Tritium Holdings, the Brisbane-based producer of electric car rapid chargers, has rolled out its latest charging unit and what it considers to be a revolutionary supporting architecture.
It’s an ecosystem that lets companies operating DC chargers scale up their charging units’ power outputs, and scale out the physical number of chargers, in less time and for less money as demand grows.
This means operators need not outlay a huge amount on capital until they have latent user demand, but can put in place all the right foundations.
It uses a DC microgrid architecture that makes a pool of shared power for the system’s chargers to access.
Tritium says it is designed to sever the linear relationship between power conversion equipment managing electrical grid feed to the site, and the charger’s power output which manages electricity delivery to an electric car.
The microgrid also transmits power across the system at 950V DC rather than 400V AC. This design reduces the gauge of cabling in half, which means tens of thousands in savings based on copper prices.
The upgraded charger unit itself is called PKM 150, runs Tritium’s patented liquid-cooled modular design, and uses 80 per cent of its predecessor unit’s parts – something the company says enhances reliability and ease of maintenance.
Customers choose between 50kW, 100kW and 150kW of power delivered to each. Operators can then upgrade to greater power levels on a “pay as you grow” basis.
These scalable chargers build on technology Tritium launched in November 2020, but appear to offer higher power ceilings – albeit not yet 350kW.
“The PKM provides a new, distributed architecture that delivers unique site capital efficiency and scalability,” said Tritium co-founder and chief growth officer David Finn.
“With the PKM150, we’ve built a strong foundational model for this new platform that will offer our customers the opportunity to deploy more capital efficient sites, which will in turn allow them to build more charging sites across their networks.”
Tritium CEO Jane Hunter said the news meant unparalleled site scalability and an optimal configuration for charge point operators to maximise revenue.
“Tritium is well-positioned to be a continued leader within this industry and grow our global market share, and the PKM150 only further solidifies our intention to be the world’s premiere fast charging provider.”
As we recently reported, Brisbane-based Tritium is ambitious to go from being number two in the US and Europe to number one – but it isn’t forgetting its Australian roots.
The company, which is about to be listed on the NASDAQ, had a ribbon-cutting ceremony a few week back for its new multi-million dollar electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing chambers in Brisbane.
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