These EV Charging Stations Have A Secret Feature To Charge Your Car Even Faster

Remember when all those car brands were promising an all-electric future? Well, the list of automakers with scaled-back EV plans continues to grow, and that's likely to remain the case now that the $7,500 EV tax credit is dead. And to be clear, this is a situation involving drastically falling demand. Per a new survey from the AAA, the share of adults who are "likely" or "very likely" to buy an EV as their next ride has cratered to just 16%.

While the top two reasons had to do with purchase and repair costs, the next three all dealt with charging: 57% of people said EVs aren't suitable for long road trips, 56% were concerned about a lack of public charging stations, and 55% expressed range anxiety –- the fear of running out of electricity while on the road.

Of course, despite the apparent doom and gloom surrounding the current EV scene, folks are still hard at work trying to improve the charging infrastructure with technologies like battery-buffered charging. Any EV charging stations with this secret feature should be able to charge your car not just faster, but also more efficiently and at a lower cost. Keep in mind, however, that this fresh technology is still in the growth stages. And while this strategy is being used by the likes of EVgo, Costco, and Electrify America, among others, there's no simple solution right now to finding a battery-buffered charger location — except through trial and error.

In a way, battery-buffered charging is another effort toward making the charging process more like filling up a gas-powered car. Remember, when you do that, the gas pump doesn't connect to one massive fuel tank shared by all the other gas stations in the area, and then pull fuel from some national reservoir into your car. Instead, stations usually have their own fuel tanks on the premises to feed their own pumps. 

Well, in sort of the same way, battery-buffered charging stations don't draw electricity straight from the grid and send it directly to your car's battery pack. Instead, they connect to the grid during low-demand hours, store the electricity for their dedicated use, and then charge vehicles from that storage as needed. There are a couple of ways they can manage this, too. Some battery-buffered charging stations store the electricity in one common location that all individual chargers can draw from, and some store the juice at each charger. Either way, the benefits extend not just to individual drivers, but to the country's entire charging infrastructure – and that's on top of the fact that all types of EV chargers are being installed at a record pace nationwide.

Even if we took EVs out of the equation — which is highly unlikely — America still needs to overhaul its electrical grid for modern times. That's why every little bit of infrastructure help is a good thing, and battery-buffering can actually help a lot. In fact, according to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), "appropriately sized battery-buffered systems can reduce power grid service capacity needs by approximately 50% to 80% compared to a charging station that is powered entirely by the power grid."

Moreover, stations with battery buffering can be built more quickly and at a lower cost. That's because they don't need the costly substations and separate power-distribution hardware. For example, an NREL project realized about 65% savings in capital costs when building a station with battery buffering as opposed to a traditional setup. Battery-buffering stations can cut two to four years from a project's estimated construction time as well.

Another way battery-buffering can help the grid is by drawing electricity specifically during off-peak hours rather than piling on during high-demand periods with everyone else. This reduces peak demand overall, meaning the grid's hardware doesn't have to work as hard or undergo as much stress — and there can be longer intervals between repair and/or replacement.

In addition, some battery-buffered charging setups can work in both directions. As a result, the charging stations can have the option of selling their stored electricity back to the grid in certain situations.