Oak Ridge Working on Solar Buffer for Vehicle Charging Stations

When Nissan’s electric vehicle hits select markets next year – including Tennessee – so will thousands of chargers. They’ll sit in people’s garages and in public parking lots. And when in use, they’ll sap massive amounts of electricity. So Oak Ridge scientists are working to protect the grid.

Some of the high-voltage chargers planned for public access use 440-volt hook-ups and can fully charge car batteries in just 26 minutes.

“It actually could damage or take down portions of the grid, depending on the time of day that all those cars might be plugged in.”

That’s Oak Ridge researcher Dana Christensen. As part of a Department of Energy grant to build 2,500 chargers in Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga, Oak Ridge received $8.5 million to work on a “solar buffer.” Roughly 200 of the charging stations will use power produced by solar panels and stored in big battery packs. Christensen says the grid would only be used as a back up.

“Through power electronics, we can allow the battery bank, the stationary bank, to fully deplete then switch over to the grid and continue charging the car off the grid.”

Christensen says the technology for the solar charging has already been developed, but his team will be looking for the best way to mass produce the stations.