Wallbox Announces the “First ever DC charger for the home”

I don’t recall ever being quite so excited reading a press release. I’m afraid I’ve been far too busy here in the UK to travel to China this week to work on EV charging station standards, as I originally planned a few months ago. I’m still far too busy even to travel to the eMove360° conference and trade fair in Munich today. Which is something of a pity since I’d like to take a very close look at this device in the flesh, so to speak:

DC-Wallbox

The Wallbox press release I’ve recently been reading contains a few interesting pieces of background information for we V2G watchers here in the UK, such as:

Research, technical development, product testing and manufacturing take place in Barcelona, where Wallbox has strong engineering resource and capacity to produce 100,000 chargers per year.

The company is Spanish but the brand is international. Wallbox operations are solely conducted in English. It began UK operations in September 2018.

not to mention:

Wallbox operates in 30 markets around Europe and overseas as far as New Zealand and China. Wallbox is partner to major automotive OEMs and energy companies. The company is approaching 20,000 installations across all markets and sees the UK as one of its most important growth opportunities. The company is 80-strong and growing, with over half of the workforce involved in software and hardware development. Many employees have made the transition from IT to automotive, coming from the likes of Apple and Tesla, which in part accounts for the unique design quality.

Moving on to Wallbox’s shiny new black box pictured above, let’s take a look at the basic specification first. According to the press release:

All Wallbox chargers are rated up to 22 kW, suitable for domestic and commercial installation and connect to the myWallbox energy management platform. This enables scheduling to take advantage of time and use tariffs, energy balancing between vehicle and the home, and a host of other easily accessible features. Wallbox chargers have connectivity through WiFi, Ethernet or Bluetooth.

Presumably that 22 kW applies to the DC black box as well in which case it can handle three phase, and if the entire Wallbox range can connect to an energy management system (EMS for short) somewhere in the clouds I’d like to take a very close look at all the other AC boxes as well! Sticking with DC for now though:

The new DC charger puts energy created and stored in the home, straight into the electric vehicle through a CCS or ChaDeMo connector. Home generation and storage are now becoming much more cost effective considerations as electric vehicle range and battery size increase and reduce ROI timescales.

The charger’s unique bi-directional power electronics reconcile the alternating (AC) and direct (DC) energy that flows between vehicle charging, rooftop PV generation or garden wind turbines, and home battery storage.

Wallbox are talking just the sort of language we like to hear when discussing our “Static & Mobile Distributed Energy Storage” (SaMDES) project, and they have even uttered the magic words “bi-directional power electronics”. This sounds like pukka vehicle-to-home capable kit, so the next obvious question from our North Cornwall perspective is “when will it start shipping to the UK?”

First sales are planned for mid 2019

A minor disappointment there then, but yesterday I did manage to speak at length with Stewart Mckee who is Director of Wallbox UK. He assures me that the black box on display in Munich today isn’t just an empty shell. It is in fact “production ready”. That being the case I cannot wait to experiment with plugging one into the CHAdeMO connector at the front of one of Nissan’s new 40 kWh e-NV200 vans, which we test drove for three days following the recent Cornwall New Energy EV event in Wadebridge:

2018-09-21_11-45-21_174

As if all that wasn’t exciting enough there’s more where that came from!

Wallbox is also making it easier to manage electric vehicle charging at home. The company is introducing software that allows spoken commands, and cognitive intelligence that learns about an owner’s charging behaviour and preferences, in order to predict optimum energy balance with home and grid.

This unique two-tier combination of software technologies means that you can speak directly to your home charging system and it will interpret your requirements in the most energy efficient manner. For instance, you can simply say: ‘I need my car fully charged for the morning’ and Wallbox will take care of the rest, with consideration for all other home energy demands during the same period of charging.

The ability for Wallbox software to automatically manage charging in this way adds another smart layer to dynamic load balancing between between vehicle and the home, and vehicles parked in the same area.

Please forgive me, but after all that excitement I need to go and lie down now. However make sure to watch this space, because we’re hoping to have a chat with Wallbox’s CEO Enric Asunción real soon now.

14 thoughts on “Wallbox Announces the “First ever DC charger for the home”

  1. Hello

    Is this a way of allowing a vehicle charged during the day from solar to supply electricity to a home after dark when the vehicle is connected to the house at night ?

  2. Hi, Can anyone assist me in buying one of these units? I am taking delivery a new Leaf and am in urgent need of a unit for my home.

    • Hi Jim,

      The first obvious question is “where are you based”?

      The second is “what are you hoping to achieve by buying a DC charging station”?

      Do you really need to charge at home faster than your LEAF’s AC port allows?

      Jim

  3. Hello I am also interested in purchasing one like Jim above. I am based in US California SF Bay Area and specifically want to use for V2H to power home (1-5 days) when PGE (local power utility) cuts power. I have 2018 Leaf. I think that someone could make a killing selling these instead of generators around here. Especially if power outages become common place for fire prevention. I currently have JuiceBox 32 ESVE, but I want to replace with bidirectional unit. Thanks, Matt

  4. I’ve just had a different brand of V2G charger fitted at my home and the cable is a tiny bit too short to conveniently reach my car’s chadmo socket. The company say they don’t supply different length cables, and I’ve found it near impossible to find an extender or a longer cable that I could retrofit. How long are the cables on the Wallbox? Is it possible to order them with carrying lengths?

    • So you had one installed without checking the cable length and now you are moaning? Also, the cable for a V2G unit is very expensive, a one meter cable would cost around £1k at the moment, as it is not a basic cable.

      As for the Wallbox, the only way to get one in the UK at the moment is via Octopus and leasing a brand new Leaf.

  5. Any change regarding the installation of V2H for homes? I have two EVs sitting on the driveway most of the time and I’m still unable to balance the grid use (and save me extra money).

    Why does this process take so long? I’m not even interested in V2G. I’m happy to install a circuit isolator as part of the primary battery storage.

    • As far as I am aware the only way to get a V2H unit installed in the UK at the moment is via the Indra trial. It was over subscribed so there are now a lot of unhappy LEAF owners out there.

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