The grid upgrade can cost millions for a DC fast charging station.
The inverter to make the DC power can cost 100,000.
Why not skip all this and have a diesel engine coupled to a 400V DC generator, thereby skipping the inverter and grid upgrade?
I think this would be cheaper, and lower capex and operational costs. Not to mention, most streets have natural gas lines which could power the diesel engines with a cheap and clean burning fuel. Natural Gas is very cheap around 4c/kwh. A 20% efficient generator, would yield 16c/kwh.
You may be onto something. The pinch point is less building the stations than getting the local utility to provision megawatts of power to the station.
There’s piles and piles of 2 megawatt generators just sitting on old locomotives. They’re already attached to the diesel engine and they come out as a matched set. The supply chain is first rate; GE and Caterpillar will sell you any part, and lots of people know how to work on those engines.
Although if I were provisioning DCFCs, especially a places like Pilot / Loves type truck stops at rural places with cheap land, I’d plop down a windmill. Sort of like in Cities Skylines when you’re just starting a city. So my routine would be windmill goes up immediately, when the utility finally hooks up my transformer I deconstruct the windmill and move it to the next station. Or not if it makes sense to keep it where it is.
Good points good points.