What you'll learn:
- What labs are involved with the National Charging Experience Consortium?
- Main objectives of ChargeX Consortium.
If you’re old enough, as I am, to remember the VCR format wars of decades past, you’ll recall that Betamax was released by Sony in 1975. One year later saw the arrival of JVC’s VHS (Video Home System) player in 1976, which was released in the United States in 1977 by RCA. A format war is one method in which a standard can established. However, it leads to much loss with regard to the financial damage inflicted to the companies that back the losing format or standard before its demise. What’s more, it can take up to a decade for a single winning standard to emerge.
Formation of ChargeX
To prevent a similar kerfuffle when it comes to EV charging formats and to ensure continued electrification leadership in the U.S., the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation has funded a team from three national laboratories to lead the National Charging Experience Consortium (ChargeX Consortium).
Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory will collaborate with organizations representing a cross-section of the electric-vehicle industry. They will work with EV charger makers to standardize several aspects of EV chargers, including reliability, usability, payments, and outage reporting. Its overall mission is to improve public EV charging by June 2025.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced plans for 500,000 charging stations to be built nationwide by 2030. This new effort, led by the Department of Energy national laboratories, aims to address charger reliability.
The ChargeX Consortium consists of up to nearly 30 companies and is growing. In addition to five automakers that have joined the group (BMW, Ford, GM, Rivian, and Tesla), the group includes station builders and operators such as ChargePoint, Electrify America, EVgo, Siemens, and Tritium.
What are the Objectives?
The Consortium will divide into three working groups to exchange information that helps the national labs complete the following objectives:
- Define the Charging Experience: With the help of data and insights from Consortium participants, the national labs will define and publish key performance indicators that measure the customer charging experience, set targets for each performance indicator, measure performance of charging networks in the U.S., and provide a blueprint for recognizing excellence in industry. The creation of a centralized data platform for EV charger data reporting will facilitate and maximize access to data and insights that could support future charging reliability analysis.
- Triage Charging Reliability and Usability: The national labs will work with Consortium participants to understand the root causes and identify solutions to problems that prevent customers from successfully charging on public chargers. Emphasis will be on issues related to payment, user interface, and communication between EVs, chargers, and cloud services.
- Develop Solutions for Scaling Reliability: With input from Consortium participants, the national labs will design new diagnostics and testing tools to ensure successful charging and scalable interoperability testing as the number of EVs and EV chargers continue to grow.
Teams working in these three areas will exchange information to help the national labs identify solutions to common challenges and share them with the entire industry. This effort aligns with the mission to accelerate an electrified transportation system that’s affordable, convenient, equitable, reliable, and safe and fulfills a specific mandate to plan, coordinate, and implement data sharing to inform the buildout of a national charging network.
The consortium’s aspirational goal, while non-enforceable, complements federal requirements of greater than 97% uptime to ensure that each customer can successfully and easily charge at public chargers.
The national labs will also work with consumer advocacy groups to inform ways to measure the customer charging experience and collect customer feedback to track industry improvement over time. Based on this work, the national labs will develop a blueprint for a voluntary program that recognizes charging-station operators for providing an excellent charging experience.
Finally, the national labs will develop innovative solutions for testing EV and charger software before deployment to ensure that every EV works with every charger as the market grows.