electric vehicle charging

A charging station, also known as a charge point, chargepoint, or electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), is a power supply device that supplies electrical power for recharging the on-board battery packs of plug-in electric vehicles (including battery electric vehicles, electric trucks, electric buses, neighborhood electric vehicles, and plug-in hybrid vehicles).
There are two main types of EV chargers: alternating current (AC) charging stations and direct current (DC) charging stations. Electric vehicle batteries can only be charged by direct current electricity, while most mains electricity is delivered from the power grid as alternating current. For this reason, most electric vehicles have a built-in AC-to-DC converter commonly known as the "on-board charger" (OBC). At an AC charging station, AC power from the grid is supplied to this onboard charger, which converts it into DC power to recharge the battery. DC chargers provide higher-power charging (which requires much larger AC-to-DC converters) by building the converter into the charging station to avoid size and weight restrictions inside vehicles. The station then directly supplies DC power to the vehicle, bypassing the onboard converter. Most modern electric vehicles can accept both AC and DC power.
Charging stations are important infrastructural devices for the daily operations and public adoption of electric vehicles, and are the quintessential component of an electric vehicle charging network. They serve the similar functions to electric vehicles as fuel dispensers to internal combustion engine vehicles, although they can technically be installed anywhere covered by an electrical grid, from dedicated charging centers/depots and public parking lots to private garages and driveways and even roadside parking spaces. In contrast, fuel dispensers can only be installed in specially constructed facilities with sophisticated underground reservoir tanks and piping systems, i.e. filling stations, which not only require significantly higher construction cost, but also demand a large land area to build. As fuels cannot be bulk-delivered from refineries to consumer facilities like transmitting electricity via powerlines, filling stations need to be routinely resupplied via tank trucks and therefore can only be built on locations that allow convenient entry and exit of large vehicles, such as along service roads or at major intersections.

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