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Wiki UK and Ireland Supercharger Site News
- Thread starter WannabeOwner
- Start date
rlasry1
Member
JupiterMan
Active Member
Planning permission granted a few months ago, together with Ecotricity chargers.
There were reports that construction had started - which was incorrect (it was work on a telecoms box nearby), so currently in waiting mode.....
Not stalled, just not started. I should be visiting both Crawley SC and Pease Pottage services on Monday so I'll post photos of both (PP likely to be no activity).
Alset2go
Member
darkNstormy
Member
Banbury: good colour coordination with the Pizza Hut sign!
Supercharger hunter @cezdoc reports Newbridge Edinburgh has started construction. Pics on Scottish Owner's Facebook group if someone manages to get permission to share.
I'm there on Wednesday morning so will provide a progress update.
I would be surprised if that was a contributing factor as Tesla specifically exclude the use of superchargers for Taxis in their terms and conditions.
Privacy & Legal | Tesla
A bunch of taxi companies use Superchargers. That rule simply cannot be enforced.
Perhaps they do but I cant imagine Tesla would actively encourage this by building chargers to suit a local taxi firm.
Depending on how much they’ll pay I suppose;
Tesla to deliver its largest privately-owned Supercharger station to a taxi fleet in Montreal - Electrek
cezdoc
Member
Good stuff! Foundations for the power supply are just inside the inner fencing on the RHS. The stalls are meant to be going on the other side of the fence in the outer parking area. It will be interesting to see if any digging has started there yet.
This is wishful thinking, particularly in respect of the V3 being able to do more.
Although there were changes in what the cars could get out of the V2, the supercharger itself never changed from its spec sheet - it was just a case of directing 100% of the output to a single car in a 2-stall supercharger, with an architecture that had 12 converter modules, each module direct from mains to DC output and sharing by means of allocating whole modules (actually, groups of 3 modules) to one output or the other.
History here:
- V1 supercharger, using the charger modules from the original USA-spec cars but run on higher AC voltage to achieve 10kW output per module. Supercharging originally launched on the 2012 Model S 85 with max rate of 90kW (ie. needing 9 modules to do it). Later, with revB battery pack in the cars it was announced that 120kW max rate was possible - from the supercharger point of view this was just a software update allowing all 12 modules in the supercharger to be fed to a single car if the other car was not present.
- V2 supercharger - exact same architecture as V1, just changing the charger modules to the ones designed in 2013 for the EU-spec Model S (but later used in USA too). These modules could deliver almost 12kW output when run from sufficiently high AC voltage - so could deliver 108kW to the lead car even with two cars attached; output with just one car still limited to 120kW by the car. Much later (Model 3 era), the upgrade to 143kW output appeared - just like the earlier V1 upgrade, this was simply a case of letting a single car access 100% of the supercharger resources at their original spec. Note that not all superchargers outside the USA could achieve the full 143kW, due to different local AC voltages (except in cases where Tesla installed their own transformer to get USA-style 480V).
- V3 has a completely different architecture, with sharing across a high-voltage DC bus (potentially between cabinets and/or external battery storage), with separate input and output modules. Input modules feed the DC bus, output modules feed an individual post from the DC bus. Hence the output per post is fixed by the output module rating and does not increase when there are fewer cars present. The rating plate numbers are 350kW per cabinet input (assuming 480V) and 250kW/631A output per post (independent of the input voltage). Total output per cabinet is limited to 925kW - the 350kW input plus up to 575kW "borrowed" from other cabinets or external battery storage.
So the only way to go past 250kW on V3 is if the output module is actually capable of more than its stated rating. Possibly they could be upgraded to do so (though by past naming convention that would give you a "V4" at that point), but there's lots of other impediments. At 631A, Tesla are already pushing the CCS connector well beyond the ratings specified for a standard CCS connector (originally 200A, now 500A with active cooling); note that heating increases with the square of current. Also, the input side of the V3 becomes an issue: with V2, it was reasonably common to find the adjacent stall not in use so you could get the full 120kW/143kW - with V3, to go above 250kW you'd need 3 empty stalls adjacent, or a lot of empty stalls across a large interconnected site. Even with interconnects and batteries, the cabinet already can't quite manage 250kW on all four outputs simultaneously. For typical sites as currently installed in the UK (no batteries, often <480V AC, so about 600kW shared across 8 stalls for example), even 250kW only works if cars are just drawing it for a relatively small proportion of the time. Nowadays, it's rare to find supercharger sites completely empty.
IMO, on the current cars 250kW is currently a bit of a "party trick", rarely achieved in practice and not for very long when it is. So there's lots of headroom for improving the cars to get more consistent and longer duration >200kW charging before the 250kW capability of the V3 supercharger becomes a significant limitation.
Note that the rule in that link applies only to cars purchased after December 2017. Most Tesla-taxi outfits that I've seen are using older vehicles.
The company doing the groundwork for Edinburgh SC is called Grid 4 Electric Vehicles. Their website - g4eltd.co.uk - seems to be, ironically, under contruction. However, there might be a clue on https://uk.linkedin.com/in/g4eltd-grid-for-electric-vehicles-6a1a23168 for those wanting to take their Supercharger hunting to the next level . . .
cezdoc
Member
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