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As more and more consumers purchase electric vehicles, many are discovering the significant benefits of home charging. Fueling an EV at a public charging station continues to be slower than filling a tank with gasoline, but the convenience and low cost of home charging greatly outweigh this relatively infrequent drawback. These advantages are increasing because state-of-the-art EVs are now traveling much greater distances on a single charge, reducing the frequency of visits to public charging stations during longer excursions. Improving widespread access to home charging is emerging as a key prerequisite to full-scale EV adoption, and promising new technologies are being developed to overcome barriers.
In most cases, homeowners are able to install rapid Level 2 home chargers that can fully refuel an EV overnight, when electricity rates are low. The cost of the installation is minor compared to the purchase price of the EV and is rightly seen as an indispensable investment. In some cases, however, a homeowner’s existing electrical panel is already near its full capacity, and upgrading the panel to handle the additional load of an EV charger is prohibitively expensive. The technical barrier is frustrating because an EV charger will only trigger a capacity shortfall when other major appliances are in use, but this is rarely a problem when operating at night. There are also situations where an existing electrical subpanel has additional capacity but doesn’t have any remaining spaces for a circuit breaker dedicated to an EV charger.
Similar technical barriers complicate the installation of home chargers in multiunit dwellings where tenants park their vehicles in assigned parking spaces. These closely packed chargers need to deliver the necessary electricity and provide a mechanism for billing the appropriate tenants. California and Canada have finalized regulations that will phase out the sale of internal combustion vehicles by 2035, and providing the convenience of home charging to renters is now recognized as a major environmental justice challenge.
Luckily, solutions are being developed that lower the cost of problematic Level 2 home charger installations. An innovative company based in Canada called Recharge Vehicule Electrique (RVE) is determined to transform the electric vehicle charging industry by overcoming barriers to residential charging. Their DCC product line avoids the load limitations of existing electrical panels by monitoring the total current in real time and safely deactivating the EV charger whenever it might cause an undesirable overload. Since these overloads are extremely rare, RVE’s load shedding devices provide a safe, practical way to manage the home delivery of electric fuel. They are also extremely useful for reducing the expense of multiunit installations and facilitating the billing of individual tenants.
The proactive innovations of progressive companies like RVE stand in stark contrast to the do-nothing attitudes of EV naysayers who insist that we will not be able to generate enough electricity to fuel a growing fleet of EVs. The DCC product line demonstrates that EVs can be refueled at night without exceeding the load capacity of our existing residential buildings, tapping into the cheap, unused generation capacity of our electricity suppliers. When renters enjoy the same inexpensive, convenient benefits of home charging currently available to homeowners, our ongoing transition away from internal combustion vehicles can be accomplished in a more equitable way.
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