Israel-based Chakratec, a provider of kinetic energy storage technology for electric vehicle (EV) charging, has completed a project with Premier Inn, a British hotel chain and the UK’s largest hotel brand, enabling guests at the hotel’s Leipzig, Germany, location to charge their EVs throughout their stay.
Premier Inn is the first to deploy Chakratec’s unique new charging technology in Germany. This is also the first indoor installation of its kind. The partnership was initiated by GHH Business Consult and EES Tübingen.
Chakratec provides Premier Inn with a solution for EV charging, circumventing the hotel’s problem of insufficient power in the grid. At most of Premier Inn’s city center locations the grid is too weak to provide the required power for EV charging. To overcome this hurdle, energy storage must be added to the chargers to “boost” the grid. This is done by applying Chakratec’s proprietary kinetic energy storage technology Kinetic Power Booster (KPB).
The KPB stores the electricity as kinetic energy in a fast-rotating flywheel, which provides high-power charge and discharge cycles (more than 150,000) without degradation over the full system lifetime of 20 years. Since it is a non-chemical technology, it is also a sustainable and reusable system, as opposed to chemical batteries.
Flexible configurations make Chakratec’s solution suitable for indoor or underground sites, as well as retrofit or new building projects. In addition to enabling EV charging, its efficient energy management system manages peak loads to prevent high demand charges, while further add-on applications such as back-up power systems (BPS) ensure that EV chargers are always online and ready-to-use.
These features are important for Premier Inn, which often requires indoor deployments and a solution that could be used as a backup power system to its elevator system during power outages. Premier Inn selected Leipzig as the first location to adopt the technology, with plans for expansion to its new sites throughout Germany over the next five years.
Germany requires all new and renovated commercial buildings to have 20% of parking spaces equipped with the appropriate pre-wiring for EV charging. Chakratec is enabling Premier Inn to meet this requirement wherever its hotels are located: city centers, suburbs and airports. Chakratec is also supporting Premier Inn’s sustainability goals, including its commitment to reduce its carbon emissions intensity by 50% by 2050, and its aim to reach net-zero on its scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 2050.
| Permalink | Comments (6)
For how long can one of these KPB's hold (store) energy? It looks like they could be portable so that might make them useful for siting at seasonal or temporary destinations like ski hills, trailheads or festival sites that are often fairly long distances from cities and not likely to have adequate grid infrastructure for fast charging.
Posted by: Calgarygary | 16 February 2021 at 06:33 AM
Spinning with no load takes minimal energy.
Posted by: SJC | 16 February 2021 at 10:56 AM
Someone must really want to play with a flywheel energy storage device. There might be reasons to use a flywheel to stabilize a power source. However, charging a battery does not seem to be one of them as the battery still requires a certain amount of power over a period of time and it is does not matter much if the charging rate varies over time. All the flywheel will do is make the charger more expensive and slightly less efficient.
Posted by: sd | 16 February 2021 at 07:04 PM
flywheel charges at 5kw from grid over 10hr and discharges to EV at 150kw for 20 min.
Posted by: charlesH | 16 February 2021 at 08:50 PM
@charlesH
I do not disagree with you math or that flywheels might be useful for fast charging but if you read the first line of the article, it states, "enabling guests at the hotel’s Leipzig, Germany, location to charge their EVs throughout their stay." If you have all night to charge the batteries, what good does a flywheel do?
Posted by: sd | 18 February 2021 at 09:52 AM
Maybe its one of those places where the rooms are rented by the hour?
Posted by: Calgarygary | 19 February 2021 at 05:59 AM
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