Intertek is a technology company originally involved in testing, inspecting and certifying products, but now has involvement in a wide range of industries beyond these areas too. One of these is electric vehicles, batteries and the associated infrastructure. Global standards and harmonisation is one of the barriers to greater acceptance of EVs and we spoke to Rich Byczek from Intertek who has a great deal of experience with these subjects.

The US has a 110 volt domestic electrical system and that presents some issues regarding available electrical current for charging, but the EV sector has developed strategies for dealing with this.

‘There are published standards in the US that cover the charging stations, DC fast chargers, the connectors and the specific safety circuits,’ says Mr Byczek. The safety circuit standards have also been harmonised with Canada and Mexico, so there is an agreed standard for these in North America. ‘We expect in the very near future that the completion of harmonising the other charging station circuits and coupler circuits will become tri-national,’ says Mr Byczek.

There is also an accepted design standard for the the vehicle charging connectors  for the AC charging stations. It’s slightly different for the DC fast charging stations, as Mr Byczek explains: ‘We have a network in place of the Japanese standard systems, but these are being augmented with an SAE standard connector that will support DC fast charging.

‘The expectation is that many of the third party charger manufacturers will be able to modify their systems to either have both connectors or allow for a conversion to the SAE-style connector as those vehicles that support the SAE connector are released. So for North America we feel there is a pretty good offer in place.

‘In Europe they have adopted the IEC standards for the basic safety and designs. Currently, one of the connectors is common with the SAE standard connector. The nice part about the IEC standards are that they are functionally compatible with the SAE, although some of the connectors may differ to support the different electrical systems in Europe.’

The differences tend to be dealt with by using adapter cables. ‘So in Europe we can see some pretty good harmonisation, although the safety standards differ a bit from the US, they are fairly similar and the job of adapting is not so great to take a North American charging station and adapt it for Europe,’ says Mr Byczek.

‘On the Asia Pacific side, there’s not so much harmonisation, particularly on the DC fast charge. We have the Japanese standard, which is pretty well adopted in Japan both on the safety and performance side. China is basically working with old safety and design standards and are looking to differentiate themselves from the Japanese standard. So it’s really in Asia that there’s a lack of standardisation in both the design and the safety requirements.’

Mr Byczek believes that most commercial fleets will provide their own DC quick charging systems and for these, a harmonised system is probably less important because most charging will probably be carried out at depots. He believes it will be some time before there is widespread adoption of electric vehicles and consequently some time before a charging infrastructure is widespread.