Do offline, <=16A Electric vehicle chargers need to be power factor corrected?

[Flyback]

Do EV chargers at 1kw and above need power factor correction?
In UK, USA, Europe or anywhere

 

[ronsimpson]

I think the answer is found in UL, CSA and VDE.
My data is old but I thought there is a 15A regulator for PF.
You should check to see what the regulations are now and report back.

You should also read proposed regulations for next year.
https://www.energystar.gov/products/spec/electric_vehicle_supply_equipment_pd

 

[jpanhalt]

Have you tried ask.com?

John

 

[rumpfy]

Depends on how many you want to make.
For a one off for yourself, probably not.
For a fully approved production item, probably 'yes'. Power mains distortion is a big problem for system supply quality reasons. In the future too, PF corrected supplies will have a marketing edge. I think my Apple power supply charger is 65 Watt and is PF corrected. Tv set power supplies too are invariably PF corrected. Its like all these things; once the components are available, then it is easy to implement.

 

[Flyback]

typically , I believe domestic SMPS power supplies above 1kw do not come under power factor laws. This is because there just aren't any. But when EV chargers become extremely common, laws may change. Industry has SMPS's above 1kw, but they pay for their poor power factor, so nobody minds them not being power factor corrected. I have searched everywhere but can find nothing. I have emailed other companies who make ev chargers, but the replies come back from members of staff who obviously don't have a clue what power factor is. I had one reply which was hilarious.
Four years ago I worked for a guitar amp company, and we couldn't find out if guitar amps needed to be pfc'd, (there were posts on this and loads of other forums) I think the same "greyness" exists over EV chargers, its just not possible to find out.

Basically, we want to cheat and use our boost PFC stage as a straightforward boost converter, and not a slow bandwidth pfc stage. This is because we want to reduce the ripple voltage on the pfc output bus, because it will make regulation of the following LLC converter easier. So we want our boost pfc to not need to be fully PFC'ing the supply.

 

[ronsimpson]

Years ago I made a car charger that took sign waves of current off the power line and fed the battery with half sign pulses of current. (no filter capacitor) The battery engineer said he liked "pulsing the battery".

 

[Flyback]

Thanks, though I believe that western countries are importing huge numbers of cheap non-pfc'd PSU's and these will seriously adversely affect the power system of the country when there are millions of them out there.
At the moment, importers are keeping well schtum about their non-PFC , as they don't want the expense of it, and want to get as far as poss without PFC.
If you live in the West, get ready to kiss your power grid goodbye.....millions of non PFC'd PSUs working away at several kilowatts each...

 

[ronsimpson]

If you live in the West, get ready to kiss your power grid goodbye

Over stated.

 

[Flyback]

Seriously, no one will say anything because nobody wants to pay extra for a pfc'd supply. The people exporting to the west wont say anything because it wont be their power grid that fails when 100 million, 7kw, non pfc'd chargers turn on.

 

[ronsimpson]

So we have gone from 1kw to 7kw. from "millions" to "100 million".
You know that big brother will step in.
Probably...when the battery is not there (or charged) your power supply needs to drop back to 1 watt of energy.
Big Brother will step in and require some thing you never thought of.

 

[Flyback]

I have written to multiple EV battery charge suppliers, and none of them are power factor corrected.
One of them emailed back to tell me that their EV battery chargers were indeed Power factor corrected because the charger only came on when the conditions to come on were "correct", ie battery voltage not too high or low, temperature not too high or low etc.....these people don't even know what PFC is.

 

[ronsimpson]

these people don't even know what PFC is.

Sales department. Not engineers.

 

[Flyback]

These non-PFC'd offline EV chargers, at several kw, are on sale now, the Government (and lets face it its them that ultimately decide it), are not doing anything about it.
This should have been stopped now, it has not been stopped, and will likely not be stopped. This is the same governments that told us to "stand by" for the disaster of the Y2K bug. The same governments that let anybody borrow enormous amounts of money, allowing an enormous meltdown of the global banking system.

 

[tcmtech]

In most places unless you are a multi 100 KVA or above power user the power companies could care less about your services power factor.

They constantly monitor and adjust the PF on their side all the time. That's why you will see big capacitor banks on the utility lines and in the switch yards. They can switch them in and out of the system as needed as their PF varies through the day.

So do they care about your 1 - 2 KW uncorrected power supply? No not really. Not even if you have a million of them spread out over the country.