You can of course charge your vehicle also at the conventional socket or at a three phase CEE-socket. Also parking lots often provide only simple single-phase or sometimes three-phase, 16 A fused connections. This results in a power rating of 3.6 kW for the single phase and 11 kW for the three phase system. Furthermore, the charging power can only be set to a fixed value below the maximum power rating of the connection. Thus, an adaptation to the available solar power is not possible.

An own charging station solves these issues. The permanently connected type II plug is compatible to most of the common vehicles and the handling of the plug is much more comfortable, compared to a conventional CEE adapter plug. The charging station communicates the currently available power of the grid to the vehicle and the charging process always operates at the maximum of the actual possible power. For example the charging power can be decreased if not enough solar power is available and a full charging power would result in an expensive charging by the public grid. Charging and dis­charging processes can be logged and enable accurate billing, even for multiple users.

• Permanently connected type II cable
• Communication of parameters between vehicle and grid
• Communication with other charging stations e.g. to avoid an overload of the feeding lines
• Safely locked physical connection of the vehicle to the power grid
• Monitoring functionalities like logging, control and network integration