional charging solutions for EV fleets
Wattzilla introduces UL-listed J3068 3-phase EV chargers

63

Issue 64.indd 6 6/30/23 2:04 PM

 FLEXIBLE CIRCUITRY
THAT’S
MILES AHEAD

Our flexible printed circuits do more than link battery cells

to EV electronics. They flex during charging cycles, creating
a sleeker, lighter solution that boosts miles per charge.
Put our long history of technical knowledge and consultation to
work for you. From engineered materials to innovative circuitry,
our vertically integrated solutions are uniquely created to help
your concepts take shape.

sheldahl.com

©2023 Sheldahl Flexible Technologies, Inc.

Issue 64.indd 7 6/30/23 2:04 PM

SHL22_2206-0662-Sheldahl-tech-briefs-8.125x10.75in-me01-01.indd 1 4/6/23 4:24 PM
 Publisher Christian Ruoff Contributing Writers Jeffrey Jenkins For Letters to the Editor, Article Submissions,
& Advertising Inquiries Contact:
Charles Morris Info@ChargedEVs.com
Associate Publisher Laurel Zimmer Christian Ruoff
John Voelcker
Senior Editor Charles Morris
Cover Image Courtesy of Hyundai Motor America
Account Executives Jeremy Ewald
Special Thanks to Kelly Ruoff
Technology Editor Jeffrey Jenkins Sebastien Bourgeois

Graphic Designers Tomislav Vrdoljak

ETHICS STATEMENT AND COVERAGE POLICY

AS THE LEADING EV INDUSTRY PUBLICATION, CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE OFTEN COVERS, AND ACCEPTS CONTRIBUTIONS FROM, COMPANIES THAT ADVERTISE IN
OUR MEDIA PORTFOLIO. HOWEVER, THE CONTENT WE CHOOSE TO PUBLISH PASSES ONLY TWO TESTS: (1) TO THE BEST OF OUR KNOWLEDGE THE INFORMATION IS ACCURATE, AND
(2) IT MEETS THE INTERESTS OF OUR READERSHIP. WE DO NOT ACCEPT PAYMENT FOR EDITORIAL CONTENT, AND THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY OUR EDITORS AND WRITERS ARE
IN NO WAY AFFECTED BY A COMPANY’S PAST, CURRENT, OR POTENTIAL ADVERTISEMENTS. FURTHERMORE, WE OFTEN ACCEPT ARTICLES AUTHORED BY “INDUSTRY INSIDERS,” IN
WHICH CASE THE AUTHOR’S CURRENT EMPLOYMENT, OR RELATIONSHIP TO THE EV INDUSTRY, IS CLEARLY CITED. IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ANY OPINION EXPRESSED IN THE CHARGED
MEDIA PORTFOLIO AND/OR WISH TO WRITE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR VIEW OF THE INDUSTRY, PLEASE CONTACT US AT CONTENT@CHARGEDEVS.COM. REPRINTING IN WHOLE OR
PART IS FORBIDDEN EXPECT BY PERMISSION OF CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE.

Ultrasonic Smart Welding

for Power Electronics & Battery Connections

www.hesse-mechatronics.com Your partner for ultrasonic smart welding and wire bonding -
individual automation solutions - process support & development.

Issue 64.indd 8 6/29/23 10:10 PM

 VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

EV Engineering

Don’t Miss Our

Virtual Conferences On
EV Engineering

Fall 2023 Conference

October 2 - 5, 2023
60+ Live EV Engineering Webinars.
On-Demand Videos. Whitepapers. Interactive Q&As.

Free To Attend!

www.ChargedEVs.com/Conference

Issue 64.indd 9 6/29/23 10:11 PM

 Publisher’s Note
Tesla’s charging triumph
Choosing a topic for the Publisher’s Note is not always easy, but this time
around it was a slam-dunk. The surprising news that Ford would hitch its
wagon to Tesla’s charging plug set off an avalanche—at this writing GM, Rivian
EXRAD® and Volvo have joined the party, along with a plethora of EVSE makers and
charging network operators.
Yes, it’s a very big deal in the EV industry, and on the whole it seems like
ERGO FLEX good news. It’s spectacularly good news for Tesla, which has scored a massive
publicity coup and opened up potentially large new revenue streams in the
future (reselling electrons will probably never be a great business, but there
High-Voltage are other opportunities if you get creative). It’s great news for drivers, who will
have more—and hopefully better—places to charge.
Cable Techies can debate the relative merits of CCS vs NACS, but all that is
beside the point. The other automakers made this move for the sole reason of
being able to promise a better customer experience. For potential EV drivers,
charging is the #1 concern (for actual EV owners, it’s a minor issue at most),
and while public charging in general suffers from unnecessary complexity
and abysmal reliability, Supercharger users report an easy-to-use, dependable
charging experience.
The legacy automakers are spinning this as good news for them, but we’re
not so sure. The move to Telsa’s NACS is an admission of defeat—the upstart
has beaten the Old Guard (who had 11 years to raise their game), and every-
Revolutionary XLPO one knows it. That’s not a great look. On the other hand, if more access to
charging helps sell more EVs in general, then let the rising tide lift all cars.
Flexibility Reaction to the news has been almost universally positive—even usually
Tesla-skeptical pundits are hailing the convergence single plug standard, and
predicting a good riddance to CSS. Standards body CharIN was one of the few
Superior Connector dissenting voices, but along with fellow standards body SAE, it has announced
Sealing that it will cooperate with the new overlords.
We hope things work out the way everyone thinks they will. More and better
charging—what’s not to like? However, all of North America’s public chargers
Reduced Bend Radius aren’t going to become Superchargers overnight. We strongly suspect that the
main reason Superchargers work much better is that they’re designed and op-
erated by one company for one small set of vehicles, and that’s going to change.
ISO-6722-1 Every new vehicle, adapter and charge point operator that signs on will com-
pound interoperability issues, and it’s going to be up to Tesla—a company with
ISO-19642-5 a less-than-perfect record of keeping its promises—to straighten it all out.
The Tesla takeover is far from the only news shaking up the EV world this
ISO-19642-9 year. President Biden’s IRA and BIL are (so far) succeeding beyond the most
optimistic predictions. Companies are investing billions to bring supply chains
to the US, creating lots of good jobs and building political support in the pro-
cess. See this issue’s feature article on Westwater Resources, page 34, which is
Industry-Leading building a huge graphite processing facility in Alabama.
California is poised to start requiring new EVs to support bidirectional
Proven Performance charging—a technology that promises to revolutionize both the transport and
utility industries. Read our interview with the CEO of Nuvve, page 72.
The incentives included in the IRA and the promise of V2X are both drivers
of another important trend: the long-awaited rise of electric trucking. Few
know more about this red-hot field than Rustam Kocher, who gives us an in-
Champlain Cable depth look at the current state of the commercial EV scene, page 64.

www.champcable.com Christian Ruoff | Publisher

sales@champcable.com EVs are here. Try to keep up.
1-800-451-5162

Issue 64.indd 10 7/1/23 1:07 PM

 28th & 29th June 2023
NEC, Birmingham, UK

Free to attend exhibition and conference for

manufacturers, engineers, and suppliers of the
advanced battery & EV industries.
Vehicle Electrification Expo will bring together the entire supply chain involved
in electric and hybrid vehicle development showcasing the very latest
technologies for this rapidly growing market.

Join leading battery & EV companies:

Register Co-located with:

for free
www.ve-expo.com @VeExpo #VEX23

Issue 64.indd 11 6/29/23 10:14 PM

 THE TECH
Image courtesy of Eaton
Eaton continues e-mobility
expansion in Europe
Power management company Eaton is continuing to
expand its European e-mobility business operations,
adding new production, office and research facilities at
several sites.
Eaton has invested in a new production facility for
power electronics components in Montrottier, France.
The new plant will produce high-voltage power compo-
nents including traction inverters and DC-DC convert-
ers. High-volume production is scheduled to begin in
mid-2023.
Eaton has also expanded a current site in Tczew, Po-
land, to include electrified vehicle capabilities.
Eaton’s electrical engineering design and testing facility
in Bonn, Germany will increase its focus on EV systems,
including the company’s Breaktor circuit protection
technology.
Last year, Eaton established a new office and laboratory
facility in Karlsruhe, Germany, near major manufactur-
ers and suppliers. Here the company will add a lab for
the testing of power electronics and power distribution
products.
Eaton is also expanding e-mobility production in
Gummersbach, Germany and Györ, Hungary.
“The electrification of automotive and commercial
vehicle markets requires new capabilities to meet the
changing industry,” said Mark Schneider, President,
E-mobility, Eaton. “We are seeing increasing global
demand for electrified vehicle solutions that are designed
and produced in our European locations.”
12
Issue 64.indd 12
Image courtesy of Metis Engineering
Metis Engineering releases
Cell Guard for battery health
monitoring in EVs
UK-based Metis Engineering has launched Cell Guard,
a battery safety sensor, to detect lithium-ion battery cell
venting and monitor battery health in EVs and energy
storage systems.
Cell Guard monitors volatile organic compounds
(VOCs), pressure change, humidity, dew point, shock
duration and shock loads (up to 24 G), unlike other
battery cell monitoring systems (BMS) that only monitor
temperature and voltage. This data can be compared to
cell temperatures and pressure spikes to detect cell vent-
ing and alert the driver within minutes.
The sensor sends data to a control unit like the vehicle’s
ECU through a customizable CAN interface, which can
also interrupt the battery pack’s circuit to prevent ther-
mal runaway. Cell Guard monitors the battery pack dew
point and provides an alert before condensation falls on
the battery contacts, which can cause shorting and ther-
mal events. There is also a threshold-triggered program-
mable pin to control relays. If a threshold is achieved,
the sensor transmits warnings via CAN and wakes the
vehicle if a problem is identified.
“As cells age, the chance of one in a pack of hundreds
or thousands having a fault increases significantly. The
early detection of cell venting is vital to the safety of the
vehicle’s passengers and everything in proximity,” said
Metis Engineering’s MD Joe Holdsworth. “Cell Guard
provides consumers with valuable and detailed informa-
tion on used EV battery condition.”
6/29/23 10:14 PM

Image courtesy of Bitrode
Bitrode launches new
generation of battery cyclers
As companies develop new battery chemistries and new
hardware and software algorithms to improve the utili-
zation and safety of batteries, advanced battery testing
equipment is gaining importance.
Bitrode has more than 65 years of experience in the
design and development of battery cyclers and battery
testing equipment. The Bitrode line of products includes
cell, module and pack testers along with battery forma-
tion equipment. In recent years, Bitrode Corporation
has been investing heavily in a new product develop-
ment team, and the team’s activities have been amplified
since September 2022 when Bitrode was acquired by the
Schuler Group.
The Bitrode Digital Cycler, which was launched at the
recent Battery Show Europe, is designed to meet the
current and future demands of the battery industry for
testing high-capacity battery cells.
Battery cyclers enable characterization and model-
ing of batteries in different stages of battery design and
development, such as inspection, validation, end-of-line
testing, pack assembly and battery management system
design.
Issue 64.indd 13
Image courtesy of Rincon Power
Rincon Power’s new RXC15
contactor offers 250 amps
continuous up to 1,000 VDC
Electronic parts manufacturer Rincon Power is expand-
ing its chassis-mount series of contactors by introducing
the new ceramically-sealed RXC15 unit, which is capable
of isolating high-voltage systems in a compact and robust
package, according to the company.
The RXC15 offers 250 amps of continuous duty for
applications up to 1,000 VDC. The single-pole, sin-
gle-throw (SPST) relay features optional auxiliary
contacts that can be used as part of a high-voltage safety
circuit, for status feedback or weld detection. The her-
metic seal allows the unit to be operated in virtually any
environment and minimizes contact oxidation over the
life of the switch, the company said. The contactor can be
installed in any orientation, even upside-down, provid-
ing needed installation flexibility.
“The RXC15 is ideal for those seeking high perfor-
mance in a small package,” said Brian Munari, Business
Development Manager at Rincon Power. “The chas-
sis-mount terminals make it easy for busbar connec-
tions or for routing large-diameter cables. There’s also
a PCB version available for those seeking an even more
compact solution. The generous over-current capability
makes this a fine choice for medium-duty loads with
high inrush without oversizing the contactor.”
APR-JUN 2023 13
6/30/23 1:52 PM
 THE TECH
Image courtesy of Delta-Q Technologies
Delta-Q Technologies begins
mass production of its 3.3 kW
EV battery charger
Canadian EV charger producer Delta-Q Technologies
has begun mass production of its mid-power battery
charger, the XV3300, for off-road mobile machinery.
The charging system’s 3-in-1 IP67-rated design
includes a 3.3 kW battery charger, a 500 W DC-DC con-
verter for auxiliary loads such as AC, lights and naviga-
tion, and an EV charging station interface. The XV3300
charges at nominal voltages from 48 V to 120 V. OEMs
can stack up to three 3.3 kW chargers for power levels
up to 10 kW with the 58.8, 65 and 120 V DC versions.
The XV3300 can charge at typical AC charging stations
in North America and Europe using SAE J1772 (Levels 1
and 2) and IEC 61851 (Modes 2 and 3) connectors.
“No other 3.3 kW charger on the market also includes
a DC-DC converter for auxiliary DC loads and an EVSE
charging interface in such a compact size,” said Mourad
Chergui, Senior Product Manager at Delta-Q. “As we
start full-scale production, we can begin to fulfill the
substantial demand we received since we first announced
the initial development.”
14
Issue 64.indd 14
Image courtesy of Inficon
INFICON releases ELT3000
PLUS electrolyte leak detector
for Li-ion and sodium-ion
batteries
INFICON, a leak-testing device and instrument manu-
facturer, has released an upgraded electrolyte leak detec-
tor for in-line leak testing of batteries.
The ELT3000 PLUS directly detects electrolyte solvent
leakage into a vacuum chamber to test ready-filled lith-
ium-ion and sodium-ion batteries in all cell formats. It
has manual and automatic in-line leak detection modes
for fast cycle times and high throughput in series man-
ufacturing, and can simultaneously test multiple cells.
INFICON says its method identifies leaks with all cell
formats, including prismatic, round or button cells and
soft pouch cells.
With its automated calibration capability, the ELT3000
PLUS can monitor different electrolyte leakages in 30
seconds and transfer all test results to each plant’s quality
system in real time. The ELT3000 PLUS can evaluate
leaks a few micrometers in diameter at 5.10-7 mbar.I/s
(helium equivalent leak rate), reducing the risk of battery
failure from water or humidity. The smallest detectable
leak rate of its predecessor, the ELT3000, was 1.10-6
mbar.l/s.
“With its high throughput and accuracy, integrating
the ELT3000 PLUS into the production line will add only
seconds to cell production, and it can save millions in
costly recalls from malfunctioning lithium-ion battery
cells,” said Thomas Parker, an INFICON Sales Manager.
“The ELT3000 PLUS operates to ISO standards and can
easily integrate into a battery cell production line.”
6/29/23 10:16 PM
 Aspen Aerogels opens

Image courtesy of Aspen Aerogels

Advanced Thermal Barrier
Center in US to optimize cell-
to-cell barriers
Aspen Aerogels, an aerogel-based electrification compa-
ny, has opened new engineering and rapid prototyping
facilities in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Aspen’s 59,000-square-foot Advanced Thermal Barrier
Center (ATBC) will create PyroThin cell-to-cell barriers barrier technologies. This center aims to commercialize
to optimize battery pack safety and performance for next-generation thermal runaway technologies for EVs
the e-mobility and energy storage system sectors. The while also providing customer-facing technical services.
PyroThin barriers prevent thermal runaway propagation “Our strategy is to leverage our Aerogel Technology
and are optimized based on the manufacturer’s perfor- Platform into large important markets, especially those
mance and critical safety requirements. Global manufac- with sustainability and electrification themes,” said Don
turers can use ATBC’s quick prototyping and real-time Young, President and CEO. “The ATBC is designed to be
engineering collaboration to develop thermal mechanical the center of our customer-facing work.”

Modular SiC Inverter

M
EE
T
US
Reference Design

AT
Bo
ot
h
91
1
Powered by CISSOID SiC Intelligent Power
Module & Silicon Mobility OLEA® T222
FCPU & OLEA® APP INVERTER Software.
This Inverter offers a modular electrical and mechanical
integration of a 3-phase 1200V/340A-550A SiC
MOSFET Intelligent Power Module from CISSOID
with OLEA® T222 FPCU control board and
application software from Silicon Mobility. This
unique hardware and software supports the rapid
development of e-motor drives up to 350kW/850V,
setting new levels in terms of power density and
efficiency.

• Up to 350kW/850V • Robust SiC gate driver

• Modular SiC power module • OLEA® T222 FPCU controller
• Low-ESL DC-Link capacitor • DC & phase current sensors
• 900V/400A EMI filter • Advanced control algorithms
• Liquid cooling • SVPWM or DPWM up to 50kHz

www.cissoid.com

Cissoid half page Charged EV May 23 Battery Show.indd 1 15/05/2023 13:46

Issue 64.indd 15 6/29/23 10:16 PM

 THE TECH
Image courtesy of Henkel
Henkel’s new injectable
thermally conductive adhesive
for EV battery systems
Henkel Adhesive Technologies has extended its portfolio
of solutions for EV battery systems with a new injectable
thermally conductive adhesive. The new adhesive, Loctite
TLB 9300 APSi, provides both structural bonding and
thermal conductivity in the battery system. Henkel says
the new product has already been adopted by a major EV
battery manufacturer.
Designed for applications such as bonding battery cells
to modules, or bonding cells directly to cooling systems,
Loctite TLB 9300 APSi is a two-component polyurethane
thermally conductive adhesive with a high thermal con-
ductivity of 3 W/mK, moderate viscosity, and self-level-
ling characteristics. In addition to its heat management
properties, it’s designed to deliver a combination of good
electrical insulation with high bonding performance to a
variety of substrates. It’s a solvent-free solution that cures
at room temperature without the need for additional
energy consumption.
“Loctite TLB 9300 APSi is a testament to Henkel’s
continued efforts to innovate new e-mobility solutions
tailored to solve today’s battery manufacturing challenges
and enable the next-generation designs of tomorrow,”
said Holger Schuh, Global Senior Manager Thermal
Technologies at Henkel. “Its immediate adoption by a
major battery manufacturer demonstrates our close part-
nership with key players in the e-mobility industry.”
16
Issue 64.indd 16
Ford signs lithium and nickel
deals to secure IRA-compliant
supply
Ford appears to be working to build the supply chain
it will need to reach its goal of producing two million
IRA-compliant EVs per year by 2026. The automaker
recently signed lithium supply agreements with five
producers, and Benchmark Minerals predicts that, with
these deals and a nickel supply agreement, Ford has
secured more than 90% of the lithium and nickel it will
require to meet its two-million-vehicle target.
According to Lisa Drake, VP of EV Industrialization
at Ford, supply agreements with two major lithium
providers have “significantly de-risked” the automaker’s
expansion plans. Albemarle will supply 100,000 tonnes of
lithium hydroxide between 2026 and 2030, and Chilean
producer SQM will deliver an unspecified amount of
lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide.
Ford is also investing in lithium projects still under
development, which Drake says supports the “need to
continue exploring reserves and development extraction
technologies” in order to “further diversify the industry.”
Ford says it will become the first customer of Nemaska
Lithium, which is developing a mine and processing fa-
cility in Québec. Nemaska will supply Ford with spodu-
mene concentrate from its existing Whabouchi mine,
and will supply up to 13,000 tonnes per year of lithium
hydroxide from its Bécancour plant for 11 years once that
facility comes online.
EnergySource Minerals will supply an unspecified
amount of lithium hydroxide from a 20,000-tonne-per-
year brine project in Imperial Valley, California, which is
expected to start operating in 2025.
Compass Minerals will provide Ford with up to 40%
of the lithium carbonate from its Utah brine project for
5 years once it starts producing. The facility is to enter
production in 2025 with an initial nameplate capacity of
11,000 tpa of lithium carbonate.
Last year, Ford signed an offtake agreement with
Ioneer, which is developing a lithium mine in Nevada.
Drake says one Ford battery plant will have access to
a supply of IRA-compliant nickel sulphate intermediate
MHP, under a 2022 deal with Brazilian miner Vale.
6/29/23 10:16 PM
 LG Energy Solution to build a $5.5-billion battery manufacturing
complex in Arizona

Image courtesy of LG Energy Solution

South Korean battery manufacturer LG Energy Solution
will invest approximately $5.5 billion to construct a bat-
tery manufacturing complex in Queen Creek, Arizona.
The complex will consist of two manufacturing facili-
ties—one for cylindrical batteries for EVs and another
for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pouch-type batteries
for energy storage systems (ESS).
The company plans to invest $3.2 billion in building
the EV battery manufacturing facility which will have a The ESS facility, meanwhile, is slated to start production
capacity of 27 GWh and $2.3 billion in the LFP pouch- in 2026.
type battery facility which will have a capacity of 16 “Our decision to invest in Arizona demonstrates our
GWh. LG plans to break ground on both plants this year. strategic initiative to continue expanding our global
LG aims to begin mass production at the cylindrical production network to further advance our products in
battery plant in 2025 with an initial capacity of 2,170 scale and with speed,” said Youngsoo Kwon, CEO of LG
cells per year, mainly for EV makers in North America. Energy Solution.

