NREL’s High-Power Charging Research for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Commercial Vehicles (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video NREL’s High-Power Charging Research for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Commercial Vehicles (Text Version)

It illustrates NREL's unique research capabilities, including the Megawatt Charging Emulator and Controllable Grid Interface, to accelerate high-power charging for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles.

[Narrator speaks]

[The video opens with a whiteboard illustration of cars and trucks driving along a street.]

In the future, many gas- and diesel-powered vehicles will go electric. Electric vehicles, or EVs, are fast, clean, and quiet.

[The video cuts to a series of heavier vehicles, such as buses and semi-trucks, producing clouds of harmful emissions.]

And because heavy commercial vehicles like trucks, vans, and buses produce so many tailpipe emissions, every commercial vehicle swapped for an EV creates an outsize impact on air quality.

[A hand moves across the screen to draw a thick cloud. The vehicles fade behind the cloud. In their place, the hand draws a power meter labeled “kW.” Text appears that reads “Kilowatts.” It is replaced with the word “Megawatts.”]

But heavy-duty vehicles require high-power charging when they’re out on the road—not measured in kilowatts, like chargers for small passenger EVs, but megawatts of electricity. What effect will all that charging have on the electrical grid?

Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working to answer this question by building the world’s first EV charging evaluation facility capable of handling power levels up to 20 MW.

[A hand draws an blueprint of multiple buildings and structures at NREL’s Flatirons campus: the Megawatt Charging Emulator.]

This massive outdoor facility, named the Megawatt Charging Emulator, will be part of ARIES, the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems.

[A hand draws the words “Megawatt Charging Emulator” and “ARIES: Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems.”]

ARIES is the nation’s most advanced platform for energy system integration research at scale. And it is home to a research capability called the CGI, or Controllable Grid Interface.

[A hand draws the words “CGI: Controllable Grid Interface,” superimposed over a map of the United States. The map fills with circles representing large electrical grids, which are linked together by lines illustrating the connected grids that span the nation.]

Using real-world data, the CGI can be programmed to mimic the grid response of any electric grid in the country—from New York City to Nebraska.

[The video cuts to the illustration of the Megawatt Charging Emulator facility. Wind turbines spin in the background, and colorful lines connect each component of the facility, illustrating the power flow between renewable energy sources, energy storage units, charging hardware, and buildings.]

It links to multiple digital simulators that can emulate the power flow between charging hardware, energy storage, renewable power generation, and buildings.

[The video cuts to a male and female scientist standing in front of a whiteboard illustrating the Megawatt Charging Emulator.]

This allows NREL researchers to run enormous, complex simulations to understand how a grid, and the EV charging infrastructure connected to it, function.

[The video cuts to an illustration of a building equipped with solar panels, multiple passenger EV charging stations, a high-power charging station, and backup energy storage systems.]

It will also help researchers identify the best strategies to reduce the strain on the electrical grid.  

[The video flashes through a day at the facility, showing cars and trucks arriving, charging, and departing. A power meter in the right-hand corner steadily declines, illustrating how smart charge management strategies can decrease the strain on the electrical grid.]

These “smart charge management” strategies spread EV charging loads across the grid more evenly over the course of a day, allowing researchers to pinpoint the best charging parameters: in other words, the most affordable and reliable ways to charge many commercial vehicles.

Put simply: NREL’s Megawatt Charging Emulator will be the only facility in the world that can help design and validate high-power EV charging hardware and controls at the 20-MW scale that boost grid performance rather than placing it under strain.

[The video cuts back to a map of the nation. It fills with EV charging stations, each labeled with three dollar signs.]

NREL’s unique commercial EV charging research could accelerate the deployment of national EV charging infrastructure.

[Each single EV charger doubles, and the dollar signs begin to disappear. The chargers are linked with green lines, illustrating a connected nationwide EV charging network.]

It could save cities, states, and businesses millions of dollars by identifying the best charging strategies, grid configurations, and EV charging infrastructure for a specific electric grid.

[The video cuts to three research technicians standing in front of a bank of EV chargers.]

Even better, the solutions developed at ARIES will be replicable, so they can be rolled out more easily across the country.

[The video cuts to a crowd of researchers pictured in front of the NREL sign.]

It’s all part of NREL’s mission: Imagining, evaluating, and building the technologies that will help create a clean energy future, for all.