Here is a deployment problem that surprises people: the limit on fast charging is often not the car or the charger, but the wire coming into the site. A gas-station-corner grid connection simply cannot hand over hundreds of kilowatts on demand. A 2021 ElectricFish Energy patent describes the elegant workaround.
The mechanism is buffering. Put a battery inside the charging station. Trickle-charge that battery from whatever modest, cheap grid connection the site already has, around the clock. Then, when a car pulls up, discharge the onboard battery fast into the vehicle. The peak power the car sees comes from the local battery, not from the grid in that instant — so a weak connection can still support fast charging.
The grant US11007891B1, "Fast electric vehicle charging and distributed grid resource adequacy management system," frames this as more than a convenience. A fleet of such buffered chargers is also a distributed grid resource: collectively they can shift when they draw power, soaking up cheap or surplus electricity and avoiding the grid's peak hours. The same battery that solves the site's connection problem also helps the grid.
Why this matters for the build-out: interconnection — getting a big new electrical connection approved and built — is one of the slowest, most expensive steps in deploying anything. A charger that can run on a small connection sidesteps that queue entirely. Queued capacity is not built capacity, and onboard storage is one way to stop waiting in the queue.
The reality check: an onboard battery adds cost and complexity to every station, and it only pencils where the grid connection is genuinely the binding constraint. But the 2021 filing captures a real strategic pivot — treating the charger not as a passive grid load but as an active, storage-backed grid participant. That reframing is now everywhere in the fast-charging business.