PROCESS SOLUTIONS FOR BATTERY

MANUFACTURING

YOUR PARTNER
IN E-MOBILITY
We offer process solutions for bonding battery
cells, sealing or potting battery packs and
modules, applying thermal materials, with
plasma pre-treatment worldwide. As well as
machines for joining electronic components
with heat staking.

www.bdtronic.com

Issue 64.indd 17 6/29/23 10:18 PM

 THE TECH
Image courtesy of Pre-Switch
Pre-Switch includes remote
update and analysis features
in Pre-Flex controller for SoC
Pre-Switch, a producer of AI-based soft-switching power
systems, has allowed the reprogramming of its Pre-Flex
motor/inverter controller SoC for EVs, and has incorpo-
rated a digital oscilloscope, allowing designers to remote-
ly diagnose and make modifications.
Pre-Flex ICs have AI algorithms for soft switching
across all operating voltages, load situations and tem-
peratures, and adjust cycle-by-cycle. Pre-Switch tech-
nology delivers 99.57% (peak) and 98.5% (at 5% load)
inverter efficiency for e-mobility applications at 100 kHz
switching frequency. Deep View, the integrated digital
oscilloscope, allows 12 channels and 160 MSPS to ana-
lyze switching timing. Recording and exporting traces
show system performance, helping in diagnosing issues
and taking corrective action.
“Pre-Switch eliminates switching losses and thereby
reduces the amount of SiC or IGBTs needed for high
efficiency. This substantially improves low load efficien-
cy and runs at 5-10 times higher switching frequencies
which improves motor efficiency and reduces DC link
capacitor size and cost,” said Bruce Renouard, Pre-
Switch’s CEO. “To enable engineers to utilize Pre-Flex AI
technology, Pre-Switch developed the CleanWave invert-
er reference system, the PDS-2 development system with
Deep View and the remote programming, Pre-Tune dy-
namometer motor control tuner, a resonant tank design
tool and training courses.”
18
Issue 64.indd 18
Huber’s new Unimotive
model range offers precise
temperature control for
battery and material tests
Temperature control is a critical
Image courtesy of ARaymond
factor during stress and load
testing in the development of
batteries and other vehicle com-
ponents. The heat transfer fluid
(HTF) used in testing is often a
water-ethylene glycol mixture.
To address these applications,
thermoregulation specialist
Huber has expanded its portfolio
to include temperature-control
systems designed and tested specifically for use with
water-ethylene glycol over the temperature range of -45°
to 95° C for the automotive industry.
Based on Huber’s Unistat technology, which the com-
pany developed over 40 years ago, these systems operate
with a very low volume of HTF, and feature plate heat
exchangers and a sealed fluid system. Huber says this
results in very short “time to temperature” times, as well
as extremely responsive, stable, accurate and repeatable
temperature control.
The Unimotive series comprises five units with up
to 35 kW cooling capacity and 24 kW heating capac-
ity. Each model is fitted with a magnetically coupled,
speed-controlled pump with a maximum flow of 145 l/
min and pressure up to 5.5 Bar.
Unimotive devices can be individually configured
and adapted to various test situations, or integrated into
existing test benches. Various sensors, expansion vessels,
pumps and data interfaces are available as accessories.
Huber can build custom-designed solutions for de-
manding applications, for example those requiring high
pressures or aggressive fluids.
All Unimotive models are operated using a touch-
screen controller that supports the most common data
communication protocols (including Profibus, Modbus,
TCP, Ethernet, OPC-UA, RS232 and USB), enabling easy
integration into automated industrial environments.
6/29/23 10:19 PM
 NI’s Software-Defined Battery Lab is NEW MOBILITY
designed for continuous improvement
NI, formerly known as National Instruments, has launched a new testing
solution for battery validation labs. NI’s Software-Defined Battery Lab cov-
ers the entire battery lifecycle from research and development to validation,
production, second life and remanufacturing.
High-voltage
The Software-Defined Battery Lab is designed to support EV manufactur-
ers and battery suppliers. It allows battery validation and data management
contactors for
and analysis of battery data, and it’s designed to be open and flexible to scale
for global validation testing and adapt to innovations in battery technolo- the mobility of
gies.
The Software-Defined Battery Lab draws parallels from the concept of tomorrow
Software-defined vehicles, which allows engineering teams to continuously
improve performance. As battery technologies evolve and scale, companies
can accelerate test system development, maximize reuse of battery testing
investments, and connect battery data to improve performance through
changes to software.
“We’re in the nascent stages of the battery revolution,” said Drita Roggen-
buck, Senior VP of the Transportation Business Unit at NI. “Companies are
faced with driving down battery costs, improving performance, innovating
endlessly, and scaling. At a time when new vehicle programs are as short
as ever, and battery validation and production must scale immediately and
C US
continuously through the end of the decade, NI’s Software-Defined Battery
Lab offers the step function change needed to improve time to market and DC Contactor
battery performance.” Series C310
NI’s Battery Test Software provides battery testing capabilities out of the
box, and also allows customization and extensibility through LabVIEW and
other common test software.
The newly announced NI SystemLink Enterprise software is a scalable en-
terprise solution for managing labs, improving test operations and analyzing
test results. It offers lab management functionality including:
• Test request tracking and scheduling
• Tester status, utilization and health monitoring
• Test software management and deployment
• Battery data aggregation, visualization and analytics
NI’s extensive battery cycler portfolio offers solutions for every phase of
battery development. NI’s newest cycler, HPS-17000, provides up to 150 kW
of power. NI’s open software allows integration with third-party cyclers to
increase development efficiency and enable reuse. Innovative electromechanical
The NI battery measurement and control hardware is built on NI’s soft- components developed for the
highest safety requirements.
ware-connected, modular hardware platforms. These systems can be quickly
reconfigured and customized to meet rapidly changing test requirements,
Contact us:
including integration with third-party components. sales@schaltbau-na.com

www.schaltbau.com

Issue 64.indd 19 6/29/23 10:19 PM

 THE TECH
Image courtesy of Vitesco Technologies
Vitesco Technologies presents
new electric drive without rare
earths
Vitesco Technologies has introduced an upgraded
version of its electric axle drive platform for main and
auxiliary drives that does not use rare earth elements.
Vitesco’s fourth-generation Electronics Motor Reducer
(EMR4) will be based on a non-permanent magnet rotor.
This rotor powers an externally excited synchronous ma-
chine (EESM) without rare earths, which decreases rotor
costs and eliminates the carbon footprint of mining and
processing ores. The company claims that this machine
saves a watt-hour of electricity per kilometer since there
is no drag from a permanent magnet field in the rotor,
lowering the drive’s power requirements by up to 5%
without a mechanical decoupling mechanism.
“The EESM option requires an additional inverter
module to control the coils. Nevertheless, we are really
close to an EESM plug-and-play solution,” said Vitesco
Technologies Innovation Head Dr. Gerd Rösel.
20
Issue 64.indd 20
Piedmont Lithium and Sayona
to provide lithium to LG Chem
and Tesla from Québec mines
Piedmont Lithium’s joint venture partner, Sayona
Mining, has released a definitive feasibility study (DFS)
for the jointly-owned North American Lithium (NAL)
project, and has increased its forecast for the amount of
lithium mineral resources at its Moblan Lithium Project.
Both projects are located in the province of Québec.
The NAL DFS contemplates increased annual spodu-
mene concentrate production averaging 190,000 metric
tons per year over a 20-year mine life. The revised pro-
duction targets, combined with higher spodumene con-
centrate pricing, resulted in an increase to the net present
value for the NAL project compared to the prefeasibility
study completed in 2022.
Sayona undertook a strategic review of mineral
resources and ore reserves in order to focus on high-
er-grade open-pit material. Based on the revised block
model, certain indicated resources have been reclassified
as inferred resources. The study contemplates a mine life
of 20 years.
Piedmont has an offtake agreement with Sayona
Québec to purchase the greater of 113,000 tpy or 50% of
the joint venture’s spodumene concentrate production.
Piedmont has agreements with LG Chem and Tesla to
provide spodumene from NAL beginning in H2 2023.
Sayona Québec is undertaking a prefeasibility study to
explore downstream production at NAL, and expects
results in Q2 2023.
Separately, Sayona has announced a significant in-
crease in mineral resources at its 60%-owned Moblan
project in northern Québec. Measured and indicated
mineral resources at Moblan now total 41.1 million met-
ric tons, making it one of North America’s most signifi-
cant spodumene ore bodies.
6/29/23 10:19 PM
 Schaltbau introduces 800-volt contactors
Schaltbau, a supplier of safety components for DC

Image courtesy of Schaltbau

systems, has designed contactors to meet the charging
and driving requirements of 800-volt EVs, which are
equipped with two 400-volt battery banks.
The C801 interlock contactor is compact and designed
to fit the usual installation geometries inside an EV.
The contact area has substantial air gaps, allowing for
an insulation voltage of 1,000 V. Due to strong contact
forces and optimized contact geometry, the contactor
can withstand a thermal continuous current of 250 A increasing demand for high-range mid-size vehicles as
and a short-time withstand current of 16,000 A during well as commercial vehicles and buses.
operation. “When driving, the contacts are open,” explains Gün-
The contactors only operate while charging at 400 V ther Rott, Director Business Development Automotive of
charging stations, and do not consume power or gener- Schaltbau. “Therefore, it is important that the contactor
ate heat when driving or charging at 800 V. The contac- does not close uncontrollably even under high mechan-
tor includes a proprietary mechanical interlock system ical loads, as may occur during an accident. Were this to
that keeps the connections from closing even if there are happen, the consequence would be a short circuit that
extreme shocks of up to 120 g per 20 ms. Schaltbau is would destroy the junction box and probably also the
also preparing to produce interlock contactors to meet vehicle.”

If you are looking for high precision thermoregulation

from -45 °C up to +150 °C designed for automotive test rigs
... go for Unimotive®
Unimotive® series

The Unimotive range is specially designed for

applications in the automotive industry. Typical
applications include temperature simulations as well
as material testing and temperature-dependent
stress and load tests for automotive parts and
functional components.
 Flow measurement and control options
 with water-ethylene glycol mixture

ice Hotline: +1 844-22

Serv 3-8
67
3

Coast to Coast Service

and 72hrs on site service 

sup
p ort@
-usa.
co m
3 Years *

huber-
usa.com · www.huber Warranty Extension

www.huber-usa.com/register
* at registration – see website for details.

Huber USA Inc. Register now!

1101 Nowell Rd Ste 110 • Raleigh NC 27607

Phone 1-800 726 4877 • info@huber-usa.com
www.huber-usa.com

Issue 64.indd 21 6/29/23 10:20 PM

 A PRIMER ON WIRELESS
EV CHARGING
TECHNOLOGY
22

Issue 64.indd 22 6/29/23 10:21 PM


By Jeffrey Jenkins
Two main types of wireless
power transfer systems are
being pursued these days:
the inductive type, which is
magnetically coupled, and
resonantly-coupled systems
using electromagnetic fields.
Issue 64.indd 23
THE TECH
T
he instant availability of maximum torque
makes driving even the most economy-orient-
ed EV way more fun than its ICE counterpart,
but few would hold the same opinion about
the refueling process, especially at fast charge stations with
charging cables that rival a Burmese python in size. Wire-
less charging does do away with wrangling those massive
cables, but as regular readers of these articles can probably
guess, there are some significant trade-offs involved. Still,
it does appear that most of the issues are being addressed,
so perhaps this will be the year that wireless EV charging
finally hits the mainstream.
Wireless EV chargers are portrayed as cutting-edge
technology, but the MagneCharge system made by Hughes
(a division of GM at the time) was commercially available
on EVs way back in the early 1990s . The MagneCharge
system employed a paddle-shaped charging head which
contained the primary coil. This was inserted into a mating
slot on the vehicle which contained the secondary coil.
Though one still had to physically handle a cable, power
was transferred across an air gap without any exposed
contacts, so this was very much a wireless charging system.
More specifically, it was of the magnetically-coupled (aka
inductive) type, which is one of the two main types of wire-
less power transfer systems being pursued these days (the
other—to be discussed in much more detail below—utiliz-
es resonant coupling).
An inductive wireless power transfer system consists
of (at least) two coils of wire that are usually flat spirals in
shape and which are placed in very close proximity and
in the same plane and axial orientation. An alternating
current supplied to one or more primary coils generates
a time-varying magnetic field that induces an alternating
current in the secondary coil. If that sounds suspiciously
like a transformer to you, that’s because it is—the only
difference is that the primary and secondary are physically
separated rather than wound on the same core. It should
be noted that minimizing the separation between primary
and secondary is a major design driver in proper trans-
formers as it maximizes the amount of coupling between
the two sides—ergo, the farther the two coils are apart, the
lower the amount of power that can be transferred between
them. This is sometimes oversimplified as efficiency being
inversely proportional to separation distance (air gap), and
that isn’t entirely untrue, but it’s more accurate to say that
increasing the air gap reduces the amount of power that
can be transferred because as the air gap increases, more of
APR-JUN 2023 23
6/29/23 10:21 PM
 THE TECH
As the separation between the
coils increases, more of the
energy that would be transmitted
by them instead circulates
between the power source and
the primary’s leakage inductance,
doing no useful work.
the magnetic field lines from the primary only travel in a
loop through the air back to itself, without ever intersect-
ing the secondary.
In transformer terminology, these orphaned loops of
magnetic field are called leakage, and they give rise to the
dreaded leakage inductance, which will store energy re-
ceived from the source only to send it back a quarter-cycle
later (behaving much like a spring). In other words, as the
separation between the coils increases, more of the energy
that would be transmitted by them instead circulates be-
tween the power source and the primary’s leakage induc-
tance, doing no useful work. If there were no resistance
present, then this circulating current would have no effect
on efficiency, but in the real (or practical) world there are
I2R losses incurred, hence increasing the separation dis-
tance does reduce efficiency. One thing to note is that the
purely magnetic fields of the inductively-coupled system
24
Issue 64.indd 24
Figure 1: Block diagram of an
inductive wireless power system
(as compared to the electromagnetic fields used by the res-
onantly-coupled system) aren’t blocked by non-magnetic
metals like aluminum, copper, etc, but will induce currents
in them, and that will lower the overall transfer efficiency.
The Hughes MagneCharge system aside, which operated at
6.6 kW (and had a very impressive efficiency for its time of
80%), inductively-coupled wireless power transfer systems
are typically used at lower power levels and where a low
separation distance (less than a few mm) is easy to main-
tain, especially when minimizing cost is important, since
the coupling mechanism really is no more complicated
than two coils which can be treated as a regular transform-
er from the circuit’s perspective.
The Hughes MagneCharge system did have some
significant safety advantages over conductive charging
interconnects such as J1772, CHAdeMO, etc, but it wasn’t
much more convenient to use, as you still had to get out
of the EV and physically place the charging paddle into a
slotted receptacle on the EV to start charging. Arguably not
a big deal if the weather is nice (or the charging station is
inside a covered garage), but there’s no denying that merely
having to park in a specific (but not too specific) spot then
just tapping a button on a phone app or the EV’s user
interface to initiate charging would be far more convenient.
Such an arrangement with an inductively-coupled system
would require an almost Rube Goldberg-like mechanical
contraption to bring the two coils close enough together
to effect power transfer with reasonable efficiency, and to
retract the EV-side coil far enough up in the undercarriage
to have sufficient ground clearance to survive potholes,
speed bumps and the like while driving.
6/29/23 10:21 PM
 A system that didn’t require the
power transmitting and receiving
m coils to be brought into such close
proximity (and that didn’t require
such precise positional alignment
of them, too) would make it so that
fixed coils could be used on the
ground and on the EV, and that is
where the resonantly-coupled ap-
proach starts to shine. It is tolerant
of a much larger air gap between
transmitter and receiver (over
100 times larger—tens of cm can
be accommodated), is less picky
about alignment between the two,
and as a bonus, the magnetic field
from the transmitting coil will
naturally be most attracted to the
receiving coil, and will drop to a
very low level in the absence of a
load on the receiving coil, rather
than radiating off into free space in
all directions at all times, as is the
case with the inductively-coupled
approach. What’s not to love about
resonant coupling, then? Certainly
plenty—and more on why below—
but the basic issues are that it’s
much more complex and far less
tolerant of variations in compo-
nent value. Despite that, resonant
coupling still compares favorably
to the mechanical contraptions
needed to accommodate inductive
coupling at a similar power level
(on the premise that electronic
complexity is usually less costly to
implement than mechanical).
Power transfer in the resonant-
ly-coupled system uses electro-
magnetic fields, the same used by a
microwave oven, a radio broadcast
station, etc, except that the bulk of
the energy is transported by the
magnetic field component, and the
electric field is effectively out of the
picture. This is possible because

Issue 64.indd 25 6/29/23 10:22 PM

 THE TECH
the electric and magnetic fields don’t come together to
form a proper electromagnetic field until they have trav-
eled some distance from the antenna. Furthermore, closed
loops (like coils) are best at radiating magnetic fields, and
are largely ineffective at radiating electric fields (open wires
or plates are best for that). Basically, then, as long as the
transmitting and receiving coils of the resonantly-coupled
system are located within the so-called near field—loosely
defined as a distance of 1/6 of a wavelength or less, where
the wavelength, in meters, is fMHz / 300—power trans-
fer will occur using just the magnetic component of the
electromagnetic field, and little will be diverted into the
electric field. While the circuitry involved in the reso-
nantly-coupled system is far more complex than that of
its inductive counterpart, the transmitting/receiving coils
might not look that different. The main difference is that,
in the resonant system, capacitors are added to each coil to
form—no prizes for guessing correctly—resonant LC net-
works (or tanks in the argot) which will naturally oscillate
at a frequency (in Hz) of 1 / (2 * Π * (L * C)^0.5) and have
a characteristic impedance of (L / C)^0.5.
Assuming that both LC tanks have fairly similar reso-
nant frequencies (and the separation distance is within the
near field), they will preferentially couple to each other
rather than to free space, and will generally ignore other
non-metallic objects (as with purely magnetic fields). This
effectively results in power tunneling directly from the
transmitting LC tank to the receiving one in the resonant-
ly-coupled system, rather than radiating off in all direc-
tions, as would be the case with the electromagnetic fields
26
Issue 64.indd 26
Figure 2: Diagram of the WiTricity resonant
inductive wireless power system demonstrated
by Marin Soljacic’s MIT team in 2007
Power transfer will occur using just
the magnetic component of the
electromagnetic field, and little will
be diverted into the electric field.
of a conventional RF wireless antenna system, or in big
loops that follow the same path whether a receiving coil is
present or not, as is the case with the purely magnetic fields
of the inductively-coupled system.
Another advantage of the resonantly-coupled system
over the inductive one is that the LC tanks automatically
convert any waveform thrown at them into a pure sine
wave, resulting in much lower noise emissions (read: a
far easier time getting through EMC compliance test-
ing). And just as LC networks are used to perform soft
switching in power converters, they can do the same here,
greatly reducing switching losses in both the downstream
rectifier as well as the upstream power converter.
So far the resonantly-coupled system doesn’t seem that
much more complicated than the inductive one—just add
a capacitor across each power transfer coil and call it a
day, right?—but there are numerous headaches that come
from resonant operation that might have you thinking
that the MagneCharge paddle wasn’t such a bad solution
after all. First, as already mentioned, real-world inductors
and capacitors tend to have much looser tolerances on
6/30/23 1:52 PM
 value, and both (but especially ca-
pacitors with any kind of dielectric
besides air or vacuum) will drift in
value over time and temperature,
so there needs to be some means
of automatically tracking the
actual resonant frequency of each
tank. The usual solution here is a
phase-locked loop, or PLL, that
tries to maintain a peak in sensed
voltage (or current) in the LC tank
by adjusting the driving frequen-
cy. However, it is critical that the
frequency adjustment remain on
one side of the peak, otherwise
the control loop action will invert
(i.e. as the peak value decreases,
the frequency adjusts to make it
worse, rather than correcting it).
Second, resonant LC tanks work
best at a fixed power level (giv-
en by the loaded Q, or the ratio
between the load resistance and
tank characteristic impedance),
as varying the pulse width on the
driving side does little to change
the power throughput (a side
effect of the resonant LC network
turning any waveform applied to
it into a sine wave), so if the power
level needs to change, either the
driving frequency has to change or
the driving pulses have to be sup-
plied in bursts. Third, bringing the
Charge Ahead in
Battery Design
two LC tanks too close together
will paradoxically result in them
detuning each other! Basically,
designing a resonantly-coupled with COMSOL Multiphysics®
wireless power transfer system
that can be mass-reproduced—i.e.
Multiphysics simulation helps in the development of innovative
made into a real product—is a
battery technology by providing insight into mechanisms that
Herculean feat, and that probably
impact battery operation, safety, and durability. The ability to
explains why it is taking so long
run virtual experiments based on multiphysics models, from
for such products to hit the mar-
the detailed cell structure to battery pack scale, helps you make
ket, despite the extremely alluring
accurate predictions of real-world battery performance.
convenience they promise.
» comsol.com/feature/battery-design-innovation

