CHAdeMO Announce 150 Kw Supercharging Protocol

During CHAdeMO’s annual General Assembly in Tokyo, Japan, the Association’s management has announced its plans and ongoing activities towards bringing high power CHAdeMO chargers to the market.

The Association plans to release an amendment to the current protocol, which will enable charging with up to 150kW (350A), this year. The revision of the protocol, announced to the Regular Members already last year, is still ongoing with technical consultations with members happening both in and outside of Japan.

CHAdeMO’s Secretary General Dave Yoshida said: “One of the purposes of the Association is to evolve CHAdeMO protocol so that it can better respond to market needs. We see a movement towards mass market EVs with higher capacity batteries and we, as the Association of fast charging protocol, prepare for it by working on the high power protocol. This will enable faster deployment of the high power charging infrastructure, in preparation for EVs that can charge with higher power.”

Recognising that the upward trend in EV autonomy will lead to a need for charging with higher power at key locations, especially along the motorways, CHAdeMO mandated its Technical Work Group to tackle issues such as the size of the high power cable or managing temperature increase of the charger that may come in contact with users.

The ‘plug’ itself will remain exactly the same as the current one, meaning the high power CHAdeMO chargers can feed power to both the current EVs as well as the upcoming EVs with higher battery capacity. Current CHAdeMO EVs will also be able to use the 150kW charger, but as today’s EVs are configured to charge at around 50kW, they will charge at the current speed.

Dave Yoshida added: “We are very pleased that, thanks to the hard work of our technical team, we will soon be able to release the new version of the protocol to our members. We expect first 150kW standardised chargers to be deployed in 2017.”

CHAdeMO technical representatives are also actively involved in the IEC Committee working on high power charging, where, together with other international experts, they are preparing a revision of the DC high power standards, based on the IEC standards published in 2014.

In terms of higher power, for example 350kW (1 000V x 350A), technical studies are ongoing and the Association will determine its further development around 2018, should there be market demand.

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