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Supercharger - Williamsport, PA
- Thread starter Lanny
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- pennsylvania supercharger
RTPEV
Active Member
This will be an awesome charger for me. I'll be traveling through this summer on a 584 mile trip, 10.5 hours drive time. Currently ABRP predicts a 35 minute stop in Harrisburg (which is the last Supercharger before my destination on the Southern Tier of Western NY (Erwin is a tad bit out of the way). I fully expect a V3 Supercharger in Williamsport to cut this stop to 15 minutes, which when combined with the other 14 minute stop in Virginia (which might need to be a tad longer to account for Harrisburg->Williamsport), would mean this whole trip can be done with only 30 minutes charging! Just insane. Of course we normally wind up stopping for well over 1.5 hours altogether when we take this trip, so it's way overkill, but now we can just stop any old place and not worry about having to hang out somewhere for a half hour. A 15 minute stop at a Sheetz is practically what it takes to just use the restroom and grab a snack and drink anyway.
Tomcrocker
Member
I talked with one of the workers at the site. It seems that they were responsible for installing the wiring under the ground. He said the next thing is for the electrician to come and hook everything up. He said that it may open this coming Monday or Tuesday. I will take what he said about Monday and Tuesday with a grain of salt. I plan on stopping by each day after work to see how it’s coming along. It’s only a couple miles from my house.
Maybe I’ll be one of the first to try out the charger, if not the first?
Maybe I’ll be one of the first to try out the charger, if not the first?
Tomcrocker
Member
Ready for the electrician. They’re painting the lines.
SabrToothSqrl
Active Member
Tomcrocker
Member
Talked to the electricians yesterday. There are three of them. One of them appears to be the Tesla expert.
The one electrician I talked to said that it may go live in 1 to 2 weeks. I suppose the wide range is because of the uncertainty of weather.
There’s a lot of big heavy wires laying around!
The one electrician I talked to said that it may go live in 1 to 2 weeks. I suppose the wide range is because of the uncertainty of weather.
There’s a lot of big heavy wires laying around!
Tomcrocker
Member
I spoke to one of the electricians on site after work on Friday. He said they’re almost finished and it may be ready by sometime Monday. They have to connect up some non-power related equipment and then have PP&L (the power company) come in and turn on the power.
Tomcrocker
Member
The 2 entrances to Sheets are on the east side of the lot fronting on Maynard street. . The Superchargers are in the south west corner of the lot near the car wash. You would be driving west along the south side of the lot past the gas pumps on the right and the underground tank filling area on the left. The Superchargers are on the left just beyond the underground tank filling area.
Note that the google maps view is of the old facility before it was razed and rebuilt.
Tomcrocker
Member
Yes. Today I went over and found a Model S parked there with no electricians present.
One of the electrical cabinets had the door open. After a few minutes a man walked out from the Sheets. I talked to him and found out that he was from Tesla.
While I was there, he adjusted the trip current for each of the 2 main breakers in the opened cabinet. He didn’t know when they would switch it on, that was not in his control. I asked if he would stay there until they came back to turn it on to test the system. he said no, but another Tesla person would return after they turn on the system to test it with a car that he/she would drive there in.
The model S that he was driving was a loaner from the Devon PA location. He, was from out of state.
I asked him how long would it take after the system is switched on for it to show up on the maps. I didn’t quite understand his answer but it seemed like the person that switches on the system will use a laptop computer on site to update Tesla so that it would then become available on the maps.
He comfirmed to me that it is indeed a V3 site. I asked him why the alpha numeric designations scribbled in grease pen or something on the back of the charging stations were marked that way. What I had seen was that they were marked 1A through 1D and then 2A through 2D. Based on his answer, I understand now that we have a Cabinet from the power company followed by a cabinet that acts as a very large junction box followed by a cabinet containing the two main circuit breakers splitting the system up into side 1 (1A-1D) and a side 2 (2A-2D). The two circuits then move onto the last box which contains electronics that interface with the charging stations that the cars plug into. Smaller conduit entering the last cabinet were confirmed by him to be for data communication lines.
He confirmed to me that there would be no power sharing between cars because this is a true V3 station.
Reddy Kilowatt
Active Member
Sounds like a tech I ran into at the Hagerstown site. he was flown into Tyson's and has been driving around site to site making repairs. In you case sounds like this guy was calibrating and checking things out.