Issue 64.indd 27 6/29/23 10:22 PM

 THE TECH
AS THE OFF-ROAD
VEHICLE MARKET
RUSHES TO ELECTRIFY,
STANDARDS ARE LAGGING BEHIND.
C
onstruction vehicles are being electrified
at a surprisingly rapid pace, as operators
recognize not only the cost savings, but
the advantages of silent, emission-free
operation. However, the high power
requirements of these vehicles mean that vehicle design-
ers face unique technical challenges, especially when it
comes to circuit protection.
High-voltage DC current is more dangerous and harder
to interrupt than the comparatively sedate 48 volts used
in smaller vehicles. Unfortunately, thanks to the fast pace
of electrification and the slow pace of standards bodies,
electrical safety standards for heavy vehicles are lagging
behind the market.
As the industry gets ahead of the standards, the
uncertainty is delaying time to market for many compa-
nies, and cutting into profits (to say nothing of poten-
tially endangering peoples’ safety).
Circuit protection specialist Littelfuse began its history
selling products for the Ford Model T, and it makes
circuit protection components for every kind of vehicle
imaginable. Geoffrey Schwartz, Business Development
Manager at Littelfuse Commercial Vehicle Products, told
Charged some stories to illustrate the chaotic situation
that’s delaying the move to EVs.
28
Issue 64.indd 28
Littelfuse has seen designs using 32 V fuses for 600 V
systems, and companies using industrial fuses because
high-voltage automotive-qualified fuses aren’t available.
When engineers specify components that aren’t automo-
tive-rated, they are then forced to spend time in extensive
testing to make sure their vehicles don’t catch fire.
Suppliers have to guess at what the eventual standards
will look like, and try to ensure that their products will
meet the standards when they’re finally published.
Q Charged: So, there’s a lack of standards for vehicles
that use higher-voltage electrical architectures?
A Geoff Schwartz: Yes. All the standards organizations are
running behind. I’m on the SAE Truck and Bus Electrical
Systems Committee, and I know we are trying to write 48-volt
standards now. We are looking at a few higher-voltage
standards, but the real standards, they’re probably three to five
years out. It takes so long to write a standard, for everybody in
the industry to come together and come to an agreement. The
standards committees just don’t move that fast.
We’re seeing a series of electrical architectures, with one
group around smaller equipment at 48 volts, and a me-
dium range—200 to 500 volts—in large equipment and
medium-duty trucks. Then as you get into larger vehicles—
6/29/23 10:23 PM
 Q&A WITH
LITTELFUSE’S “We’re seeing a series of electrical
architectures, with one group

GEOFFREY
around smaller equipment at 48
volts, and a medium range—200 to
500 volts—in large equipment and

SCHWARTZ
By Charles Morris
medium-duty trucks. ”

APR-JUN 2023 29

Issue 64.indd 29 6/29/23 10:23 PM

 THE TECH
trucks, tractors, large construction equipment—that stuff ’s
all going to 800 volts up to 1,000 volts.
When will they need to go higher than 1,000 volts? I’m
pretty convinced that’s a 2035 problem. The EPA require-
ments are that commercial vehicles will have to be 40%
electric by 2035. And there’s 40% of the Class 8 market and
the medium-duty market that [drives] under 250 miles a
day. With current technology, they can hit those numbers.
You can get 250 miles a day even with a full load nowadays,
so that technology is there for right now. But the problem
is going to come in 2035 when they exhaust that 40%. Then
you have to look at longer-range vehicles, and that’s when
I suspect you’re going to see them go above 1,000 volts,
because they have to pack more power into the device.
A couple of things are holding that up right now—num-
ber one is the power electronics. Most automotive power
electronics are maxed out around 1,200 volts. You’re starting
to see some creep up to 1,500, 1,800 volts, but most of them,
and most of the volume and affordable ones, are 1,200 volts
and under. They can’t go much above 800 to 1,000 volts in
battery technology with their electronics only at 1,200 volts.
Q Charged: Would you say the biggest standards gap is
in safety best practices?
A Geoff Schwartz: Yeah, things like what’s the proper
spacing of wiring and stuff like that. What do you need for
gapping in the wiring, and what are the connectors you
need at that level? And then there’s interoperability and all
those standards that we take for granted in the 12- and
24-volt world. They don’t really exist in the 800-volt world.
Right now I’m working on a committee where we’re de-
fining the standard for an ePTO (electric power take-off )
connection. We’re talking about the physical connector, but
there’s also the communication side of things, the electron-
ic handshaking routine that has to take place—when you
plug this thing in, it’s got to acknowledge and say, Okay,
I’m connected correctly, and then turn on the power. With
the HVIL [high-voltage interlock], you’ve got to turn the
power off when you pull the plug out of something.
One of the things that standards organizations do is try
and make it about the interface and about the performance
rather than the actual design, so that there’s some freedom
for companies to find a base for competition. As long as
they are interchangeable, what you do with the rest of it is a
competitive advantage.
30
Issue 64.indd 30
It’s the Wild West. A lot of
people out there are running
industrial fuses in vehicles. And
yeah, they’ll work, but industrial
fuses are not built for vehicle-
based vibration and shock.
Q Charged: Do the same standards bodies oversee
on-highway stuff ?
A Geoff Schwartz: Yeah. The SAE committee covers on-
and off-highway. There are specialty committees that cover
special areas of off-highway, but mostly they kind of count
on the truck and bus committee to write the electrical
standards, so there are rarely separate standards for those
things. And there’s enough [overlap] between those
organizations in membership that we share information
nicely and we try and work together.
Q Charged: How are vehicle designers dealing with
the lack of standards? And what do you recommend to
designers right now that are tasked with designing
these systems?
A Geoff Schwartz: It’s the Wild West. A lot of people out
there are running industrial fuses in vehicles. And yeah,
they’ll work, but industrial fuses are not built for
vehicle-based vibration and shock. They’re built to go in
a building, so they’re just not capable in a lot of cases of
maintaining life in a vibration situation, which is typical
of a vehicle.
As for designers, find somebody who knows what they’re
doing and work with them. There are any number of
suppliers out there who have the expertise, who are willing
to work with you. Talk to them early, bring them on board,
make them a partner. They’ve brought experience in from
other people. They’ve been doing this for a long time.
That’s probably the best advice I can give: Find a supplier
partner and bring them in.
The biggest problem with the lack of standards is that it’s
hard for suppliers. It’s hard for OEMs to figure out what to
6/29/23 10:23 PM
 make, and therefore everything is
essentially custom. So a lot of this
stuff ends up costing more because
it’s one-off. It’s also very low-vol-
ume right now, so that tends to
drive the cost up as well. Standards
will help drive consistency, and
they’ll drive volume improvements
and cost improvements.

Q Charged: I imagine it affects

speed to market as well.

A Geoff Schwartz: Of course it

does, because everything has to be
customized for that particular
OEM. This one’s doing it a little bit
differently than that one. We do
high-voltage PDMs [power
distribution modules], and
everybody keeps coming in asking
for it off the shelf. But nobody
wants it off the shelf: “Mine’s a little
different. Can’t you do something a
little bit differently?”

Q Charged: How is Littelfuse

trying to bridge the gap between
the demand for products and the
lack of standards?

A Geoff Schwartz: We’re already

out there in the market with all
kinds of products, and the stan-
dards are well behind. We’re
starting to bring components out
now that are getting up into the
1,000-volt realm. The testing
involved, because the energy levels
are so high, just takes time. We are
still working on getting our
1,000-volt fuses out. Once you
have the design done and you have
it in production, there’s about a
year’s worth of testing we need to
do for every single one of the
Schedule a Meeting
[voltage] values to get it qualified. aerogel.com/PyroThin

Issue 64.indd 31 6/29/23 10:23 PM

 THE TECH
There’s a 500-volt standard for fuses right now. There’s no
1,000-volt standard. So we’ve taken that 500-volt standard
that we helped write and we’re extending it up to 1,000 volts.
We’re pulling stuff in from ISO standards, from OEM stan-
dards, and trying to pick worst-case of everything. If we can
hit worst-case in everything, we will be able to meet every-
body’s standards. That’s kind of what we’re designing to.
Q Charged: I understand you saw a huge variety of
electrified vehicles and industrial equipment at the
recent CONEXPO.
A Geoff Schwartz: I was surprised—I thought that it was
going to be mostly small equipment, but there was a lot of
mid-sized to larger equipment that was also going
electric, including some really large stuff for mining.
Probably one of the fastest things out there going electric
is underground mining, because one of the big problems
is, when you have diesel equipment down in a mine, how
do you get all the fumes out?
Small construction equipment is tending to move to 48
volts, for two reasons. Number one, they can get a full day’s
work out of a 48-volt battery pack, so they don’t need to go
higher. And at 48 volts, they’re below that 60-volt threshold
and don’t have to have as much protection and guarding
because it’s not considered to be a lethal voltage level.
The other thing is they’ve got a lot of existing infra-
structure already built for the material-handling industry.
There’s a huge number of 48-volt forklifts and things like
that and they’re stealing components from those areas to
build their products. Forklifts are a pretty high-volume
business in our realm. Not like cars, but they make several
hundred thousand forklifts a year, easily—maybe world-
wide, over a million. That’s a higher-volume product and
that tends to drive lower prices, so they’re using those 48-
volt parts, components and architecture.
We’re seeing more and more movement towards electric
in construction, and that’s happening for a couple of rea-
sons. Number one, it’s a lot better, particularly when you’re
working indoors or when you’re working in an urban envi-
ronment. Also, it’s a maintenance issue. For those vehicles,
maintenance is key. If your car is not working—oh, that’s
a pain, but I’ll use the other car or I’ll take the bus. If your
excavator or your loader is not working, you don’t make
money that day. So maintenance and uptime is really key
and electric vehicles are better for that in this market.
Bobcat recently introduced a completely electric
32
Issue 64.indd 32
We were expecting the heavy truck
market to electrify a whole series
of their auxiliaries and take the
loads off the motor. What we’ve
heard is they’re going to skip that
step entirely and go straight to BEV.
vehicle. They even got rid of all the hydraulics. They’re
replacing hydraulic cylinders with electric actuators. The
hydraulics in those vehicles are usually the number-one
maintenance problem, so they are eliminating one of the
biggest problems. You would think they can’t get enough
power out of them, but they can. Using screws and gearing
they can match hydraulics.
We have been saying that a lot of the big construction
equipment wasn’t going to go BEV. The work cycle is longer
and tougher, and charging becomes an issue. You can charge
a small piece of construction equipment on a mobile charger
or a mobile battery, but those bigger pieces of equipment
take a lot of power to charge and they’re sitting out in a field.
So I think the small ones are going to go electric fast, but the
big ones are going to go electric slower.
One interesting problem that we have in these EVs that you
don’t necessarily have in the diesel ones is that because they’re
lighter weight, with fiberglass and all kinds of lightweighting,
where do you ground the thing? Grounding becomes a prob-
lem, so we’ve actually released a new series of grounding boxes
for customers to be able to consolidate ground.
Q Charged: Are you seeing a lot of auxiliary systems
being electrified on those large systems?
A Geoff Schwartz: Not really yet. I’m a little surprised. We
were expecting the heavy truck market to electrify a whole
series of their auxiliaries and take the loads off the motor.
What we’ve heard is they’re going to skip that step entirely
and go straight to BEV. There’s a new greenhouse gas
requirement on large vehicles for 2027 engines, and Califor-
nia’s adopting that next year. We thought that was going to
drive a lot of 48-volt stuff, but everything we’re hearing now
says they’re going to skip right by that and go pure BEV.
Q Charged: Is there any other commercial off-highway
stuff that you think is a fast-growing market?
6/29/23 10:23 PM

Littelfuse recently expanded its lineup of DC contactors to
support next-generation commercial EVs.
A Geoff Schwartz: I’ve seen a lot of interest in small farm
tractors. I know that Case New Holland has launched an
electric tractor, and Monarch is going electric. Particularly
for small and specialty farmers where they’re working in
tight with the crops. There’s a company called GUSS that
does a fully autonomous sprayer, and now they’re bringing
an electric version out as well.
I’ve seen a lot of small equipment, a lot of harvesting as-
sist equipment. There’s a company called Burro that makes
an electric crop hauler. It runs from where the picker is
working to a central location—the picker is hand-picking
specialty crops, and the Burro is right by his side, he loads
it up, so he can just concentrate on picking.
We’re also seeing interest for hybrids based on digestive
materials. For instance, a farmer could take all his scraps
and put them into a digester, make his own fuel and use
that to run a hybrid tractor. Case New Holland brought out
a methane-powered tractor that [runs on methane] made
from farm waste.
The other thing of course is that drivers love them now,
which is fantastic. We hear comments like, “It’s easier on
me, less vibration, less noise. I don’t come home smelling
like diesel. I don’t come home as worn out and tired.” In the
truck market, driver retention is a really big issue, because
there’s just not enough truck drivers out there. If they’re
not getting treated right, they can move relatively easily, so
you want to retain your drivers.
Every one of the major OEMs is launching an electric
truck series. The primary customers right now are the
ports—Port of Long Beach, Port of Los Angeles—and the
ports around the country are usually in urban environ-
ments. Transporting goods out of that environment tends
to have an overly heavy effect, particularly on less oppor-
tune communities because they’re kind of built around the
port, so they’re very sensitive to that pollution.
Therefore, a lot of electric and hydrogen vehicles are
Issue 64.indd 33
being brought into that market quickly. In most cases
they’re running from the port, 50 or 100 miles to a ware-
house and then running back to the port, back and forth.
They could do three, four runs a day without a problem,
without having to recharge. So those vehicles will proba-
bly go electric pretty quickly.
The other market that’s probably going to go electric
quickly is refuse. Garbage trucks. You’re operating close in
neighborhoods, so the quiet is a huge advantage, and you
have room to have a pretty good-sized electric actuator on
a garbage truck because it’s a bigger vehicle. And also, huge
amounts of regenerative braking going on. They stop, start,
stop, start, and because they’re doing that, they’re running
that electric motor in a range where it’s very efficient in
that low end of the torque band.
Q Charged: In terms of regulations, what are the biggest
ones driving the market in the commercial space?
A Geoff Schwartz: The MOU is an agreement between
California and several other states that are ramping up the
requirements for zero-emission commercial vehicles, with
the goal to be completely emission-free by 2050. I think it’s
gotten up to 17 states total now. That’s for new purchases—
the lifetime of a truck is usually at 15 years plus—seven or
eight years in the primary market and up to 10 years in the
secondary market.
That’s one of the biggest ones, and there’s also a couple
of big California regulations. California is shortly going to
outlaw the use of diesel engines in transportation refrigera-
tion units. The reefer boxes that are up on trailers or trucks,
they’re going to have to go all-electric. Construction
equipment, lawn and garden equipment is going electric
in California as well. Shortly they’re going to eliminate the
ability to buy gas mowers and stuff like that.
Now California just actually moved it up 10 years. They said
they want 100% of commercial vehicles to be zero-emissions
by 2040. I have doubts whether we could hit that. I think we
could hit 50, 60, 70%. But when you get into longer-range
vehicles, the problem is still going to be infrastructure.
You think it’s hard to charge a car? Think about how
much energy you have to pump into a truck. The Megawatt
Charging System standard is intended to charge a Class 8
truck in 30 minutes. It’s capable of up to 2.2 megawatts. It’s a
huge water-cooled cable. It’s a lot of power. I think the truck
technology is going to be there to do it, but I’m not sure the
grid will get built out fast enough to do it on schedule.
APR-JUN 2023 33
6/29/23 10:23 PM
 THE TECH
TANGIBLE
IMPACTS OF
THE IRA
Westwater Resources is building a facility in Alabama to process
graphite from one of the largest deposits in the US.
veryone in the EV industry is talking about the
E IRA and the BIL, two sets of federal regulations
that include strong incentives for automakers
to establish domestic supply chains for EV raw
materials and components. Not everyone is happy about the
requirements, and there are a number of issues that need to
be considered as the new regulations are finalized. However,
bringing mining and processing raw materials closer to the
sites of vehicle production is necessary both for reasons of
sustainability and national security.
For certain key raw materials, much of the mining and
almost all of the processing currently takes place in China,
and in other countries that are geographically distant, have
environmental or human rights issues, or all three. One of
these materials is graphite, which is the main ingredient in
EV battery anodes. The few companies that have access to
34
Issue 64.indd 34
By Charles Morris
graphite mines in North America are the belles of the EV
ball at the moment. One of these is Westwater Resources,
which controls what it says is the second-biggest graphite de-
posit in the US (the biggest is in a remote region of Alaska).
Westwater holds mineral rights to the Coosa graphite
deposit, which is located across 42,000 acres in Alabama. The
company is currently building a graphite processing plant in
Kellyton, Alabama. The first phase of plant construction will
produce 7,500 metric tons of refined graphite each year.
We first met Jon Jacobs back in 2013, when he was work-
ing at Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a battery research
firm that developed an innovative process to rapidly syn-
thesize and evaluate energy storage materials. Now Jacobs is
Chief Commercial Officer at Westwater Resources, and he
spoke to Charged about his company’s plans to start supply-
ing graphite anode material in the heart of the Battery Belt.
6/30/23 1:53 PM
 Q&A WITH JON JACOBS OF WESTWATER RESOURCES
Q Charged: Graphite’s a hot property these days. Tell us
about Westwater’s plans.
A Jon Jacobs: Westwater Resources is positioned to be the
only vertically integrated natural graphite supplier in the
United States. Prior to my joining Westwater, I was really
naive about the importance of graphite and the fact that
none of it is currently produced in the US. Much like
lithium was ten years ago, graphite is a sleeping giant that is
about to get a big awakening. The growing EV market and
the IRA are now driving incredible demand for domestical-
ly produced graphite.
If you spend time in the battery industry, you’ll find most
of the discussion is about new and promising next-genera-
tion materials like silicon anodes or lithium metal. Yet, these
technologies still face major technical challenges. Mean-
while, in terms of material by weight, there’s more graphite
Issue 64.indd 35
in a battery than anything else. Today, over 75% of all the
battery graphite comes from China. Unbelievably, none of it
currently comes from the US.
Along comes the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s amazing
what the IRA is driving in terms of new companies and
investment. Take Westwater as an example. Westwater
transitioned from mining uranium, of all things, to be-
coming a graphite anode producer—all because of these
new trade rules.
Fast forward to today and Westwater is building a graphite
plant in Alabama, and people are eager to buy our capacity.
How much more are people willing to pay to get US graph-
ite compared to Chinese suppliers? Natural graphite from
China sells for about $7 a kilogram, yet companies setting up
factories in the US are willing to pay more than that to get
graphite domestically if it meets the IRA requirements.
This is roughly how the math works: In 2023, 40% of the
APR-JUN 2023 35
6/30/23 1:53 PM
 THE TECH

