The grid connection was the bottleneck. So we took it out of the loop.
Conventional fast chargers pull their full output straight off the grid. Ours don't. Here is how an SAEV station is built, and why it changes which sites are possible.
Four blocks. One DC bus.
- 01
Storage.
A SolarMD high-voltage outdoor cabinet holding 272 kWh of lithium iron phosphate cells (CATL). The only thing the chargers draw from. Not the grid. Not the sun. The battery.
- 02
Dispensing.
DC-to-DC converters feeding two CCS2 bays at 120 kW and up. The battery is high-voltage DC. The car wants high-voltage DC. One conversion stage between them. No rectifier, no inverter, no AC anywhere in the chain.
- 03
Front end.
How energy gets into the battery is specified per site. Grid only: a rectifier sized to the spare capacity, from 15 kW. Solar carport present: a hybrid inverter that puts PV straight onto the DC bus and can export surplus into the host's building.
- 04
Grid.
From 15 kW. No upgrade. In most cases no new demand application. This is where months come off a deployment.
Built for the grid we actually have.
The connection no longer sets the speed.
120 kW+ out of a 15 kW supply. The battery decides how fast the car charges. The site decides how fast the battery refills.
Loadshedding is not an event.
The station is islanded by design. Both bays stay live through an outage. The driver sees nothing.
We choose when to buy electricity.
A grid-tied charger buys energy when a car arrives, which on a winter weekday evening is the most expensive electricity Eskom sells. Our stations charge the battery off-peak and standard only. Never peak. The battery makes the tariff a decision instead of an accident.
The host's demand stays where it was.
Grid draw is slow, smooth and controllable. On a time-of-use tariff, charging off-peak adds nothing to the site's chargeable demand. We put that in the agreement.
Fewer conversions, fewer losses.
DC solar into a DC battery into a DC car. No round trips through AC.
Optional. Sensible where it fits.
A PV carport shades the bays and feeds the battery directly on the DC side. Surplus flows into the host's building at an agreed rate, well under what most sites pay Eskom at two in the afternoon. Sized per site. We don't sell a carport where the yield doesn't justify it.
Our chargers talk to our servers. Nobody else's.
The charging management system was written in-house. OCPP 1.6J and 2.0.1. Hosted on SAEV's own infrastructure in South Africa, powered by the same SolarMD storage that powers the network.
Built for local conditions: sessions complete and meter values queue on the charger when a site loses signal, then reconcile on reconnection without dropping or duplicating a transaction. A charger that reboots and replays its messages is normal here, and the backend treats it that way.
Driver data never leaves the country. That's how it's built, not a clause in a contract.
Four meters per site. Three different numbers.
- 01
Grid import, split by time-of-use period.
What we owe the host.
- 02
Solar generation.
The renewable fraction, and the surplus credited to the host.
- 03
Energy delivered at the connector.
What the driver pays for.
- 04
Battery telemetry. State of charge, cycles, temperature.
Never a billing source.
Energy bought at the grid meter and energy sold at the plug are not the same number. Our settlement engine never treats them as one.
- How many cars before the battery is low?
- A full battery covers roughly five to eight back-to-back sessions before the front end needs to catch up. Busy sites get a larger grid allocation, a carport or a second cabinet. We model it before we build.
- What about heat?
- An outdoor cabinet in Upington in January is a different problem to Cape Town in July. Derating at high ambient temperature is part of the site assessment for inland locations.
- What does the driver pay?
- Costs differ per site, so the price does too. The rate for the station in front of you, VAT included, is in the app before you plug in.
- Charging output
- 120 kW+ DC
- Connectors
- 2 × CCS2
- Battery
- 272 kWh, LFP, SolarMD HV outdoor cabinet
- Grid connection
- From 15 kW
- Grid charging window
- Off-peak and standard only, never peak
- Outage behaviour
- Both bays remain live
- Solar
- Optional DC-coupled carport, surplus to host
- Footprint
- 3 bays, re-striped to 2 charging bays with the unit centred
- Protocol
- OCPP 1.6J and 2.0.1
- Backend
- In-house CSMS, self-hosted in South Africa
- Authentication
- App · QR · RFID/NFC tap
Got 15 kW to spare and three bays?
That's a fast-charging site. We'll survey it, spec it and build it at our cost.
Get the app. Charge anywhere the grid reaches.
