Chakratec partners with Premier Inn on first kinetic EV charging installation in Germany
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.
Source: greencarcongress