critical materials in your battery must be “produced” in the

United States or one a few designated free-trade partner
countries. “Produced” refers to the percentage of value
added during production. By 2027, the critical material
requirement will increase to 80%.
Now, if you look at just the materials half of the $7,500
tax credit, there’s $3,750 available, and graphite is on a
short list of critical materials, along with lithium, cobalt,
nickel and a few others. If you do the math and make some
assumptions, it means $550-600 of the total tax credit is
attributable just to graphite. For US cars with 80 kWh
packs, cell makers should be willing to pay as much as $7
per kilogram more than non-IRA sources just to get anode
material from the United States.
Of course, a material supplier like Westwater will need
to share the IRA value with the cell maker, the OEM and
the end customer, so the real premium will be lower. But
without the IRA, it would be difficult for a US company
Natural graphite from China
to stand up a facility and compete with China. To be fair, sells for about $7 a kilogram, yet
China got most of its battery business off the ground due to
government subsidies of its own.
companies setting up factories
There’s an additional factor to consider too. The IRA
value won’t necessarily be the same at every cell maker,
in the US are willing to pay
as it’s not a linear calculation. For example, if a cell maker more than that to get graphite
purchases 45% of its battery materials from IRA sources but
is still 5% short overall, the company might be willing to
domestically if it meets the IRA
pay a lot more to get that final 5% because that determines
whether it gets the entire credit or not.
requirements.
Q Charged: Tell us about the processing plant Westwater
is building in rural Alabama. great US story—the government got it right with the IRA,
and it’s already generating tangible effects.
A Jon Jacobs: The plant is under construction in east-cen-
tral Alabama in a town called Kellyton, conveniently Q Charged: You recently signed a joint development
located in the growing US Battery Belt. Prior to Westwater, agreement with SK On, a South Korean battery manufac-
the only major employer in the area was Russell Athletic, a turer that’s operating two EV battery plants in Georgia,
company that makes jerseys and sporting apparel. At one and is building several more in the Southeast.
time, Russell employed over 7,000 people in this area. Over
the years, however, Russell moved most of its jobs else- A Jon Jacobs: Yes, and we hope to strike similar JDAs
where, leaving this beautiful part of Alabama in a lurch. I’ve with other cell makers too. Every cell maker, because
heard as many as half the residents in the affected area they’ve been using graphite for 40 years, has their own
moved away. Fortunately, the battery industry and the IRA proprietary twist. That’s what the JDA is about—SK will
are about to change everything, along with some good come into our plant and say, “Okay, for our material, we
fortune that one of the battery industry’s most important want you to do this extra thing.” Another cell maker might
minerals just happens to exist in that same area. Westwater’s ask us to do a different extra thing. A JDA enables us to
plant will likely employ many of the people nearby. Who openly collaborate with our customers to produce the
knows, maybe we’ll ask Russell to make our uniforms! It’s a specific material they want.

36

Issue 64.indd 36 6/30/23 1:54 PM

 CoolTherm® Thermal
Management Materials
Westwater is currently building
a graphite processing plant in
Kellyton, Alabama.

As electric vehicle technology evolves, so should

your expectations. Our customizable CoolTherm®
products help electric vehicles go longer, charge
faster and have higher reliability.

Q Charged: There’s some contro-

versy around the IRA in Washing-
ton. For some reason Joe Man-
chin’s mad about it, and he was
Solutions:
threatening to vote to repeal it. ▪ Gap Fillers
▪ Potting & Encapsulants
Jon Jacobs: The main thing I’m
hearing is that the rules pertaining
▪ Structural Adhesives
to Chinese company involvement
aren’t totally clear. SK, LG and SDI Applications:
announced joint ventures, and that
they’re going to build plants in the
▪ Battery Packs parker.com/
US, and nobody has an issue with ▪ Motors
that. Meanwhile, a few Chinese ▪ Charging Systems
CoolTherm
companies want to build plants in
the US, but the reply from different
states is inconsistent. Some say,
“No way—I’m not going to support
you.” Other states, like Michigan,
say, “Your money’s as good as
anybody else’s, so you’re welcome
here.” There may not be a consis-
tent response here until the IRA
language is fully vetted.
There was also a long-antici-

Issue 64.indd 37 6/30/23 1:54 PM

 THE TECH
pated update to the IRA language on March 31. An added
restriction was placed on things like nickel, cobalt, lithium
and graphite, requiring the initial mining to occur outside
of China regardless of how much value-added process-
ing occurs later. If interpreted correctly, that’s an added
game-changer for Westwater with our rights to the largest
graphite deposit in the contiguous US.
Q Charged: Are there going to be enough of these
materials that manufacturers can source from places that
will meet the requirements?
A Jon Jacobs: That’s tough to predict, but it’s not going to
be easy. To put things in perspective, Westwater will
produce 7,500 metric tons per year of natural graphite after
our Phase 1 construction is complete. Just one of SK’s plants
in Kentucky or Georgia or Tennessee would require
roughly that amount of graphite. Although Westwater will
increase capacity to over 40,000 MT/year in 2028, there
aren’t a lot of other IRA-compliant options available. I
believe global EV market growth requires that 6-8 new
gigafactories be built every year for the foreseeable future.
These plants are going to require a lot of battery materials
from somewhere other than China.
Now, add to that the ratcheting factor of the IRA.
In 2024, only 50% of the critical materials need to be
IRA-compliant. This then increases 10% each year until it
reaches 80% in 2027. We and others intend to boost our
capacity over time, but it will require flawless execution to
keep material supply in line with demand.
Q Charged: Is the post-processing the slow part, or is it
actually digging it out of the ground or scraping it off
the surface?
A Jon Jacobs: Once graphite is extracted from the ground,
it must be purified, which usually takes place at the mine
location. This can all take a couple days, plus several
months to ship it from remote locations around the world
to wherever it will be processed. In our case, the resulting
feedstock material will be conveniently trucked 30 minutes
up the road to our Kellyton processing plant to be convert-
ed into battery-grade anode material.
The processing of the feedstock into finished anode
material is well understood. The Chinese have been doing
this for decades. Although our overall process is similar,
we are using what we believe to be superior manufactur-
38
Issue 64.indd 38
The IRA is probably here to
stay. It is clearly working to
generate investment and jobs
across the US.
ing equipment and more sustainable processes, without
the use of harmful acids. The basic steps involve reduc-
tion of the graphite particle size, turning it into spheres,
removing contaminants and coating the surface of the
finished material. The overall processing steps also take a
couple days. So to answer your question, the two general
steps are similar in duration.
Q Charged: How much graphite, and what kinds, go
into a cell?
A Jon Jacobs: That’s a good question. In a 60 kWh EV
battery pack, there’s roughly 50 kg of graphite. Graphite
comes in two flavors. There’s natural graphite, which is what
Westwater produces, and there’s artificial or synthetic
graphite, which is made, ironically, from oil refining by-prod-
ucts. Most batteries today are produced using a blend of
natural and artificial graphite. Overall usage of each type by
volume varies from year to year, but it’s roughly 50/50.
The downside to artificial graphite is that it’s nearly double
the cost of natural graphite, but companies use it because it
can offer cycle life advantages. Like any industry though, cell
makers are incentivized to use lower-cost materials. There-
fore, companies are still finding ways to improve natural
graphite, and momentum is arguably in its favor.
Q Charged: Is any of the synthetic graphite produced
in the US?
A Jon Jacobs: There are a few companies ramping up
production now, including Novonix and Anovion.
Q Charged: So, all of your direct competitors will
import the raw material from somewhere else?
A Jon Jacobs: I suppose that’s true if you’re talking about
natural graphite competitors within the US. This is why we
view the Coosa deposit as a long-term competitive advan-
6/30/23 1:54 PM
 Graphite deposits with more than 1,000 metric tons
tage. It reduces graphite feedstock supply risk with the
potential to lower costs from vertical integration.
Q Charged: Are there no other deposits anywhere in the
US where you could start a mine?
A Jon Jacobs: There are small deposits in Texas, and I
think there is a company that has one up in the Adiron-
dacks. There’s one deposit larger than ours in Alaska, but
it’s likely too expensive given its remote location.
Q Charged: The activity is so great now that I’m starting
to think that pressure from the industry will prevent the
politicians from reversing the IRA in the future. There’s
so many ribbon-cuttings going on right now, especially
in the Battery Belt in the southern states, which presum-
ably would be the people who would overturn it if they
get power in a few years.
A Jon Jacobs: I agree the IRA is probably here to stay. It
is clearly working to generate investment and jobs across
the US. This should appeal to both political parties in a
Issue 64.indd 39
large number of states, so I don’t think it will go away.
Q Charged: The EU has to come up with some kind of
response, right? Otherwise, everything will be made
here and shipped to Europe.
A Jon Jacobs: It’s funny—Europe started pumping money
into battery infrastructure three or four years ago while the
US was doing very little. The IRA has now put the US back
into the spotlight. It wouldn’t surprise me if Europe sweetens
its own legislation related to EV tax credits to compete with
what’s happening here. If they don’t, most new material and
cell production investment could go to the US.
That said, there’s a lot of production in the EU that’s not
going to be stopped due to their head start. Plus, the glob-
al battery and EV markets will eventually be big enough to
require local supply.
After 100+ years of auto production, you still see com-
panies throughout the supply chain producing things in all
the main regional markets around the world. The transition
to EVs is unlikely to change that dynamic once the market
matures. But in the near term, it feels like the gold rush!
APR-JUN 2023 39
6/30/23 1:54 PM
 THE VEHICLES
Image courtesy of Holcim
Holcim to deploy 1,000 Volvo
electric trucks
Construction material provider Holcim will deploy up to
1,000 electric trucks from Volvo by 2030. Deliveries will
start in the fourth quarter of 2023.
This deal, reportedly the largest commercial order to
date for Volvo electric trucks, is part of a wider partner-
ship between Holcim and Volvo Group to deploy electric
trucks across Holcim’s operations in Europe between
now and 2030.
Both companies are founding members of the First
Movers Coalition (FMC), a group of companies that aim
to use their purchasing power to create early markets for
innovative clean technologies.
“The net-zero transition requires deep collaboration
across value chains,” said Holcim Chairman and CEO
Jan Jenisch. “We are excited to be partnering with Volvo
to decarbonize our European operations’ logistics with
electric fleets, advancing our goal to reach 30% of ze-
ro-emission heavy-duty truck purchases or contracts by
2030.”
40
Issue 64.indd 40
Image courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz develops
dedicated EV architecture for
vans
Mercedes-Benz has developed a new purpose-built
modular and scalable architecture dubbed Van Electric
Architecture (VAN.EA), upon which all its newly devel-
oped vans will be based starting from 2026.
The company is planning to reduce its portfolio of van
variants by more than 50% compared to its current ICE
offerings, while covering the same use cases for custom-
ers.
The platform consists of three separate modules:
front, center and rear. The front module consists of the
electric powertrain and the front axle, and is the same
in all VAN.EA variants, as part of an optimized com-
mon parts strategy. The center module scales the vehicle
length. This is also where the standardized battery case
is placed. High-voltage batteries with different capacities
can be installed within the case. The rear module will be
available in two versions: with an electric motor for the
all-wheel-drive variants of VAN.EA and without one for
the front-wheel drive variants.
”VAN.EA enables us to consolidate our mid-size and
large vans down to only one architecture and significant-
ly reduce the complexity of our product portfolio,” said
Mathias Geisen, Head of Mercedes-Benz Vans.
6/30/23 1:53 PM

Image courtesy of Caterpillar
Caterpillar to supply NMG with
zero-emission machines and
infrastructure
Canadian materials company Nouveau Monde Graphite
(NMG) and Caterpillar have signed agreements to supply
NMG’s Matawinie Mine with an integrated solution that
includes a zero-emission vehicle fleet, supporting infra-
structure and services.
The agreements encompass machines such as hydrau-
lic excavators, mining trucks, wheel loaders, dozers and
motor graders, as well as charging and energy storage
infrastructure and equipment maintenance services.
As part of the agreements, the two companies have
mapped the development and testing of equipment and
infrastructure at NMG’s Matawinie Mine in Saint-Mi-
chel-des-Saints, Québec. Equipment will be progres-
sively replaced with Cat zero-emission machines as they
become available.
The two companies have also signed a non-binding
memorandum of understanding to advance commercial
discussions targeting NMG’s active anode material. A full
circular value chain could be established, in which NMG
would supply carbon-neutral graphite materials to Cater-
pillar for the development of its battery supply chain that
would serve to electrify heavy vehicles, including NMG’s
Matawinie fleet.
“Not only will we benefit from Caterpillar’s expertise,
products and latest technological developments, but our
team will also be sharing insights, testing equipment for
further optimization and providing battery materials
to support electrification beyond our mine,” said Eric
Desaulniers, founder and CEO of NMG.
Issue 64.indd 41
GM’s new Envolve business
unit to offer tailored solutions
for fleet customers
Fleet customers represent a lucrative line of business for
General Motors. This year, the company reported that
GM Fleet achieved its best first quarter of commercial
fleet sales since 2006.
In order to better address the rapidly-changing fleet
market, GM has now brought all of its fleet products
and services under a new brand called GM Envolve. The
new business unit will be headed by VP of Commercial
Growth Strategies and Operations Steve Hill.
GM Envolve is “a one-stop customer experience, de-
signed with input from customers and dealers, to make it
easier to tap into all the products and services GM has to
offer.” GM Envolve will offer “a full program of tailored
solutions, providing high-tech management for both ICE
and EV commercial fleet operations,” and “give business
customers more ways to reduce their environmental
impact, streamline fleet operations and increase driver
safety.”
Each large fleet customer will be assigned a dedicated
account executive to offer coordination and recommen-
dations, “backed by a team of experts to help identify and
curate a package of GM’s technologies and innovative
solutions for each customer’s business.” A digital plat-
form for customer use is in the pipeline.
GM Envolve is designed to give fleets “efficient, un-
cluttered access” to various GM business units, includ-
ing BrightDrop, GM Genuine Parts, OnStar Business
Solutions (tracking and data analysis), and energy
management for EV fleets. Consultants will be available
to help with upgrading from ICEs to EVs, including such
services as telematics, route planning and EV charging.
Among the first GM Envolve customers are Domino’s,
which ordered 800 Chevy Bolt EVs last year, and Au-
toZone, which plans to order 60 Chevy Bolt EUVs this
summer.
“GM Envolve will leverage the complete power of Gen-
eral Motors to offer the best solutions to customers and
further reinforce why we’ve increased our fleet sales for
five consecutive quarters,” said GM Executive VP Steve
Carlisle. “We will bring our customers in to create tai-
lored solutions to meet their unique business challenges.”
APR-JUN 2023 41
6/30/23 1:52 PM
 THE VEHICLES

Yutong to deliver 12,000

electric buses to Lagos,
Nigeria

Image courtesy of Hyundai

Image courtesy of Collins Bus

The Lagos Metropol-
itan Area Transport
Authority (LAMA-
TA), which serves
Africa’s largest city, plans to deploy 12,000 electric buses
over the next seven years. The buses will be supplied by
Chinese OEM Yutong, and will be assembled locally.
Oando Clean Energy Limited (OCEL), a subsidiary of
the Nigerian multinational oil company Oando, will
provide charging infrastructure.
Yutong’s electric buses are equipped with air condi-
tioning and WiFi. Two pilot vehicles have already been

Hyundai announces delivered, and OCEL has taken delivery of some charging
stations and spare parts. Lagos State is expected to save

investment plans for EV some $2.6 billion in fuel and maintenance costs.

production Collins Bus introduces Ford

The Hyundai Motor Group plans to invest $18 billion in
its domestic EV industry by 2030. The funding will be
used to increase production and exports and to foster E-Transit Type A school bus
EV-related industries. The Group announced plans to ex- American bus maker

Image courtesy of Collins Bus

pand its annual EV production in Korea to 1.51 million Collins Bus, a subsid-
units and global volume to 3.64 million units by 2030. iary of REV Group,
To increase domestic EV production, Kia is building has introduced its
a plant to manufacture electric purpose-built vehicles Ford E-Transit Type
(PBVs), while also expanding existing EV lines to in- A school bus. The
crease production. new e-bus is now
Also, the Group will develop a platform for next-gen- available for orders
eration EVs, expand product lineups, develop core parts from Collins Bus dealers.
and advanced technologies, and establish research facil- The bus is built on Ford’s T-350 single-rear-wheel
ities. The Group plans to sequentially develop dedicated E-Transit cutaway. It is available in two options to
platforms for each vehicle class under the Integrated accommodate either twelve seated passengers or eight
Modular Architecture (IMA) system, including the eM seated and two wheelchair passengers.
platform designed for passenger EVs, which will be The new model, which comes with a 68 kWh battery
introduced in 2025. and an 8-year/100,000-mile warranty, has a narrow-body
In 2030, Hyundai Motor Group expects to have a total design, view-out window, one-piece tubular roof bow
lineup of 31 EV models, including models from Hyundai design, and body and paint warranties.
Motor, Kia and Genesis. This year, Kia plans to launch “Ford and Collins Bus have a long history working to-
EV9, its three-row electric flagship SUV. Hyundai Motor gether to provide mobility solutions for school systems,”
plans to launch the IONIQ 7 in 2024. said Ford Pro General Manager Raj Sarkar.

42

Issue 64.indd 42 6/29/23 10:25 PM

 Image courtesy of GreenPower
GreenPower to manufacture electric
school buses in West Virginia
GreenPower Motor Company has received an order for 41 purpose-built
Type D BEAST and Type A Nano BEAST electric school buses totaling $15
million from the state of West Virginia. As part of the deal, GreenPower
will begin manufacturing electric school buses in the state.
“Since we first announced our intent to manufacture in West Virginia,
we’ve made tremendous progress on our mission to be the leading man-
ufacturer of purpose-built, all-electric school buses,” said Brendan Riley,
President of GreenPower. “We look forward to continue providing a posi-
tive impact on West Virginia’s economy with clean energy jobs.”
GreenPower took possession of a manufacturing facility in South
Charleston in 2022, and has been performing final assembly and inspec-
tion on EV Star Cab & Chassis there as part of its supply agreement with
Workhouse Group. Over the next few weeks, GreenPower will begin pro-
ducing its Nano BEAST Type A electric school bus there, followed by the
Type D BEAST.
The BEAST and Nano BEAST have been in pilot operation in several
West Virginia counties for some weeks. “Over the course of the 2022-23
school year our BEAST and Nano BEAST have proven their capabilities
in cold weather, snowy conditions and mountainous terrain in both rural
and urban counties across the state. In short, the GreenPower school buses
have performed exactly as we expected them to,” said GreenPower CEO
and Chairman Fraser Atkinson.
GreenPower predicts that operation and maintenance costs for its elec-
tric school bus will be 70% to 80% less than those of a legacy diesel bus.
GreenPower will increase the number of employees at its West Virginia
facility, and expects to reach a head count of 200 by the end of 2024. The
company will conduct employee training programs in partnership with
BridgeValley Community & Technical College.
“The fact that our workers will be manufacturing the school buses being
purchased by the state that their kids and grandkids will be riding to and
from school on brings me great pride,” said Mr. Riley.

