Eli5 why does dc charging work so much faster than ac charging?

418 views

Eli5 why does dc charging work so much faster than ac charging?

In: 0

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Are you referring to cars?

All EVs have a battery that stores voltage in DC and so they must be charged as DC.

Most chargers use the AC power from your house and provide that to the car, which has an onboard converter that switches from AC to DC.

DC Fast Chargers provide much higher levels of charging power and they provide it directly to the vehicle as DC. The vehicle does not need to convert this power from AC to DC.

I am **guessing** this is done this way because it’s relatively cheap/light to have a 120v or 240v AC to DC converter on board every vehicle, but it would be more expensive/heavier to have a 480 (or more) volt AC to DC converter on every vehicle, so this converter is built into the fast charging station instead.

You are viewing 1 out of 6 answers, click here to view all answers.