Senior Director, Technology Enteligent Inc. Santa Clarita, California, United States
Two co-related consequences of the imminent electric vehicle (EV) revolution may shift the archetype of electrical energy management in the home. First, the expected large-scale adoption of EVs over the next two decades will significantly increase electric energy consumption, doubling electrical power needs. Both this increased demand for EVs and the ongoing conversion of existing electrical generation to clean sources will predominately fall to renewables in general and to solar in particular, given the predictability of its power generation, its advantageous cost profile and the distributed nature of its power generation at sites like residential rooftops. Second, wholescale buy-in by consumers hinges on the availability of longer-range, full-size EVs which require fast DC chargers, not only in public places and highway supercharging stations but also at residential homes as on-board AC/DC converters could take over a day to charge from AC sources.
To address these two correlated events – increased residential rooftop PV solar adoption and faster home-based DC EV charging – this poster proposes a non-conventional home energy management system, where a new universal modular DC fast EV charger also operates as a bidirectional transformerless split inverter (240/120V), effectively eliminating the need for other inverters in the home. This one device enables efficient energy exchange to occur through a common DC bus avoiding costly AC/DC conversion losses, connecting PV solar generation, on-site DC energy storage (electro-chemical batteries, kinetic energy, etc.), bi-directional DC fast EV charge ports and future migration to other DC-based home appliances, HVAC heat pumps, hot water heaters and LED lighting. This poster presents a novel modular architecture for residential electrical management based on fast DC charging directly from on-site PV solar generation.