Issue 64.indd 43 6/29/23 10:30 PM

 THE VEHICLES

Dennis Eagle to supply 40

Image courtesy of Blue Bird

eCollect electric refuse trucks
to Westminster City Council
UK-based refuse truck

Image courtesy of Dennis Eagle

manufacturer Dennis
Eagle has announced
that Westminster City
Council in Greater
London, after exten-
sive trials in 2022,
has ordered 40 of the
Blue Bird delivers 60 electric
company’s eCollect 27-tonne 6×2 rear-steer vehicles.
The vehicles will be operated by global waste-manage-
school buses to Broward
ment company Veolia in partnership with Westminster
City Council, which has set a goal of reaching net zero
County Public Schools in
emissions by 2040.
Dennis Eagle launched the eCollect in 2020, and says
Florida
there are now more than 100 in operation in the UK and Blue Bird is delivering 60 Vision electric school buses to
Ireland. Broward County Public Schools (BCPS). This represents
Blue Bird’s largest e-bus fleet sale to date.
Blue Bird’s Vision electric school bus can carry 72
students, and has a range of up to 120 miles.
Frito-Lay to deploy over 700 BCPS is the sixth largest public school system in the
US, serving more than 254,000 students and 110,000
delivery EVs in 2023 adult learners. The agency maintains a bus fleet of more
than 1,200 vehicles, including 515 Blue Bird buses.
Frito-Lay will deploy BCPS received a nearly $15-million grant from Flori-
Image courtesy of Collins Bus

over 700 electric da’s Diesel Emissions Mitigation Program, which is fund-
delivery vehicles in ed by the state’s Volkswagen Settlement and the EPA’s
the US by the end of Diesel Emissions Reduction Act. Florida Power & Light
2023. is providing the vehicle charging infrastructure.
The company has Blue Bird electric buses come standard with vehi-
already introduced cle-to-grid (V2G) capability, which will enable BCPS to
a new electric fleet coordinate with local utilities to manage vehicle charging
to serve the Dallas-Fort Worth area and recently made and return stored energy back to the grid as needed. V2G
its first third-party shipment as the first company to programs can lower the overall cost of electric buses for
contract transport on logistics firm Schneider’s electric school districts.
truck fleet. “This project has been in development for several
“The introduction of EVs throughout our owned years, and we’re thankful to the Florida Department of
fleet and that of our partners is in direct support of our Environmental Protection and Florida Power & Light
commitment to building a circular and inclusive value for providing the essential funding and infrastructure to
chain,” said Laura Maxwell, Senior VP of Supply Chain at make it possible,” said BCPS Superintendent Dr. Earlean
PepsiCo Foods North America. Smiley.

44

Issue 64.indd 44 6/29/23 10:30 PM

 DC-Powered,
Variable-Speed

Image courtesy of Monarch

Cooling &
Refrigeration
Monarch electric tractors roll off
Foxconn assembly lines in Lordstown
The humble Ohio community of Lordstown has played a dynamic role
in EV history. The first act of the drama was a typical Rust Belt tragedy—
shuttered auto plant, lost jobs. The second was a heart-warming resurrec-
tion story—plucky startup builds innovative electric pickup. Next came a
tawdry tale of a missed opportunity to electrify postal delivery vans, and a
told-you-so parable in which credulous investors lost their chips in a SPAC
deal. What next?
The latest news from Lordstown is good, as far as it goes: Taiwanese
contract manufacturer Foxconn has begun production of MK-V electric
tractors for Monarch.
In 2022, struggling EV startup Lordstown Motors sold its manufactur-
ing facility to Foxconn. As part of the deal, the Taiwanese experts are to
help bring the automaker’s Endurance pickup into production. Foxconn
has also made a deal with Fisker (another company with a highly colorful
history) to assemble its planned EV model, the PEAR.
We’ve heard nothing recently about the Endurance or the PEAR, but
the electric tractors are real. Monarch says an initial five units have been
assembled and are ready for customer deliveries. According to the com-
panies, MK-V production is on schedule. Foxconn says it is “very pleased
with the product quality,” and will now fine-tune its assembly lines and
material sourcing as it prepares for full-scale production.
The MK-V can be operated with or without a driver, and is equipped
with advanced safety technologies, including collision prevention and hu-
man detection, which enables it to stop moving or shut down if it detects a
MA STE R F LUX
person nearby. APPLICATIONS:
“As a leader in manufacturing some of the world’s most influential
Automotive n
Electronics
electric and autonomous technologies, Foxconn is the ideal partner for us
as we look to rapidly expand production of the MK-V,” said Monarch CEO Medical n
Military n
Solar
and co-founder Praveen Penmesta. “Today’s farmers need solutions like
Mobil Containers
the MK-V now that will increase farm profitability and sustainability.”

MASTE RFLUX .COM

©2022 Tecumseh Compressor Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Issue 64.indd 45 6/29/23 10:30 PM

 THE VEHICLES
Image courtesy of JLR
Jaguar Land Rover to invest
$18.9 billion in EV production
over next five years
JLR announced that its Halewood plant in the UK will
become an all-electric production facility. The company
will invest £15 billion ($18.9 billion) over the next five
years. Additionally, the company shared that its new
platform for medium-size SUVs, Electrified Modular
Architecture, will now be fully electric.
Adrian Mardell, JLR’s CEO, said: “Today I am proud
to announce we are accelerating our electrification path.
This investment enables us to be net-zero carbon emis-
sions by 2039.”
JLR also announced that the first of its three new
Jaguar models will be a 4-door GT. The company said it
will have a range up to 430 miles (700 km), and a starting
price of £100,000. Additionally, it will feature its own
architecture, which Jaguar has dubbed JEA. The model is
expected to go on sale in selected markets in 2024.
46
Issue 64.indd 46
Image courtesy of ZeroAvia
GenH2 and ZeroAvia to develop
liquid hydrogen technologies
for airports
Hydrogen infrastructure system specialist GenH2 has ex-
ecuted an MOU with ZeroAvia to develop liquid hydro-
gen aviation infrastructure solutions for use at airports.
ZeroAvia is developing a hydrogen-electric avia-
tion powertrain. The company aims to retrofit its fuel
cell-powered engines to existing fixed-wing and rotor-
craft airframes in order to reduce time to market, and
is also partnering with clean-sheet designers. ZeroAvia
hopes to earn certification of its ZA600, a 600 kW engine
for 9-19 seat aircraft, as early as 2025, and to certify its
ZA2000 engine for up to 80 seat regional turboprops by
2027.
GenH2 offers hydrogen liquefaction, storage and dis-
pensing systems ranging from 20 kg/day up to 5,000 kg/
day that are capable of working airside as ground support
refueling units.
“Today, aviation is the fastest-growing source of
greenhouse gas emissions, and without radical change,
its share of global climate impact is expected to be more
than a quarter of all human activity by 2050,” said Arnab
Chatterjee, ZeroAvia’s VP of Infrastructure. “GenH2’s
liquefaction capability will further support our mission
of demonstrating that hydrogen-electric propulsion is
the only way to scale truly clean aviation for commercial
use.”
6/29/23 10:30 PM
 EV / Baaery
Test Systems

Electrified transit bus sales overtake Power and Precision in Mooon

diesel in the EU
The skies are slowly beginning to clear in the EU, where the most recent World Class Standalone
quarterly sales data for transit buses shows that diesel-only buses no longer or Combined AC and DC
make up a majority of the market.
As the International Council on Clean Transportation explains, city bus-
Drive Systems Specifically
es (not including coaches and interurban buses) make up about 60% of all Designed for Tessng:
heavy-duty passenger vehicle sales. They tend to have high emissions, and
their typical use cases make them prime candidates for electrification.
The latest milestone was not reached due to a significant rise in sales of
zero-emission buses—which have hovered around 30% for the last year,
according to the ICCT—but rather from increased sales of hybrid buses,
which overtook those of diesels this year.
The EU’s Clean Vehicles Directive requires member states to purchase Baaeries E-Motors
between 24% and 45% “alternatively fueled” buses (i.e. anything other than Cell, Module & Pack
diesel-only) from August 2021 to December 2025, and half of these need
to have zero-emission powertrains. The targets will increase to 33-65% in
2026, so diesel’s days in Europe are clearly numbered.
Several individual countries have set their own targets: ICE bus sales are
to be phased out in the Netherlands and Denmark by 2025, in Ireland by
2030, and in Austria by 2032. Major cities are also regulating stinkpots out
of existence—the ICCT reports that over half of Europe’s capital cities plan
to have only zero-emission buses on their roads by 2040. E-Drives E-Axles
The transition is taking place more slowly than many would wish. Inverter + E-Motor

Hybrid vehicles are playing a strong role in Europe’s largest countries, and
an unfortunate amount of investment is going to methane gas engines,
especially in France, Spain and Italy. A recent lifecycle analysis carried out
by the ICCT found that a natural gas city bus reduces greenhouse gas emis-
sions by 17% compared to a diesel counterpart, whereas a battery-electric
bus can deliver a reduction of up to 75%.
Good news: Hydrogen fuel cell buses made up only a tiny percentage of
the buses bought in the quarter.
PHEV Complete
Bad news: Europe still lags far behind China, where zero-emission buses
E-Motor + Engine
Powertrains
took 91% of the market in 2022.
www. unicous. com
TSsales@unicous.com

Issue 64.indd 47 6/29/23 10:31 PM

 THE VEHICLES

2023 HY
48

Issue 64.indd 48 6/29/23 10:31 PM

HYUNDAI
Ioniq 6
Korean Model 3 clone,
or something else
altogether?
Battery-electric sedans are a rare breed—
that makes Hyundai’s striking Ioniq 6
a strong new entry

APR-JUN 2023 49

Issue 64.indd 49 6/29/23 10:31 PM

 THE VEHICLES

By John Voelcker

Q
uick, name all the battery-electric sedans
for sale in the US—that aren’t Teslas. By
our count, there’s only been one: the pricey,
luxury Lucid Air.
Now, there’s another: the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6 is on
sale at your local Hyundai dealer, joining the Ioniq 5
crossover utility and the smaller Kona Electric hatch-
back. The new Ioniq 6 is built on the same E-GMP
underpinnings as its utility sibling, but wears an entirely
different and strikingly sleeker body.
While the production vehicle isn’t as striking as the
Electric Streamliner concept first shown in January 2022,
the arched window line and dropped tail of the Ioniq 6
still turn plenty of heads. Available in rear- or all-wheel-
drive versions and three trim levels (SE, SEL and Lim-
ited), the new electric sedan starts at $43,000 but can hit
$60,000 for a high-spec model.

Many models, one E-GMP

Hyundai’s E-GMP battery-electric platform wins kudos,
and rightly so, for its rear-wheel-drive bias and 800-volt
battery charging. Today, it’s used under not only the
Ioniqs 5 and 6, but sister brand Kia’s EV6 and the luxury
Genesis GV60—all effectively hatchback utilities except
for the Ioniq 6 sedan. And that’s just the start: the Kia
EV9 three-row electric crossover will break cover later
this year, followed by the Hyundai Ioniq 7, a three-row
family SUV on the same platform.
Hyundai’s well aware that SUVs now handily outsell se-
dans in North America. The Ioniq 6 won’t be the brand’s
top EV seller—that role falls to the Ioniq 5. Still, it’s a new
entry in a category that’s essentially been dominated by
one vehicle: the Tesla Model 3.
Hyundai’s compact electric four-door lines up pretty
closely against the Model 3. The two cars aren’t di-
mensionally identical, but they’re the only two battery-
electric sedans on offer below $90,000 or so. It seemed
a shame not to let people see them together, so on the
March day we drove the Ioniq 6 at a media preview in
Phoenix, we rented a Model 3 so we could photograph
the pair side by side.
Overall, the Ioniq 6 represents a more comfortable,
quieter and more conventional approach to a battery-
electric sedan than the Model 3. The Tesla is undeniably
sportier, more BMW-like, and eager to accelerate and
carve through corners; the Hyundai is comparatively
more relaxed, softer and gentler. It’s hardly an old-
Ioniq 6 is a new entry in
a battery-electric sedan
category that’s essentially
been dominated by one vehicle:
the Tesla Model 3.
style American luxury car, wallowing on its springs,
but many buyers may find it better balanced and more
soothing to drive than the lithe, speedy Tesla.
Tesla vs Hyundai
Which exterior design you prefer is a matter of taste,
though midway through its seventh full model year,
the Model 3 design has become as common as Toyota
Corollas in some precincts. Hyundai’s sleek, arced
sedan is fresh and clean, especially from the front,
though it gets busy at the rear with a spoiler below the
rear window and another at the base of the trunk. Both
interrupt the drooping banana shape that makes the
car so distinctive. Automotive history fans may see a

50

Issue 64.indd 50 6/29/23 10:31 PM

 Photos by John Voelcker

APR-JUN 2023 51

Issue 64.indd 51 6/29/23 10:31 PM

 THE VEHICLES

Photos by John Voelcker

bit of Infi niti J30 or Mercedes-Benz CLS in its lines,

though Hyundai claims the obscure Stout Scarab as a
design influence. But we digress.
Inside, the Ioniq 6’s controls and user interface are
relatively intuitive, its graphics are clear and coher-
ent, and it retains actual knobs and buttons for several
functions that the Tesla driver controls through the
central touchscreen. The Model 3 approach is fairly
well known by now: a steering wheel with scroll but-
tons, stalks behind the wheel, and then just a land-
scape-oriented central touchscreen on which drivers
control virtually every other function.
There’s a fair amount of hard plastic inside the Ioniq
6, but the patterns and textures bring it up a notch. It
took a while to get used to power-window switches on
the center console, like a Jeep with removable doors.
Hyundai said this was to widen the passenger com-
There’s a fair amount of hard
plastic inside the Ioniq 6, but
the patterns and textures
bring it up a notch.
partment by eliminating switchgear from the inside
door panel. (Tesla has window switches right where
you expect them: in the armrest.)
For sedans in the same segment, the Ioniq 6 offers
roughly the same battery capacity as the Model 3—but
less range, less combined power from its two motors,
and less torque.

52

Issue 64.indd 52 6/29/23 10:33 PM

 EPA-rated ranges up to
361 miles
The Ioniq 6 price leader is the SE
with a smaller 53 kWh Standard
Range pack and rear-wheel drive
only. It’s rated at 240 miles of
range, but offers a low sticker
price of just $42,715, including
a mandatory $1,115 delivery fee.
Don’t expect to see a lot of these
on dealer lots; the vast major-
ity of buyers will go for one of
several Long Range models.
A base Ioniq 6 SE with the 77
kWh Long Range battery and
rear-wheel drive is EPA-rated at
361 miles on its 18-inch wheels;

Issue 64.indd 53 6/29/23 10:33 PM

 THE VEHICLES

add all-wheel drive, and the SE falls to 316 miles. The As for power, the front and
higher Limited trim adds many more features, along with
larger 20-inch wheels, all of which cuts range to 305 miles rear motors in the Ioniq 6 are
for RWD, 270 miles with AWD. For comparison, the
Tesla Model 3 Long Range we tested, with all-wheel drive rated at 74 and 165 kilowatts
and a 75 kWh battery, had a 353-mile rating against our
Ioniq 6 Limited AWD range of 270 miles.
(100 and 221 horsepower) and
As for power, the front and rear motors in the Ioniq 6
are rated at 74 and 165 kilowatts (100 and 221 horsepower)
446 lb-ft of torque.
and 446 lb-ft of torque. The Model 3’s two motors come
in at 147 and 188 kW (197 and 252 hp). We couldn’t get an
estimated 0-to-60-mph acceleration time for our AWD
Ioniq 6, and didn’t have proper testing equipment in our
single-day drive to measure it properly, though one car
magazine tested it at 4.3 seconds. Tesla quotes a 0-to-60
mph acceleration time of 4.2 seconds for the Model 3 Long
Range with dual motors, which felt about right—meaning
both are quite fast away from the stoplight for small sedans.

Two versions of fun to drive

The Hyundai corners flat and remains composed, but
it’s more isolated from road feel—likely a plus in many Photos by John Voelcker
drivers’ eyes. It doesn’t particularly invite drivers to toss it
through corners, even though it’s perfectly capable of do-
ing just that. It’s a closer analog, perhaps, to the Hyundai
Sonata mid-size sedan: a middle-of-the-road sedan entry
with the many benefits of a battery-electric powertrain.
The Tesla is more like a BMW 3 Series, a sport sedan
that trades noise suppression and a bit of ride comfort
for instantly available performance and roadholding that
induces confidence and makes drivers want more. Its con-
trols are considerably heavier than the Hyundai’s—it’s a

54

Issue 64.indd 54 6/29/23 10:33 PM

 Building an Electric Vehicle?

You NEED
Conveyors

car to be driven. Each approach

is valid for its intended audi-
ence—neither car has anything
to apologize for. They’re just
two interpretations of how a car
should feel to its driver.
Behind the wheel, Hyundai
requires drivers who want one-
pedal operation to pull back
the left steering-wheel paddle mk North America has been manufacturing
to invoke the i-Pedal func- conveyors for the automotive industry since
tion—every single time the car is
turned on. That’s annoying when 1988 AND offers conveyors specifically
other EVs, including the Chev- designed for the electric vehicle and
rolet Bolt EV, retain the setting battery pack industries.
through multiple power cycles.
Strong regenerative braking and
one-pedal driving are the default
on the Tesla.
The Ioniq 6’s front seats are
comfortable and supportive for
drivers of virtually any size,
but that falling roofl ine exacts
a penalty on rear-seat head-
room—just as it does on trunk
space. Still, outside of taxi
and Uber duty, most mid-size www.mknorthamerica.com
sedans we see on the road have
precisely one person in them, info@mknorthamerica.com
so perhaps rear-seat accom- (860) 769-5500
modations simply aren’t that
important.
better products. better solutions.

Issue 64.indd 55 6/29/23 10:33 PM

 THE VEHICLES

Whither Hyundai, whither Tesla?

The Ioniq 6 is another proof point for the idea that
Hyundai-Kia is one to watch in the EV battle. It
looks entirely different than its Ioniq 5 sibling—
you might not know the two are from the same
maker. You’d certainly never know they had the
same underpinnings—at least until you sat behind
the wheel, and saw the family twin 12-inch digital
displays side by side, and the identical infotainment
graphics.
But the E-GMP platform, with its ability to
fast-charge up to 235 kW (under optimal circum-
stances), and the speed at which models that use
The Ioniq 6 is another proof
it are being rolled out, suggests that the company
understands the design and important features of
point for the idea that
EVs better than some competitors. Hyundai-Kia is one to watch
Whether Hyundai understands the presently dire
state of non-Tesla public fast charging is a different in the EV battle.
topic. The Ioniq 6 comes with three years of unlim-
ited fast charging on the Electrify America network,
which may perversely encourage buyers—even
those who can charge at home—to overuse public
DC fast charging stations. That’s not good for the
car’s batteries, or for the drivers who genuinely need
fast charging stations to complete their road trips.
Then there’s the unpredictable and unreliable
nature of the half-dozen public fast charging
networks, a topic Hyundai execs were notably un-
interested in discussing. Tesla’s advantage on that
front is unquestioned, and was recently under-
scored by deals in which Ford, GM and Rivian EVs
will be able to use the Tesla Supercharger network.
Hyundai has nothing comparable to offer at the
moment.
Still, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 is to be welcomed as
an electric car, not an SUV. It’s handsome, pleas-
ant to drive, offers versions with significant range,
and provides a competitor of sorts to the all-but-
ubiquitous Tesla Model 3. For that combination of
attributes, Hyundai deserves a hand.

