NECST - Next Generation Emission-Reduced Charging System Technology

The EU’s environmental efforts to become climate-neutral by 2050 are outperformed by the very ambitious targets of the Austrian government to reach climate-neutrality already by the year 2040. To achieve these CO2-targets of a net-zero in Austria as well as in Europe, it will be especially crucial to lower the emissions of the transport sector which has increased steadily in recent years. With a broad introduction of the e-mobility as key technology, combined with renewable energies, this can be reached. As we are at the beginning of this transformation, it still requires major technological improvements for a full spreading of e-mobility in the public. Major subjects for achieving these targets will be a higher overall efficiency in the e-mobility energy chain, accompanied by a higher social acceptance, which is also influenced by the charging time as well as the charging noise emissions. Currently, the expansion of the so-called High-Power Charging (HPC) Technology takes major steps forward, which will cause significantly faster charging times soon. Thus, the excessive waste heat, that appears in the power electrics is currently released to the ambient air via a fan in all applications. On the one hand, higher charging rates lead to higher thermal losses which might be further used. On the other hand, the high fan speeds lead to acoustic disturbances, that seems to make residential areas inadequate for future charging stations. These effects will become even more relevant with higher charging capacities in the future. NECST starts exactly here and wants to introduce adequate countermeasures because these drawbacks of efficiency and acoustic will significantly increase with higher charging power in the coming years. In the project NECST, four real demonstrator systems should be built, in which the thermal losses of HPC stations, that operate 100% with electricity from renewable energies, will be transferred by appropriate heat exchangers to an end user of the waste heat. Therefore, use cases with significantly different boundary conditions are chosen in order that benefits as well as limits of the NECST approach can be widely evaluated. In most cases, heat pumps are used to transfer the heat to the required temperature levels but for financial reasons in few cases, an implementation without heat pump will be enforced. In all cases one main goal is to omit the fan and hence avoid the acoustic disturbance in the surrounding area of the HPC stations. The utilization of a heat pump enables lifting the waste heat to temperature levels suitable for heating purposes. With the aid of a local heating network, the heat exchange to the selected customer can be ensured, who can reduce his primary heating energy requirements tremendously. Beside that. it is possible to take off some of the load in the electric grid because less electric energy for heating purposes is needed by using the waste heat. By the exploitation of this - up to now - unused energy, significant amounts of CO2 can be reduced in heating systems, which supports the climate-neutrality. This technology could also turn bidirectional charging more profitable by loss reduction. For installers & operators of HPC stations, the operation becomes more economically attractive. Via a wide illustration of the overall efficiency increase in the e-mobility by the aid of NECST, a higher social acceptance of e-mobility should be achieved, hence the electrified transportation systems can spread faster.