WattEV says its Bakersfield, CA charging depot includes the first MCS charger in North America, and the fastest. Tesla has a number of its own 750kW chargers at Pepsi and Tesla facilities, but this 1.2MW charger beats them in speed and is also publicly available.
MCS is a new charging standard being worked on by the charging standards organization CharIN. The standard is nearing completion, though there aren't really any MCS-capable trucks available yet, or even UL-certified chargers.
As a result, the WattEV installation is something of an experiment. The site has a total of 50 chargers, split between 32 grid-connected 360kW CCS chargers on one side, and 3 1.2MW MCS and 15 240kW CCS chargers on the other, connected to backup batteries and solar, and completely off-grid.
This last part is particularly interesting - WattEV received grants from the California Energy Commission to create this grid-islanded setup, where the power for the chargers is provided entirely by 5MW of on-site solar (which WattEV hopes to eventually expand to 25MW) and 3MWh of battery backup.
WattEV could connect the installation to the grid, but between the CEC grant, the lack of UL certified MCS chargers, and the delays that would have been caused by the permitting and interconnection process, the company decided that off-grid half of the installation was the right decision for the time being.
The addition of an MCS charger promises the ability to fill a truck in the same time as a traditional truck stop. While trucks don't currently have 1.2MW charging capability, WattEV wanted to be ready for when they do.
One of the things that a lot of operators say is that they're waiting for chargers before they start building or buying trucks. Here, however, we have an infrastructure provider leading the way - building infrastructure before trucks are built or purchased. In a world where operators have gotten used to using infrastructure as an excuse, WattEV seems uninterested in letting them continue to use that excuse.
Like WattEV's other chargers, this one will be publicly available, either through membership or by scanning a credit card/QR code at the site. It's near an industrial park in Bakersfield with several distribution centers, and near the 99 freeway that serves California's Central Valley. WattEV also offers a "truck-as-a-service" model, where the company provides electric trucking at a set price.
Source: Electrek