Note: A more detailed comparison of the Hyundai Ioniq

6 and Tesla Model 3 can be found in The Autopian: “I
Rented a Tesla Model 3 To Test Against The New Hyun-
dai Ioniq 6. Here’s How They Compare.”
Hyundai provided airfare, lodging and meals to enable
Charged to bring you this first-person report. Photos by John Voelcker

56

Issue 64.indd 56 6/29/23 10:33 PM

Issue 64.indd 57 6/29/23 10:34 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE
Image courtesy of SK Signet
SK Signet opens Texas-based
EV charger manufacturing
facility
Korea-headquartered EV charger maker SK Signet has
opened its first US EV charger manufacturing facility in
Plano, Texas.
The company projects the plant’s production capacity
of its range of chargers, from standalones to power cabi-
nets supporting multiple dispensers, at more than 10,000
units per year. The facility will also host R&D, manufac-
ture EV charger power modules, conduct charger testing
with automakers, and develop EV charging software and
firmware.
SK Signet’s fastest V2 charger, which is slated to begin
production at the Texas facility later this year, provides a
maximum output of 400 kW.
“The company’s new state-of-the-art facility will not
only create new manufacturing jobs for Texans, but will
advance critical EV infrastructure for our state and the
nation,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who recently
signed a $200-per-year tax on EVs into law.
58
Issue 64.indd 58
Image courtesy of Electrify Commercial
Electrify Commercial to install
80 DC fast chargers with up to
350 kW at 20 sites in Utah
Electrify Commercial, the Electrify America business
unit that provides EV charging solutions to businesses,
plans to deploy 20 EV charging stations in Utah for local
utility Rocky Mountain Power. The project will include
more than 80 individual chargers at 15 stations in the
Salt Lake City area and 5 stations in surrounding regions.
Electrify Commercial will provide charging equip-
ment, installation, networking and ongoing operations
and maintenance.
Each station will have a minimum of 4 chargers, with
charging speeds up to 350 kW. Rocky Mountain Pow-
er will set pricing, and customers will be able to access
charging through the Electrify America mobile app.
The first of the charging stations are expected to open
in 2024 in Salt Lake City, the Wasatch Valley Front and
Moab.
“Salt Lake City is the top city in the US to own an elec-
tric vehicle, making it more important than ever to pro-
vide accessible charging in the region and in other parts
of Utah,” said James Campbell, Director of Innovation
and Sustainability at Rocky Mountain Power. “Electrify
Commercial will play an important role in helping us
achieve our electrification goals and enable seamless EV
travel throughout the state of Utah.”
6/29/23 10:34 PM
 Image courtesy of SolarEdge
SolarEdge introduces
bidirectional DC-coupled EV
charger
Israel-headquartered energy technology company
SolarEdge recently debuted its bidirectional DC EV
charger, which is expected to be available in the second
half of 2024.
The charger is compatible with 400 V and 800 V pow-
ertrains, and will enable solar-powered vehicle-to-home
and vehicle-to-grid functionalities. It will allow charging
at up to 24 kW by simultaneously drawing from the PV
array, the home battery and the grid.
SolarEdge says its ONE optimization system will apply
algorithms to calculate dynamic utility prices and auton-
omously charge the battery. It will also discharge battery
power back to the grid, enabling homeowners to receive
compensation from electricity suppliers during demand
response events.
The EV battery will be able to function as a home on-
or off-grid battery storage solution with up to 50 kWh of
capacity for backup use during power outages.
Issue 64.indd 59
Versinetic releases ISO
15118-compliant EV charging
software stack
Versinetic, a UK smart charging consultancy, has devel-
oped a software stack solution that allows EV charging
manufacturers to produce ISO 15118-compliant
charging infrastructure.
The ISO 15118 protocol defines vehicle-charging sta-
tion communication.
Versinetic licenses its new ISO 15118 software stack as
part of its modular EV charging solutions. Versinetic’s
MantaRay control board, which supports AC and DC
chargers, runs the software. Versinetic’s Charging Blox
are product and service modules that can be customized
to build a comprehensive EV charging station solution.
These are offered under three models:
• Design concept—consulting, feasibility studies,
evaluation kit;
• Solution design—Versinetic hardware and software;
• Supply options—license, buy direct or construct
under license (for huge numbers), or non-recurring
engineering.
“Accommodating ISO 15118 in our products is anoth-
er part of Versinetic’s roadmap to play an integral part in
the electrification of our roads,” said Dunstan Power, MD
at Versinetic. “We strive to bring expertise and flexibility
with our modular EV charging products that reduce time
to market for EV charging providers and enable them to
ensure their EV chargers are future-proofed.”
APR-JUN 2023 59
6/30/23 1:51 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE
New York City to deploy up to
13 fast EV charging hubs at
municipal parking lots
The New York City DOT and New York Power Authority
(NYPA) have agreed to create up to 13 fast charging hubs
at municipal parking facilities across the city, and each
will feature roughly 50 charging plugs.
Once installed, these chargers will bring the city closer
to achieving the Adams Administration’s goal of all New
Yorkers living within 2.5 miles of a fast charger by 2035.
They will also help to advance Mayor Eric Adams’s
administration’s plan to transition more than 100,000
for-hire vehicles to zero emissions by 2030 and help to
achieve New York State’s target that all new vehicles sold
in the state be zero-emissions by 2035.
“Our administration has set ambitious goals to electri-
fy all Uber and Lyft trips and ensure every New Yorker
lives within 2.5 miles of a fast charger,” Adams said.
“These new hubs are sited in areas where many
for-hire drivers live and work, and they will boost fast
charging availability right at the time the city’s for-hire
EV fleet is expanding,” added Taxi and Limousine Com-
missioner David Do.
60
Issue 64.indd 60
Image courtesy of Cummins
Cummins and Heliox to offer
EV charging solutions for fleet
customers
Motor manufacturer Cummins, and fast charger maker
Heliox are cooperating to sell and service EV chargers in
North America. The companies will bring a mobile 50
kW DC charger and a stationary 180 kW DC charging
system to market.
The Mobile 50 is designed to plug into 480 V AC wall
sockets, and can be used anywhere there is a compatible
power source. Its portable design does not require fixed
installation.
The Flex 180 solution provides up to three dispensers
capable of static, sequential and dynamic charging for
optimal flexibility for fleet customers. The companies
will offer both plug and pantograph options for transit
bus customers.
Both EV charger products are available through Cum-
mins’s North American distribution network. Cummins
Sales and Service North America will provide repairs and
planned maintenance at its over 180 service locations.
“We have a history of building innovative partner-
ships that combine strengths to create incremental value
for our customers. Our relationship with EV charging
partners builds on this legacy,” said Zach Gillen, General
Manager of Cummins Sales and Service North America.
“Our collaboration with Heliox will deliver a reliable
solution to support fleet customers in reaching their
sustainability and emissions goals.”
6/29/23 10:34 PM

Image courtesy of dcbel
Volvo invests in bidirectional
EV charging startup dcbel
Volvo has invested in bidirectional EV charging startup
dcbel. The automaker’s venture capital firm, Volvo Cars
Tech Fund, will support dcbel’s R&D and commercializa-
tion efforts for its home energy system.
dcbel’s r16 Home Energy Station will be a “renew-
able energy ecosystem” that features bidirectional EV
charging capabilities and a smart home energy manage-
ment system. The system can be integrated with rooftop
photovoltaic panels, and supports charging two EVs
simultaneously.
Energy from an EV’s battery can be used to power a
home during an outage, to save on utility costs during
peak hours, or (theoretically) to earn money from the
local utility for providing grid services.
dcbel’s operating system, Orchestrate OS, “synchroniz-
es with a home’s solar power generation and stationary
battery storage, and calculates the best ways to use, store
or sell home energy every five minutes. Homeown-
ers maintain complete visibility and control over their
energy through their smartphone and other connected
devices.”
“Home energy management systems will play a vital
role as we move towards bidirectionality of electric
vehicles,” said Alexander Petrofski, CEO of Volvo Cars
Tech Fund. “Rising energy prices coupled with frequent
blackouts are challenges faced by consumers today, and
our investment in dcbel and their technology can help
alleviate those challenges for our customers.”
Volvo has said that its upcoming EX90 will be the
brand’s first EV with bidirectional charging capability.
Issue 64.indd 61
ABB E-mobility and Scania
successfully test Megawatt
Charging System
Scania has successfully
Image courtesy of Scania
installed and tested a pilot
Megawatt Charging System
from ABB E-mobility.
Deploying this high-power
charging solution could
enable operators to halve
the charging time for
heavy-duty vehicles, says
Scania.
Scania calls the testing,
which was done to prove
the technical viability of high-current charging, a first
important step towards a future system, which will result
in the progressive deployment of high-power MCS
chargers, starting with current levels of 1,500 amps and
eventually delivering the full MCS scope of up to 3,000
amps.
Scania and ABB E-mobility have both been instrumen-
tal in developing MCS in collaboration with CharIN (the
MCS standard is expected to be finalized in 2024).
Scania calls MCS technology “critical” for long-haul
electric trucks, as both driving time and resting time
for drivers are regulated by law. In some jurisdictions, a
commercial vehicle can be driven for a maximum of 4.5
hours before the driver needs to take a 45-minute break.
During this time, the truck needs to add enough ener-
gy to the battery to operate for another 4.5 hours. Due
to the size of the batteries, fast, high-power charging is
essential.
“We see momentum for electric transport, and our
goal is that 50 percent of all vehicles we sell annually by
2030 are electric,” says Fredrik Allard, Head of E-mobili-
ty at Scania. “To achieve this goal will require infrastruc-
ture, and MCS is a crucial piece of the puzzle.”
Scania is now offering trucks with the MCS pre-stan-
dard connector to customers with specific needs, and
production is set to begin in 2024. ABB E-mobility will
introduce the next iteration of its MCS technology in late
2024 or early 2025.
APR-JUN 2023 61
6/29/23 10:34 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE
Image courtesy of Legrand
Legrand launches Level 2 EV
charger for commercial use
France-based electrical equipment maker Legrand has
expanded into the EV charging market with the launch
of the Legrand Networked Level 2 Commercial Electrical
Vehicle Charger, designed for such commercial applica-
tions as offices, parking garages, multi-unit residential
buildings and vehicle fleets.
The 48 A (11.5 kW) Level 2 networked charger comes
factory-configured with customizable charging-manage-
ment subscription software from American EV charging
company AmpUp, providing real-time monitoring and
remote diagnostics.
The integrated Legrand-AmpUp product is now avail-
able to US customers.
“Our partnership with AmpUp was an easy choice—
we are excited to bring a differentiated and comprehen-
sive charging solution,” said Legrand President Ravi
Ramanathan.
62
Issue 64.indd 62
Schneider opens large electric
truck charging depot in
Southern California
Multimodal transportation provider Schneider National
has completed an electric charging depot at its South El
Monte Intermodal Operations Center in Southern Cali-
fornia. The depot will power the company’s battery-elec-
tric truck fleet, which will include nearly 100 Freightliner
eCascadias by year’s end.
The 4,900-square-foot charging site, which was de-
signed and built in cooperation with Black & Veatch,
features 16 350 kW dual-plug chargers, allowing the car-
rier to charge 32 trucks simultaneously. Schneider says
its eCascadias will be able to charge up to 80% within 90
minutes.
Schneider’s facility is centrally located within the metro
Los Angeles area, adjacent to major highways—numer-
ous customers have facilities within a 50-mile radius.
Schneider is already using its new eCascadia electric
trucks, each of which has a range of approximately 220
miles, to make deliveries for Frito-Lay and Goodyear.
“Schneider decided to lead the way by building our
own depot in South El Monte,” said Schneider CEO Mark
Rourke. “It was important to develop onsite charging
because it is the most efficient solution to power our
growing electric fleet. With the infrastructure deficiency,
we found that we needed to collaborate with a wide array
of experts to see our vision come to fruition.”
JETSI, an electric truck project jointly funded by
the California Air Resources Board and the California
Energy Commission, awarded the project $27 million.
Additional funding was provided by the South Coast Air
Quality Management District, the Port of Los Angeles
and Southern California Edison. Building the depot
“would not have been possible without our funding and
grant agencies,” said Rourke.
Schneider worked alongside Daimler Truck North
America (DTNA) as the eCascadia evolved, piloting a
truck for six months in 2019-2020 through Freightliner’s
Customer Experience fleet. Feedback from Schneider
drivers and the equipment team led to the production of
today’s eCascadia.
6/29/23 10:35 PM

InCharge Energy launches
suite of bidirectional charging
solutions for EV fleets
InCharge Energy, a provider
Image courtesy of InCharge
of turnkey fleet electrifica-
tion services, has launched a
new portfolio of bidirection-
al DC fast chargers. The new
ICE-22 V2X, ICE-44 V2X
and ICE-66 V2X chargers
are aimed at fleet operators,
and are designed to optimize
operations and increase cost
efficiencies while supporting grid stability, and to enable
fleets to qualify for grant funds that include a vehi-
cle-to-grid (V2G) compatibility requirement.
After performing extensive interoperability testing at
its Engineering and Fulfillment Center, InCharge has
verified that its solution enables fleet managers to charge
any bidirectional-capable EV at any ICE V2X charging
station.
The suite of InCharge V2X chargers includes three
options, with different power outputs:
• ICE-22 V2X is intended for fleets needing sequential
charging, such as those with long dwell times without
time-of-use tariffs, and is useful for discharging mul-
tiple vehicles back-to-back.
• ICE-44 V2X is best for fleets that need to maximize
charging with simultaneous and sequential charging
or discharging of two vehicles at a time.
• ICE-66 V2X is aimed at fleets that have high daily
utilization and may need to charge up quickly or feed
energy back to a building or facility to shave utility
costs.
The bidirectional functionality of the InCharge V2X
chargers is controlled by the V2X add-on of InControl,
the charging management system from InCharge Energy.
Using an OpenAPI architecture developed specifically
for large fleets, the proprietary InControl platform allows
fleet managers to operate, monitor and maintain their
EV charging infrastructure, and to integrate it into their
existing software systems.
Issue 64.indd 63
Wattzilla introduces UL-listed
J3068 3-phase EV chargers
EV charger manufacturer
Image courtesy of Wattzilla
Wattzilla has introduced a
new family of UL-listed SAE
J3068 3-phase Level 2 EV
chargers. The new chargers
are available in single, dual
and quad configurations,
each capable of simultane-
ously delivering 44 kW of
400 VAC 3-phase power (63 A per phase) on each output
cord.
Not all EV chargers on the market are UL-listed, but
this certification is an important indicator that a product
meets the highest safety standards.
The Wattzilla Uno-3P, Duo-3P and Quadzilla-3P are
designed for high-power charging of trucks, buses and
other medium- and heavy-duty EVs.
All three models are suitable for interior or exterior
use. Each features a type 4X 316 stainless steel enclo-
sure for protection from the elements, a gold-plated
proprietary circuit board for high corrosion resistance,
a multi-color LCD display, and the requisite number of
25-foot cables with J3068 Mennekes couplers.
All are rated for temperatures from -35° C to 50° C,
and come with a 39-month standard warranty. An ex-
tended warranty is also available.
The Quadzilla Four Vehicle 3-Phase provides up to 63
amps per phase (approximately 44 kW) to four vehicles
simultaneously. It can be wall- or pole-mounted, and
comes standard with a pole mounting kit and a cable
management system that holds all four couplers securely
when not in use. It requires four 80-amp, 3-phase pro-
tected branch circuits, and is priced at $39,995.
The WattZilla DUO Dual 3-Phase delivers up to 63
amps per phase (44 kW) to two vehicles at a time. It’s
available in wall-mounted or exterior pole-mounted
styles, and has an optional cable management system. It
requires two 80-amp, 3-phase protected branch circuits.
Pricing starts at $19,995.
The WattZilla UNO 3-Phase cranks out 63 A per phase
to a single vehicle. It’s available in wall-mounted or
exterior pole-mounted styles, and has an optional cable
management system. It requires a single 80-amp, 3-phase
protected branch circuit. Prices start at $9,995.
APR-JUN 2023 63
6/29/23 10:35 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE

CLEARING THE
ROADBLOCKS
TO ELECTRIFICATION OF
HEAVY-DUTY TRUCKS
64

Issue 64.indd 64 6/29/23 10:35 PM


By Charles Morris
edium- and heavy-duty vehicles make up a
M small fraction of the vehicles on the road,
but they generate a disproportionate amount
of pollution. Therefore, electrifying them is
critical to reducing emissions. Furthermore, the case for
electric trucks and buses would seem to be an easy one to
make. Unlike individual car owners, fleet operators know
exactly how many miles their vehicles travel, and they ar-
en’t likely to be swayed by questions of styling or coolness
factors—if you can demonstrate that an EV will save them
money, then you should be able to make a sale.
In the real world, things haven’t been that simple.
Here at Charged, we’ve been covering the commercial
EV market for a decade. For some (not all) use cases, the
economic advantages of going electric have been clear for
a long time, and yet we’ve seen a dozen EV manufacturers
Issue 64.indd 65
Q&A
WITH ELECTRIC
TRUCK EXPERT
RUSTAM
KOCHER
go bust while trying to address the commercial market,
while fleet operators continue to buy diesel vehicles, which
continue to belch out clouds of oily black smoke.
After many discussions with players in the commercial
EV field, we realized that the problem was proving the
performance of EVs. Saving money is important, but reli-
ability is mission-critical, and fleet operators were unwill-
ing to get serious about going electric until they had tested
EVs in years-long pilot projects.
Well, that phase of the transition is over. Commercial
EVs have been on the job for years now, at dozens of com-
panies, in just about every conceivable use case, and they’ve
APR-JUN 2023 65
6/29/23 10:35 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE

proven that they can do the job better, quieter, more safely
and above all, cheaper. Upfront costs are steadily approach-
ing parity with legacy vehicles, purchase incentives are
available, and new programs at the levels of federal (IRA,
BIL), state (California’s ACT and ACF) and local (city
zero-emission zones) government are driving (some would
say “coercing”) companies to move forward quickly.
However, the electric road ahead is not exactly clear.
There are several roadblocks on the way to an electri-
fied trucking system, some of them obvious and some
far less so.
Rustam Kocher has been a pioneer in the commercial
EV field. When Charged first spoke with him in 2021, he
was the Charging Infrastructure Lead at Daimler Trucks
North America, and also the Chair of CharIN’s Mega-
watt Charging System (MCS) task force. He later served
as Transportation Electrification Manager at Portland

You could make roughly ten

Model 3 battery packs with the
same number of cells as you’d
need for one Semi.

