Gravity Technologies is working hard to make electric vehicle charging faster and more widely available, particularly in populous cities like its home base of New York. Just weeks removed from launching the fastest charging station in the United States, it's revealed new 200-kW curbside chargers designed to bring its world-beating fast-charging tech to the streets. The company says its latest hardware is the same size as a conventional Level 2 charger but 30 times faster – quick enough to give a substantial charge while parked for short bodega or deli stop.
It's easy to imagine large EV charging stations in suburbs and alongside superhighways, but when it becomes much harder when thinking about city centers so dense and crowded drivers have trouble finding parking spots each and every day. Compounding that problem is the fact that at-home charging is a more complex issue for apartments and other multi-unit dwellings common in urban areas - so urban EV drivers can't necessarily rely on overnight charging, either.
That threatens to be a major obstacle for EV adoption moving forward, as more than half the world's population lives in cities and that number is only expected to get bigger in the coming decades.
Current curbside charging infrastructure is dominated by slow Level 2 AC hardware. New York City has installed a pilot network of 100 Level 2 chargers at curbside locations around the city's five boroughs, and those chargers have proven quite popular. They've also proven quite slow – it takes an hour just to get 20 miles (32 km) of range, a rate that's all but useless for stays shorter than overnighters.
Gravity Technologies is looking beyond slow-trickling Level 2 chargers with a fast-charging solution it calls Distributed Energy Access Point (DEAP). Designed to be installed on metered curbs in the busiest parts of the city, each curbside unit is mounted atop its own smart pole or on a city utility pole. The DEAP box doesn't look much larger or more intrusive than a parking meter, and Gravity says it requires no utility upgrades or street reconstruction. The simple, tamperproof retractable cable is designed for easy plug-in and return.
Gravity says the UL Solutions-certified 200-kW curbside DEAP can deliver charging speeds up to 960 mph (1,545 km/h), adding 200 miles (322 km) of battery range in just 13 minutes – less time than it takes to eat lunch or hold a business meeting. And unlike a charging station, street-side charging promises to fit more flexibly into one's daily schedule, without demanding a dedicated trip.
The new DEAP units are twice as fast as the 90-kW TIC 01 chargers Gravity revealed in September 2022 and only slightly larger at 18 x 9 x 27 in (46 x 23 x 69 in). They're also bidirectional, allowing for a more holistic energy management system that can redirect electricity from the parked car's battery back to surrounding buildings or the grid at large when needed. In essence, each plugged-in car goes online as part of the local electrical grid.
"An urban parking spot is valuable real estate. So is people's time," said Gravity founder and CEO Moshe Cohen in an announcement this week. "If cities install slow, outdated chargers at the curb, they're wasting people's time and blocking the ability to fully utilize the latent potential in parked EV batteries. Gravity was the first to bring DEAP-speed to indoor charging, and now we're doing it again on city streets."
Cohen refers to the even faster 500-kW DEAP indoor chargers Gravity launched earlier this month in its first public deployment. The company opened what it and Reuters deemed the fastest EV charging in the US, a 24-charger network offering 500-kW speeds, fast enough to add 200 miles in just five minutes. Each of those 24 charging units has been mounted above a parking space in the public garage in Midtown Manhattan, so no ground-level garage space was disrupted and no utility upgrading was necessary.
Gravity said during the opening ceremony of the Midtown station that it has many additional sites in development and the capacity to manufacture and deploy thousands of chargers per year. It has not yet announced plans for deploying the new 200-kW curbside chargers.
Source: Gravity Technologies