Under the NEC, Tesla probably has to identify each piece of equipment. Although it wont mater to us, maybe why there marking the back side in lieu of the front side.
This is good news and should be on line shortly. I need the station in May for a couple days.
kungfujoe
Member
Does the permit data support this claim? The handful of V3 stations I've seen data for don't seem to allocate 250kW x the number of stalls, which would be required to avoid power sharing. The one going up near me doesn't even support 100kW per stall, based on the permit paperwork. Is this site truly capable of drawing 2 megawatts of power?
Regardless of whether there's power sharing or not, I'm really excited for this location to open, as I'm commonly driving between Northern Virginia and Western NY. The Harrisburg stop is a little sooner than I'd like, and having a V3 charger in a nearly-perfect location will be huge for me!
RTPEV
Active Member
Tomcrocker
Member
I am pretty sure this V3 charging station does not have batteries. One reason may be that the Sheets station was completely torn down and rebuilt. In anticipation that it would have a supercharging station, they made sure that the power made available was adequate. There is a significant powerline right next to the station.
Tomcrocker
Member
Friday, I spoke to a contractor worker who was there for “caulking” and other finishing up activities.
He said that all that is left is for someone from Tesla to come by, turn it on, test, and add it into the system.
I took pictures of equipment labels for those interested.
First is the label on 1 of the 2 cabinets connected to the two sets of 4 Superchargers.
Next is the label on the circuit breaker cabinet. This contains 2 circuit breakers.
Next is the label on the metering cabinet.
Last is the label on the transformer.
It looks to me that a full 250kw charge may only possible with 2-3 vehicles simultaneously as long as there is no more cars charging. I leave it to others to do the math (and guessing).
He said that all that is left is for someone from Tesla to come by, turn it on, test, and add it into the system.
I took pictures of equipment labels for those interested.
First is the label on 1 of the 2 cabinets connected to the two sets of 4 Superchargers.
Next is the label on the circuit breaker cabinet. This contains 2 circuit breakers.
Next is the label on the metering cabinet.
Last is the label on the transformer.
It looks to me that a full 250kw charge may only possible with 2-3 vehicles simultaneously as long as there is no more cars charging. I leave it to others to do the math (and guessing).
RTPEV
Active Member
Local storage is also about peak shaving. Whether or not sufficient electrical capacity exists on site, it will usually be beneficial to limit power draw during on-peak hours
kungfujoe
Member
Thanks for posting these (I'd use the +1/thanks function on your post, but I guess I need more posts of my own before I have permissions to rate posts... or add a profile pic).
I'm not entirely sure what to make of that electrical panel. It says that the max continuous AC input is 430A. At 480V, that's only 206.4kW... But it also lists DC input, suggesting there's a DC power source, which supports the assertion above that the sites have battery storage. Those must be awfully BIG batteries if a unit that can take in 206kW of input power can feed four V3 stalls.. It lists the output power as 250kW. Hopefully that's per stall, and not 250kW out of the unit that serves 4 stalls. It's really hard to tell from this panel.
RTPEV
Active Member
Not quite. The 480V is 3-phase. To convert to single phase equivalent, we need to divide the 480 by √3 (about 1.73) to get to the 277V (also listed on the panel). The 277V at 430A delivers ~119kW per phase, or ~357kW for the 3 phases total. To within a rounding error, that is why it states 350kVA @ 480V under the AC Continuous Power Output.
It's still far short of the 1MW that in theory the V3 Supercharger cabinet should be able to deliver, so I'm not sure how to interpret that, other than to assume that this label is PER OUTPUT (notice that it does state 4 outputs at the top).
kungfujoe
Member
Right, of course, thank you. That's less power than I'd like to see, but I do think that 1MW would be serious overkill. Last I heard, the LR Model 3 will only charge at 250kW up to about 20% SoC, and it begins to drop off after that. The Y will most likely have similar limits, since it's reportedly using the same battery pack as the 3. I don't know if the Raven Models S/X can charge at 250kW, but I understand that the pre-Raven models can't hit 250kW at all. Given that, I'd think that 120-150kW per stall would be sufficient to provide power without significantly limiting people very often.
Unfortunately, this appears to be less than 90kW per stall, so if all four are in use and everyone has less than ~60% SoC, they're going to experience slow charging, unless the site really does have battery storage to provide a boost during peak demand.
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