General Electric, so he’s worked both sides of the electric
fence. Now nominally retired and living in Portugal, he
remains active in the infrastructure space as a consultant,
and closely follows the development of the EV charging
ecosystem. If you want to stay up on developments in the
commercial EV space, you could do worse than to follow
Rustam’s LinkedIn feed.
Q Charged: You recently wrote, “Commercial vehicle
battery packs are tough to source.” Lots of fleets will
be placing orders for heavy-duty EVs over the next
few years. Is the supply of battery packs going to be a
bottleneck?
A Rustam Kocher: I think it’s going to be an issue for
any company that has a large battery pack. Tesla, for
instance: if you look at their battery pack in the Semi, it’s
roughly 800 kWh, and you’ve got 74 kWh on a Model 3,
which means you could make roughly ten Model 3 battery
packs with the same number of cells as you’d need for one
Semi. So, Tesla can make more margin selling ten Model
3s than they can on one Semi.
Every company is going to be faced with that issue,
whether or not they make light-duty and medium- and
heavy-duty EVs, because the battery manufacturers are also
going to look at quantity and volume, and if they can sell at
a higher volume to light-duty and consumer vehicles, then
they’ll be less interested in providing packs for larger EVs.
It’s easier to sell to the light-duty market. It’s less time
and effort. If you’re CATL, you can sell in mass quantities
to GM and Ford. Supplying to Volvo Trucks or Daimler
Trucks or whoever is more burdensome.
Also, the demands for medium- and heavy-duty battery
packs are much more complex. In a commercial vehicle,
you have a lot more forces in play, such as G-forces on a
truck, that you have to test for. For commercial vehicles,
the cells have to be able to perform at a different level.
For example, the kingpin that the truck smacks onto
when the driver backs up to pick up a trailer, the G-force
in that transaction is significant. But that’s also where the

66

Issue 64.indd 66 6/29/23 10:35 PM


Everything on a commercial
vehicle has to be more rugged.
Most commercial trucks are
engineered for 1.2 million miles.
battery pack sits, so that battery pack has to be mounted in
such a way that when that truck backs up and hits the king-
pin and grabs the trailer, it doesn’t jar it and cause shorting
issues or whatever else over the long-term life of the battery.
Everything on a commercial vehicle has to be more
rugged. Most commercial trucks are engineered for 1.2
million miles, so the engineering that goes into making
those vehicles be able to perform and last that long has
to apply to the battery pack as well. So, it’s a technical
challenge and it’s a lot of cells.
When we were first starting off at Daimler Truck, trying
Issue 64.indd 67
to find a battery cell supplier that would build us a pack
that was good in the truck was difficult. Your supplier pool
is restricted to who can make what you want and who
wants to make what you want, so you have to deal with a
smaller number of suppliers. The more suppliers you have,
the more competition you have, which means the pricing
and performance from those suppliers are going to be bet-
ter. If you’ve got a limited supplier pool, they’re going to be
less inclined to give you a good price for good performance.
Q Charged: You’ve also said that heavy-duty charging
is going to be a huge hurdle.
A Rustam Kocher: It is. I was a big part of building the
first-of-its-kind—at least in the Western world that we
knew of—heavy-duty charging site in Portland, Oregon.
It’s called Electric Island.
You’re not going to be able to pull a Class 8 truck up to a
consumer charging station and charge it towing the trailer.
It won’t work. We’re going to need purpose-built sites, and
we [decided to] build one so we could show people what it
would look like.
Electric Island did what we hoped it would do, which
was to kick off a movement towards knowing what was
possible and what needed to be done. If you don’t build
something like that, people can’t refer to it. What Tesla
did with their Supercharger network was really difficult
because no one else had ever done anything like that. They
thought through all those problems: Where should the
charge port be? How long should the cable be? How should
the vehicle interact with the charger? All those things. And
they came up with a pretty bulletproof solution.
What we wanted to do with Electric Island was play with
all those things. In fact, the code name for it internally was
“the sandbox,” because we wanted to be able to build up a
sandcastle and learn from that process and knock it down
and build another one. The site was built with maximum
flexibility so that we could change things, swap out char-
gers, move things around and learn from the process of
installing battery electric storage or putting solar on the
site or what a megawatt charging unit would do under full
power in partnership with the utility. What happens when
we plug in 1.2-megawatt chargers? Will the lights all dim?
Portland General Electric was also involved with the West
Coast Clean Transit Corridor (WCCC), which is a move-
ment towards getting truck and bus charging stations like
Electric Island built from Vancouver down to San Diego so
APR-JUN 2023 67
6/29/23 10:36 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE
that you could move goods and freight all up and down the
West coast, at 50-mile intervals. [This project is currently at
the stage of conducting grid readiness assessments.]
What we did, again, was try and show what’s possible,
and what needed to be done in order to enable goods
movement and usage of battery-electric trucks. So we set
out to show the industry what needed to be done so that
the Flying Js, the Chevrons, the BPs of the world would
understand that this needs to be built and that they had
some support in doing so.
The utilities did all the desk reviews, they evaluated each
of the sites generally and said, “Okay, it’s going to be this
much on upgrades and this much time. We built it out in
historical growth segments so that people would know if
they’re going to build a site there, how long it would take
and what it would take to get a site to 3.2 or 12 MW.
Q Charged: A couple of companies are building big
commercial charging hubs—WattEV (I know you
serve on their advisory board) and Terawatt. What’s
different about their business model?
A Rustam Kocher: There’s also a couple more out there
building charging hubs for trucks. There’s the partnership
between Daimler and BlackRock, called Greenlane, and
Forum Mobility, which is building a charging network for
drayage trucks.
WattEV saw the need and they moved prior to the
market growth. Power to them for seeing it, understand-
ing it, and being willing to be a first mover. Terawatt as
well. I’m excited for both of them to be successful—we
need more. We need a dozen companies that are willing
to do this. We need Love’s, we need Flying J, we need
Pilot, we need all of the current fleet fuel and service pro-
viders to move to providing electricity for medium and
heavy trucks and buses. If we’re going to hit the numbers
we need to hit for fleet adoption, we need as many places
for those vehicles to recharge as possible.
WattEV’s first site is in Bakersfield. They’re building a
massive site with onsite generation, solar+storage, which is
important within the Megawatt Charging System. Mega-
watt charging is going to have really high demand charges
[fees that utilities charge if peak demand exceeds a certain
level] unless you have some way to mitigate those peaks.
And having stationary storage on site will be important for
that. They’ve also got a site at the Port of Long Beach and
a couple others in the LA area. Those will be public-facing
68
Issue 64.indd 68
truck-charging sites similar to Electric Island.
But then they did something interesting. They said,
“We’re going to build new sites and there’s simply not
enough trucks on the road today for us to get the volume
we need for the site to be profitable.” And they recognize
that there’s a lot of small fleets that serve drayage in and of
the ports of Long Beach and LA that are served by own-
er-operator fleets that only have a few trucks. Those guys
don’t have the wherewithal to finance a battery-electric
truck that costs twice as much as a diesel truck, and they’re
usually buying third- or fourth-owner diesels anyway, that
are super-cheap. So WattEV is going to offer truck-as-a-
service. They will own, maintain and insure the trucks, and
then the owner-operators can rent them on a daily, weekly
or monthly basis. WattEV will also provide the charging
for those trucks, so it’s a way to allow some of these smaller
fleets that serve freight in and out the ports to be able to
comply with the California regulations so they can stay
in business and keep operating cleanly. And it generates
flow through the WattEV site so that they get a consistent
number of trucks coming through. Because the flatter your
demand curve is, the lower your power costs are from the
utility. If you have a really peaky and spiky demand, your
power costs can be really high because utilities don’t like
We need a dozen companies that
are willing to do this. We need
Love’s, we need Flying J, we need
Pilot, we need all of them.
that, and they charge accordingly. They want a nice solid
demand line, so if you can keep a site active as much as
possible, then you’ll have lower overall power costs.
Q Charged: Tell us more about issues with the utilities
and how that can be a bottleneck.
A Rustam Kocher: Public utilities are there to serve the
public—whether they’re investor-owned, co-ops, city-
owned, whatever, they’re there to serve the ratepayer.
When your home was built or when the business next to
you was built, they went to the utility and said, “I need a
hookup to the grid.” They didn’t have to pay extra for that
6/29/23 10:36 PM
 hookup if it wasn’t exceptional—if it wasn’t very far to
where they needed to get hooked up, that cost was
essentially free.
It was free to the builder, but it wasn’t free to the utility.
What they do is they rate-base that work. In order to get
half a megawatt to the supermarket down the street, they
had to trench, they had to make the connection, they had
to make sure they had enough generation, they had to
serve that site. That cost is spread among all ratepayers for
that utility. That’s an accepted practice for utilities because
that’s what a utility has done over the last hundred years.
What hasn’t normally been done is transportation elec-
trification work—what’s on the utility side of the EV. So if
I’m Tesla or Electrify America, or a truck fleet that wants to
have an electrified depot, and I go to Southern California
Edison, and I say, “I need an interconnection to grid for
this transportation electrification site,” there’s no stipulation
that says that that work should be offset by the ratepayer,
so that cost is typically born by whoever’s building the site,
which gets expensive. If Tesla needs to come in and build a
charging site, they’ve got to pay for the grid connection.
California has passed Assembly Bill 841, [signed into
law in 2020] which says that transportation electrification
must be treated just the same as building construction.
So now that utility-side work can be done in a rate-based
manner, which means that the individual site builder
doesn’t have to pay for that work out of their own pocket,
which is what needs to happen everywhere.
The way that you can spread that cost to the ratepayer
for transportation electrification sites is important, and it
needs to be done with every publicly-owned utility across
the nation. The problem is those laws are all state-based
and every state has to make that change at the level of the
utility commission.
Q Charged: It’s not just the cost—time can also be a
big factor. As someone pointed out to me, if you’re
building a factory and it takes two years to get your
utility connection, that’s okay, because the factory’s
going to take two years to build anyway, but a charging
site can be built much more quickly.
A Rustam Kocher: I told this story over and over to the
utilities every chance I got. It’s like gravity has changed for
the utility industry. From the time of the first utilities until
today, everything took a certain amount of time. If they
needed to make an interconnection because a building
Issue 64.indd 69
The trucking industry is very,
very old-school, very, very
conservative. You’ll see pushback
from them until TCO becomes
positive operating the vehicles.
was going to be built, they had 18 to 24 months, because
you don’t build a building faster than that. Gravity always
worked in a certain way—you always had this much time
to do whatever needed to be done. Today, Sysco could
order trucks from Tesla or Daimler and get electric trucks
in a month or two, and they can be connecting temporary
charging solutions to their warehouse when the trucks
arrive. Utilities don’t respond to grid upgrades and
interconnection upgrades in two months. They just don’t
operate that quickly. They never have, they’ve never
needed to. Well, suddenly gravity is heavier. A lot heavier.
Q Charged: I’ve been seeing articles from trucking
industry groups that say things like, “Don’t get us
wrong, we love EVs, but it needs to be a nice smooth,
gradual transition,” by which they mean that there
needs to be minimal government regulation. An official
from the American Trucking Associations (ATA)
recently made a speech in front of the US Congress,
which contained a number of incorrect statements
about EVs. Are we going to see a lot of resistance to
electrification from the trucking industry?
A Rustam Kocher: Yes. Any change is hard. And this
industry is very, very old-school, very, very conserva-
tive. You’ll see pushback from them until TCO be-
comes positive operating the vehicles. Once your total
cost of ownership is lower with a zero-emission
vehicle, then that’s a spreadsheet decision. Then I can
plug that into a business plan and say, “I can offer
lower freight rates than Joe down the road, who’s
operating diesel trucks, because his cost per mile is
more expensive.” Once that happens, then your
adoption curve skyrockets. It turns into a hockey stick,
which we’re already seeing with passenger cars. And
the commercial vehicle hockey stick will be more
APR-JUN 2023 69
6/29/23 10:36 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE
MCS should put a bullet in
hydrogen because the only thing
that they have going for them is
speed of refueling.
pronounced, because it is a spreadsheet decision.
Nobody buys a commercial truck because it looks
good. They buy to make money.
Q Charged: When do you see the TCO clearly becom-
ing better?
A Rustam Kocher: My guess for commercial trucks is
the early 2030s, but there’s going to be some binary
decisions that fleets are going to have to make before then.
For instance, in states that have adopted the Advanced
Clean Trucks regulation [15 US states at last count], you
have to hit certain emissions benchmarks. You’re either
operating by hitting those benchmarks with ZEVs or
you’re not, so your choice is operate or not operate. And
yes, you may have slightly higher costs because you’re
forced to operate ZEV trucks as per regulation. And then
in Europe, some of the major city centers have created
zero-emission zones, so if you want to deliver to Starbucks
within Paris, you’d better have an electric truck.
Q Charged: Early 2030s? Is it really going to take
that long?
A Rustam Kocher: It depends on a couple of things. I’m
watching battery prices, I’m watching component prices,
I’m watching the tick-tock of new models coming to
market, from gen one to gen two, to gen three to gen four.
I call that a “tick-tock,” like what Intel does with the speed
of their chips. So, how quickly the OEMs go through their
iterations and learn and equip new products, new battery
packs, new chemistries, those sorts of things.
You’re already seeing different (LFP) batteries on the
Tesla Semi, which is interesting. So now they think maybe
they don’t need a 500-mile range, maybe they can get by
with 300. Well, that helps the OEMs out there that can
just barely reach 300. There’s a lot of use cases for 300-
mile trucks out there, so let’s do that with LFP batteries.
70
Issue 64.indd 70
Iron phosphate batteries are great because they’re durable,
they’re cheap. They’re a little heavy and they’re not quite as
energy-dense as some of the other chemistries, but they’re
a good fit for commercial use because of their durability.
As the industry is able to go through these iterations
and get some serious production trucks out there, learning
from failure and iterating will make the products better.
All these OEMs have had a really slow iteration cycle in
the past. Typically, from model to model, it was about
eight years, which is just fantastically slow in today’s BEV
world. Now they’re down to roughly two, and I think
they’re probably going to have to get down to about a year.
It’s going to be a big lift for the industry. They won’t like
it because they want to validate everything. They never
want to put something out on the road that hasn’t been
fully validated, but in some cases, they’re going to have to
do virtual simulation instead of on-road validation.
Q Charged: There’s another bottleneck. Fleets don’t
want to go electric at scale until they’ve done pilots
for two or three years. Do you think that timeframe is
going to get condensed?
A Rustam Kocher: It will be artificially constricted by
the ACT. They won’t have any choice. And so they’ll
choose OEMs that they trust and move forward. Whether
that’s Volvo, Freightliner, PACCAR or Navistar, they have
relationships with those OEMs and so they’re going to
trust them to build a vehicle that will perform under the
conditions that they need it to perform. Tesla’s going to
have trouble breaking into the market. Nikola I wouldn’t
expect to be around much longer, but other companies
like Motiv and Proterra hopefully will have carved out
enough of a niche to stand on their own two feet.
Q Charged: These articles about “sensible regulations”
and “smooth transitions” tend to say a lot about
hydrogen, CNG and e-fuels. Is there a real danger that
the industry will go down one of those dead-end roads?
A Rustam Kocher: There is. I am quite worried about
hydrogen sucking some of the oxygen and funds out of
the room. To me, hydrogen is a way that the oil and gas
industry can stay relevant. What are they good at?
They’re good at pumping things out of the ground,
storing it, refining it, piping it or trucking it to a place,
compressing it or putting into the tank and then dispens-
7/1/23 1:10 PM
 ing it. Hydrogen fits all those things really well. But it
doesn’t work. It’s not efficient. It’s extremely expensive.
It’s technologically almost impossible to do it safely.
Big Oil’s got a lot of resources and money to push this
narrative and you see it all day, all the time. When we
look at the federal funding for charging and whatnot,
they always have hydrogen in there at a similar amount
of money as BEV. There’s no need for it. There are almost
no hydrogen vehicles out there because they cost so much
more per mile to run.
That’s why I love the global effort to standardize the
Megawatt Charging System, and hopefully Tesla will
come on board with the rest of the industry. MCS should
put a bullet in hydrogen because the only thing that they
have going for them is speed of refueling. With MCS it’s
the same speed. In fact, it might be faster, so hydrogen
can go pound salt.
Batteries are only going one way. Gravimetric density
is improving, volumetric density is improving, charging
speed is improving, and all those curves are heading the
right way. None of them are slowing down, so we know
that batteries are on an improvement curve that will
continue. Solid-state batteries can charge almost instantly.
StoreDot has those organic-chemistry batteries, which
can charge super-quick. So if you can get your Megawatt
Charging System and a big StoreDot battery, we can
charge it in maybe 12 minutes, 15 minutes.
Tesla is on gen five because they
built that truck from the ground
up to be electric, which none of
the major OEMs have yet.
Q Charged: It has long seemed to me that within every
automaker there are pro-EV and anti-EV factions
eternally contending for the mastery. Is that the case
with the commercial vehicle makers too?
A Rustam Kocher: Even more so. When I started at
Daimler Trucks, a member of the board came by to visit
Portland from Germany. As the new hire, I got to ask
them a question—this was 2012. I said, “What is the plan
for the decline of the diesel engine and the switch over to
Issue 64.indd 71
new technology, whether it’s hydrogen or batteries?” And
he literally laughed and said, “Diesel is the drivetrain for
the foreseeable future, period, end of statement.”
And I made it my focus for the rest of my time to
agitate for electrification because I felt that they were
missing the boat. I started a newsletter internally about
electrification in the industry, and I sent it to the CEO
and the board. And then I got the opportunity to join the
e-mobility group and the rest is history.
Q Charged: So you were one of the pro-EV partisans,
agitators...
A Rustam Kocher: ...lobbing Molotov cocktails over
the wall.
Q Charged: Which of the big OEMs are the ones to
bet on to lead in the electric brave new world?
A Rustam Kocher: I’ve really been impressed with Volvo
Trucks. What they’ve done in electrification, both in the
European market and the US market, has been tremendous.
There’s still internal factions there, but they seem to be
moving very quickly in the right direction. The eCascadia
by Freightliner [a US subsidiary of Daimler] is a fantastic
product, I’m excited to see more of those get produced out
of the factory in Portland and get on the road. The Traton
Group [a subsidiary of Volkswagen], is doing great work
primarily in Europe, as is Daimler Truck Germany. They’re
more regulation-forced because they’ve got some pretty
strict deadlines that are coming up for truck electrification
within the European Union. They’re really under the gun,
so most of the major truck manufacturers are pushing hard
to meet those regulations, because otherwise the fines are
really, really expensive—in the billions of dollars.
Tesla, obviously, they’ve got a great product. We talk
about gen two, gen three with the OEMs right now and
maybe PACCAR and Navistar are on gen one, gen two.
Tesla is on gen five because they built that truck from the
ground up to be electric, which none of the major OEMs
have yet. They’ll get there, but honestly Tesla is that many
more jumps ahead. Whether or not they can keep their
truck intact, maintain it and build the trust within the in-
dustry is a good question—we’ll see. I hope they can. I’ve
never worked with smarter people. I’ve never worked with
a more agile company than when I was working with Tesla
on the Megawatt Charging System.
APR-JUN 2023 71
7/1/23 1:10 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE
By Charles Morris

WHY CALIFORNIA
NEEDS TO
REQUIRE
BIDIRECTIONAL
EV CHARGING
Explaining the benefits of
bidirectional EV charging: Q&A with
Nuvve CEO Gregory Poilasne
he term “game-changing” gets thrown around a lot in the EV

T field, but if there’s any new technology that really does deserve
to be described this way (as California Governor Gavin New-
som recently did), it’s bidirectional charging.
Going bi adds several nift y new benefits to driving electric. It turns an
EV into a mobile battery that can be used to provide backup power to a
home or business, and to provide services to the electrical grid, generating
revenue for the vehicle owner and potentially offsetting a significant part
of the purchase price of the vehicle.
What’s more, bidirectional charging is no hypothetical future technolo-
gy—it’s here now, and it’s being used around the world in pilot projects and a
few commercial-scale programs. A handful of bidirectional-capable EVs are
available today, and automakers are quickly implementing the technology.

72

Issue 64.indd 72 6/29/23 10:37 PM

 APR-JUN 2023 73

Issue 64.indd 73 6/29/23 10:37 PM

 THE INFRASTRUCTURE

In just a few years, every new EV, on both the consumer

and commercial sides, is likely to be bi.
Charged spoke with Nuvve CEO Gregory Poilasne about
the various V2G projects that his company is working on
around the world, and his recent testimony before the Cali-
fornia legislature, which is considering a bill that would
require all EVs sold in the state to be bi-capable by 2027.

Q Charged: We’ve been covering your company for

several years. As Nuvve is one of the pioneers of
bidirectional charging, I imagine you can explain the
benefits as well as anyone. What did you tell the folks
in Sacramento?

A Gregory Poilasne: In April, I went in front of the

Energy Committee and the Transportation Committee of
the California Senate. This bill authored by Senator
Nancy Skinner is called SB 233, and it would require
electric vehicles to have bidirectional capabilities by 2027.
Initially, the bill also required the infrastructure—the
charging stations—to be bidirectional, but then they de-
cided to split the two. The idea is that having vehicles with
bidirectional capabilities creates an environment where
innovators like Nuvve can develop business models. Bidi-
rectional EVs would be enough to accelerate adoption of The idea is that having vehicles
bidirectional services. This would naturally drive more bi-
directional charging stations like ours, and all the required
with bidirectional capabilities
hardware to support vehicle-to-grid services and more. creates an environment where
The bill doesn’t say how the bidirectional capability
needs to be integrated. You could do V2G through the innovators like Nuvve can develop
DC port of the vehicle—this is what we are doing with
school buses here in California, where our charging
business models.
station converts AC to DC and then connects to the DC
port of the vehicle to provide power. Then it takes the DC
from the bus or car, and converts it back to AC to provide case—it’s basically just replacing diodes with transistors
power for the grid. That’s one way. This implementation to make it bidirectional from an AC perspective.
is actually pretty simple. It’s purely a software upgrade, V2G through an AC port solution requires a little bit
and standardization is already in place. The ISO 15118-20 more work on the vehicle side, whereas V2G through
standard enables bidirectional communication between the DC port really requires no work on the vehicle if you
the charging station and the vehicle, and with OCPP have ISO 15118-20 implemented.
2.0.1, permission is granted to go through the DC port.
It's also possible to do V2G through an AC port. In Q Charged: Does the bill refer to both of those
that case, you need to have an onboard bidirectional options or does it leave it open?
charger. That means the charger inside the vehicle can
convert AC to DC to power the battery and take DC A Gregory Poilasne: The bill is agnostic. The bill is just
from the battery and convert it back to AC for export saying the vehicles have to have bidirectional capabilities.
to the grid. Your charging station is a lot simpler in this My point to the Senate committee was that DC implemen-

74

Issue 64.indd 74 6/29/23 10:37 PM


tation inside the vehicle is pretty much no cost, it’s just
having the right software, because people are, like, “Oh, it’s
going to make the vehicle more expensive.” Also, it doesn’t
affect the rules that the OEMs might be building around
the battery warranty. We’ve been working with Nissan for
many years now, and the only rules that we have with
Nissan are that we cannot do V2G when the charge level is
above 95% or below 30%. Between 30 and 95% we can do
V2G without any effect on the battery warranty.
The case that I made for the Senate is that bidirection-
al capabilities, with the right V2G business model, can
reduce the total cost of ownership of an EV, and there-
fore make EVs more affordable. It’s not just for the high
end—even the Nissan LEAF has bidirectional capabili-
ties today. In a pilot project in Denmark that has been
running for over 7 years, we’re generating about $220
per month from grid services. That’s about two thirds of
the leasing cost of a LEAF nowadays.
The other piece is understanding why bidirectional ve-
hicles and vehicle-to-grid are essential to our clean energy
future in California. More and more renewable energy is
Issue 64.indd 75
being added to the grid, but the distribution system has to
be designed for the peaks. When you mix EVs and renew-
able generation, the peaks are going to get even bigger. So,
you need to reinforce the distribution system for peaks
that might be occurring less than 5% of the time, and
therefore the cost of energy is going to go up for every-
body, even people that cannot afford an EV, because the
EV increases the volatility of the system.
The idea of vehicle-to-grid is that you are storing energy
at the end of the distribution system, so you can absorb
those peaks. You can bring the peak as close as possible to
the average. Now you’re making a fully-optimized use of
the infrastructure and therefore the cost of energy actu-
ally might go down for everybody.
I think those are the two most important messages:
total cost of ownership and energy cost equity. To me,
those are the two critical pieces of why vehicle-to-grid
is essential. We are thinking that by 2030 we’re going to
have eight million EVs in California. Eight million EVs
on 10-kilowatt charging station, that’s 80 gigawatts, that’s
80 nuclear reactors. It’s gigantic.
Q Charged: And it’s particularly important in Califor-
nia. Some months ago, they had rolling blackouts and
they were asking EV owners to avoid charging at peak
times. Of course, the anti-EV crowd picked up on that.
How could V2G address that problem?
A Gregory Poilasne: We actually participated during
the heat wave. We saw the largest peak that the California
grid ever reached 52 gigawatts. One of the programs we
participated in is called the Emergency Load Reduction
APR-JUN 2023 75
6/29/23 10:38 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Program, which is a demand response program in which

you can also discharge to the grid. A regular demand
response program, you go down to zero and then that’s it.
With the ELRP, we get paid $2 per kilowatt-hour, and we
can feed back to the grid. That means we can bring the
meter negative.
Last year, we only had about six buses that were con-
nected at Cajon Valley Union School District, so we had
a few tens of kilowatts of capacity that we were able to
dispatch. This year, we now have close to one megawatt
of capacity across three different school districts. I think
we have 22 or 24 buses in the San Diego area, and we
have another deployment underway in the Los Angeles
Unified School District, where we are initially deploying
24 as well. We are in the process of commissioning those
charging stations right now.
Discharging during those peak hours when you have a
heat wave, that’s really essential to balance the grid so that
when you have this heavy usage we are able to compen-
sate without using spinning reserve. When we had that
peak last year, we brought down the load to 52 gigawatts,
but everything was turned on—methane gas generators, If you convert all of LA Unified
gasoline generators, everything. From a CO2 footprint
perspective, that was really bad.
school bus fleet to electric
school buses, it’s 108 megawatts.
Q Charged: Does SB 233 address commercial vehicles?
That’s significant.
A Gregory Poilasne: It’s all EVs. I know that there are
some areas in the heavy-duty piece where they want
CARB [the California Air Resources Board] to be The Emergency Load Reduction Program is part of that.
involved with it. But buses, school buses, all those things And then you have another ruling called FERC 2222.
will definitely be a part of it. FERC [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] is
the federal organization that regulates the independent
Q Charged: Does the bill include any mandates for system operators. FERC 2222 is saying that any behind-
utilities? the-meter storage solution needs to be able to access the
spot market, including ancillary services like frequency
A Gregory Poilasne: You can take this very complex regulation, which are essential services to keep the grid
issue and try to solve all the problems at the same time, or balanced. This is opening the door to resources such as
you can do it step by step. Senator Skinner has decided to V2G participating in the spot market.
go step by step. The first step is bidirectional vehicles. Then, This regulation is in process because there is some
with that, you can provide a business model where if you complexity in how it gets implemented. Some of it re-
own a home, you can discharge your battery when the cost lates to the energy going in and out at the consumer me-
of energy is the highest, and you can also use the vehicle to ter level and, therefore, the PSCs [state utility regulators]
power your house if the grid is down. That would drive the have to be involved with that, because the other thing
business around bidirectional charging stations. that FERC says is that this market access needs to be
Then the second step is to work with the utilities to be fair. That means if you buy retail and you sell wholesale
able to do grid services, which we are already doing today. at your meter, it hurts your business case. You need to

76

Issue 64.indd 76 6/29/23 10:38 PM


come up with a net metering business model. The utili-
ties are like, “But you are still using my infrastructure so
I need to be compensated for that.”
Those are some of the negotiations that are underway
right now between different parties involved with the roll-
out of FERC 2222. But in places like Delaware or in PJM
territory, which covers a very large percentage of the US
population, this is getting implemented right now.
Q Charged: Do you think SB 233 has a good chance of
being signed into law?
A Gregory Poilasne: It’s a great question. Obviously, the
OEMs don’t like when there’s a mandate, so that’s why
some are pushing back, but even the people that are
pushing back are saying, “Yeah, we need to get there but we
are not ready to do it right now.” We expect that there will
be some special requests for case-by-case accommodations
to implement it. [Editor’s Note: As of this writing, the bill
has passed the Appropriation Committee, and been
referred to the Transportation and Utilities committees.
Mr. Poilasne now tells us that it looks “very close” to
becoming law.]
Issue 64.indd 77
Q Charged: You provide Nuvve-branded chargers. Do
you make those chargers yourself, or are you collabo-
rating with other manufacturers?
A Gregory Poilasne: We have an AC charging station
that we rolled out that came from our relationship with
the University of Delaware. It’s bidirectional, but only
with vehicles that have an onboard bidirectional
charger. That’s our product. On the light-duty side we
are working with ABB and Wallbox. Those are two of
the charging stations we have deployed mostly in
Europe at this point. We’ve got some others that we have
not announced yet. On the DC side, we are rolling out a
charging station right now with Rhombus.
Q Charged: Does Nuvve provide just V2G implemen-
tation, or do you also offer a comprehensive fleet
charging-as-a-service solution?
A Gregory Poilasne: At the core, we are a technology
company and a grid service company using EVs to
provide those grid services. Now, there are certain
segments where we provide a full CPO type of service,
which is what we are doing in the school bus space.
Where we are working with school districts, we are
providing them with charging stations and maintenance.
We are here to bring the right people to provide instal-
lation, and in some cases, we are also the intermediary to
help them finance those vehicles at an attractive cost. Those
districts are tax-exempt organizations, therefore they have
access to attractive loans. We see ourselves as the trusted
advisor to the school districts as they go through the instal-
lation process, and then in the long run, providing grid
services, which also includes monetizing the carbon offsets.
Q Charged: Are school districts your main customers
at this point?
A Gregory Poilasne: In the US, yes. Many including
San Diego Unified and LA Unified. LA Unified is the
second-largest school bus fleet in the US; they have
around 1,800 diesel school buses. If you convert all of
those to electric school buses, it’s 108 megawatts. That’s
significant. Now, in Europe we have some partners like
Circle K. They are headquartered in Laval, Quebec and
they own 17,000 gas stations around the world.
APR-JUN 2023 77
6/29/23 10:38 PM
 THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Q Charged: School buses are generally considered to

be an ideal use case for V2G. What are the pros and
cons of some other use cases?

A Gregory Poilasne: I think the only really bad one is

fast chargers on the freeway, because you are not there to
discharge. You want to go back on the road as fast as
possible, otherwise your kids are going crazy. This is not
suitable for bidirectional applications, but there is value in
providing unidirectional services.
On-the-road charging is an environment that is expen-
sive, so if you have the ability to use that very large capac-
ity in order to provide some type of grid service without
impacting the end consumer too much, this is very at-
tractive. We’ve been working with Circle K on deploying
our technology in Norway and Denmark, to provide grid
services that only increase the charge time for the end
user by 30 seconds to a minute.
The grid services include FCR-D, or Frequency Con-
tainment Reserve for Disturbances, which is a frequency-
controlled response that happens only in extreme cases
where there is a short but significant disturbance in the
frequency of the electrical current. Basically, we would
stop charging for 30 seconds or a minute and then restart, morning. When you drive by a transit bus depot, you see
and hopefully, the grid is stable again. a lot of buses that are parked maybe for many hours. Then
There’s another service called FFR, which is a very fast- the question is: What is the cost of doing V2G from an in-
responding service—in the area of a tenth of a second. We frastructure perspective, and therefore does the business
are starting with Norway and Denmark, then we’ll ex- case work? As the cost of the charging session goes down,
pand across all of the Nordics. Now, they’re also deploy- deploying universal bidirectional infrastructure makes a
ing a lot of charging stations here in the US, and they’re lot of sense.
also interested in looking at what other grid services we Another interesting business case is electrified trail-
can provide. The issue with the US is that the grid is not ers. When you have a truck with a big trailer, if the truck
as advanced as it is in Europe, and especially in the Nor- comes with, let’s say, 500 miles of range, when you put
dics, so the system is not always able to send us the right a trailer behind it, now all of a sudden you have 150
signal in order to help keep the grid balanced. miles of range. But if you have a battery in the trailer,
The good business cases are vehicles that leave in the the primary purpose of the battery could be to provide
morning from the depot, do whatever they have to do functionality—if it’s a refrigerated trailer, maybe the
and come back in the evening. Very often they’ll stay battery powers the fridge. But if you put one or two
parked 14 hours a day, and also during the weekend. In sets of motors in the wheels, now the trailer can also
Denmark, we’ve done all those light-duty fleets. We have provide some of its own traction, and therefore, reduce
some utility vehicles, some municipal vehicles, some the amount of energy that the tractor needs in order to
private fleets. pull the trailer. [Food distribution giant] Sysco just an-
The transit bus use case is not clear, because sometimes nounced that they were deploying some of those trailers.
they are just a few hours at the depot, but not all the buses We have some similar projects in Europe, where we are
are coming late in the evening and leaving early in the actually implementing V2G.

78

Issue 64.indd 78 6/29/23 10:38 PM


Now think about a logistics center. Maybe this is a
food place where you have some fridges and maybe
some ovens, a lot of loads. And those trailers are usually
parked for a pretty large amount of time. While they’re
parked, obviously you’re going to charge them, but they
have plenty of time to provide some grid services. This
could be saving on the cost of the energy for the local
site while also providing those grid services.
Municipal vehicles are another interesting business
case. You drive by a heavy-duty utility vehicle parking
lot, and they’re parked most of the time. There are a lot of
cases where bidirectional capabilities can be very viable
because the vehicles are parked. For certain periods of
time, they might be parked 100% of the time for a few
months, like school buses during the summer.
Those are some of the good use cases. Anything that is
overnight, even in-city charging, V2G is great.
I think residential to me is the top. You might have
home solar, a battery, maybe you can already interface all
of that together. Your car becomes an extension of your
home battery. Your home battery might be 15 kWh, but
your car is 150 kWh. It’s a big increase.
Q Charged: Is the Wallbox Quasar the only residen-
tial bidirectional charger available at the moment?
Issue 64.indd 79
I think everybody’s going to keep
a close eye on what’s going on
in California, because if it goes
through, the whole US and the whole
world most likely will go this way.
A Gregory Poilasne: There’s a product called dcbel.
They are just finishing certification right now. ABB has a
10-kilowatt bidirectional charger. We are deploying that
in Denmark.
Q Charged: Is there anything pending in Europe
that’s comparable to the California SB 233 bill?
A Gregory Poilasne: Not at this point, but the OEMs
over there are very aggressive on the subject. BMW was
involved with the V2G pilot of the University of Delaware
many years ago. Volkswagen has been working on it. PSA
has been working on it. Kia/Hyundai will be launching
bidirectional-capable vehicles. No, there’s a lot of activity
there, but not at the regulatory level.
I think everybody’s going to keep a close eye on what’s
going on in California, because if it goes through, the
whole US and the whole world most likely will go this
way. Maybe excluding Asia, but the Western world will
go bidirectional because the OEMs will build one car for
all those markets.
Q Charged: Are the OEMs already moving in that
direction without the need for regulation?
A Gregory Poilasne: They just don’t like to be pushed
to do something, but they are already there. The Califor-
nia Energy Commission is working on an interoperability
test center. If all the vehicles have bidirectional capabili-
ties, what happens when you plug one into charging
station A? What happens when you plug it into charging
station B? You want to have a site where the vehicles can
be tested. One, you can make sure that the bidirectional
capabilities are working, but two, you also want to
understand some of the characteristics of the response of
that control so that you understand what type of services
you can use them for.
APR-JUN 2023 79
6/29/23 10:38 PM
 Don’t Miss Our
Virtual Conferences on EV Engineering
VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

EV Engineering
Fall Conference: Week of October 2
Spring 2023 Conference: Now Available On-Demand

Cell Development and Motor Design &

Battery Systems Manufacturing

Testing, Powertrains, Charging

Power Electronics Design & Systems, Thermal Management,
Manufacturing Circuit Protection, Wire & Cable,
and more

www.ChargedEVs.com/Conference

Advertiser Index
Aspen Aerogels 31 Eaton 53 Masterflux 45

bdtronic 17 Ellsworth 9 mk North America 55

Bitrode 57 EuroGroup 84 Parker LORD 37

Champlain Cable 10 EV Tech Expo N.A. 81 Schaltbau 19

Chroma 2 Fujipoly 43 Sheldahl 7

CISSOID 15 Green Watt Power 83 Unico 47

COMSOL 27 Hesse Mechatronics 8 Vehicle Electrification Expo 11

EA Elektro-Automatik 25 Huber 21 Wafios 5

For more info about advertising visit: www.ChargedEVs.com/Advertise

Issue 64.indd 80 6/30/23 2:06 PM

 Suburban Collection Showplace

Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo is a forum for electric, hybrid and plugin hybrid
technology that connects engineers and executives from across the H/EV manufacturing
industry. Stay informed on the latest solutions for electric and hybrid vehicles with a fast
display of technologies including: cables and connectors, components, magnetics, testing,
simulation/software, manufacturing

Use promo code CHA for free expo

registration and $100 off conference pricing.

EVtechExpo.com

Issue 64.indd 81 6/30/23 2:07 PM

 No, charging stations are not gas stations
rticles about EVs in the mainstream press invari-
A ably mention the need for more public charging
infrastructure. Those with an anti-EV slant spin
this grain of truth into an insurmountable obstacle, but
even those that are neutral or positive-leaning often assume
that we’ll need astonishing numbers of public chargers.
In 2017, a USB auto analyst triggered howls of hilarity
when he wrote that Tesla would need to add 30,000 Super-
chargers at a cost of $8 billion “to match the convenience of
the US gas infrastructure.” (The gentleman also predicted
that Tesla would not make any profit from its then-new
Model 3.)
Incredibly, such uninformed views still pervade the
press. To give just one example, a recent piece in the New
York Times stated that “experts” say that public chargers
will need to become as ubiquitous as gas stations are today.
Respected news sources regularly make similar pronounce-
ments.
I don’t know how these folks
define “experts,” but I regularly
interview CEOs of charging As EV owners
providers and EVSE manu- writers don’t), many EV drivers will
facturers, and while everyone
agrees that more (and more never need to use a public charger.
importantly, better) public
charging is required, no one
I’ve spoken to sees EV charging as analogous to the gas sta-
tion experience.
As I’ve often noted, people tend to see every new technol-
ogy through the lens of the old, and that’s natural. Most of
us have spent our lives making periodic stops at gas stations
to fill up, and until you’ve owned an EV, it’s hard to under-
stand that this model is history.
The US DOE estimates that 80% of charging takes place
at home or at the workplace. Of course, this figure just tells
us about current charging needs, and at this point most
EV owners are affluent suburban dwellers. As EV adoption
spreads, the need for public charging is likely to grow. We
don’t know what percentage of refueling sessions will need
to take place at public chargers in the electric future, but
we do know that, for gas vehicles, it will always be 100%,
whereas for EVs, it will be a fraction of that.
As EV owners know (but so many writers don’t), many
EV drivers will never need to use a public charger. You can
count your favorite pundit among that number. I often visit
public chargers as a journalistic duty, but I’ve never needed
to use one, because I charge at home, and I don’t make long
trips in my EV.
There are two main use cases that require public charg-
ing. One is long-distance travel. The Great American Road
Trip requires widespread access to fast, dependable charg-
ing, and while the necessary network is rapidly being built
out, more will be needed. However, most drivers will need
Issue 64.indd 82
By Charles Morris
to use highway charging only occasionally, and some not
at all. Meaningful stats are hard to come by, but by most
accounts, only about 5% of automobile trips in the US are
for more than 30 miles.
The second situation that calls for public charging is
the Plight of the Drivewayless. Millions of urban denizens
lack driveways, or even assigned parking spaces, so they
cannot install chargers at home. Workplace charging can
serve some of these poor souls, but not all—city dwellers
often take public transport to work, and use their cars for
shopping trips and weekend outings.
We’ve seen many proposed solutions for the Drive-
wayless, ranging from sensible to dubious to downright
nutty. I don’t know what the urban charging landscape
is going to look like, but I am confident that it will not
involve anything similar to a gas station. Some imagine
that urban drivers will pay regular visits to charging hubs,
where they’ll sit and wait to
charge (an acquaintance of
mine proposed that such hubs
know (but so many should feature stages for live
music).
This isn’t going to happen.
In our society, convenience
is next to godliness, and a
gadget that saves us the five
minutes it takes to check into a hotel, or the three seconds
it takes to stick a credit card into a slot, is hailed as a
breakthrough. Can anyone really believe that American
consumers will sit and wait to charge for half an hour?
On the highway, waiting to charge is no great incon-
venience, because the stations are on the way, and most
human bodies need to make a pit stop every 200 miles or
so anyway (some commercial drivers are required to do
so). But driving to a “charging hub” and sitting around a
couple of times a week? People won’t do it.
To get a realistic idea of what urban charging will
look like, look at the few cities where EVs make up a
large percentage of vehicles. In Oslo, Amsterdam and,
increasingly, London, on-street parking areas and public
garages are liberally provided with chargers. You park,
you charge. No sci-fi gadgets needed, and no heavy lifting
for utilities, as these areas already have electrical service
for street lighting. On my last visit to Oslo, I saw lots of
EVs charging, but I did not see anyone waiting around at
a charging hub.
Cities need lots more on-street chargers, they need to
be well-designed to fit into streetscapes without clutter,
and they need to be smart, so utilities can manage charg-
ing times to help stabilize the grid. There are a lot of rich
opportunities for innovative companies in the charging
space, but turning gas stations into charging hubs is not
one of them.
6/30/23 2:08 PM
 Everything You Wanted To Know About
DC/DC ’s, But Were Afraid To Ask….
Is it Uni-directional or Bi-directional?
Can I get parts when I need them? You bet –we’ve
got the best delivery – through Digi-Key or direct.
What about pricing? Price and quality through our
low-cost factories and advanced automation.
How about 2nd sourcing and customs/proprietary?
We do both – with industry standard DC/DCs like
Sevcon/Borg-Warner or Delta footprints:
• 300W & 500W
• 12Vdc Outputs/Batteries
• 30~130Vdc Inputs
• Can Parallel up to 10
• Enable/Remote, On/Off
• Low Quiescent Current
Plus others…Isolated, non-isolated, single & dual
outputs and bi/uni-directional – from 40W to 66kW!
Chargers Too… Including the World’s Smallest 6.6kW!

Ph.+1-310-881-3890 greenwattpower.com

Issue 64.indd 83 6/30/23 2:09 PM

 C

CM

MY

CY

CMY

Issue 64.indd 84 6/30/23 2:09 PM