Biggest EU Tesla charge park yet planned in Germany

Tesla’s largest fast-charging park in the EU will soon go online on a plot of land owned by bakery Roland Schüren at the Hilden motorway junction (A3/A46) near Düsseldorf. Fastned is also planning to set up fast-charging points for other electric cars right there.

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According to local media reports, “on February 14th, a 16-pallet supercharger with a 1-megawatt transformer will initially go into operation there”. Tesla intends to build a total of 40 stalls of the latest generation V3 chargers with a peak output of up to 250 kilowatts at the Hilden intersection. However, the information does not come from Tesla itself, but from Roland Schüren, who acquired the land in the immediate vicinity of the motorway junction.

Schüren is no stranger to the e-mobility scene; he already operates one of the largest private charging parks in Germany at his bakery in Hilden and has also converted most of his bakery’s fleet to electric transporters for deliveries to the surrounding branches.

The report goes on to say that Fastned will build its largest charging facility in Europe to date, which will include 20 fast chargers, directly next to Tesla. However, the Dutch charging provider presented its plans somewhat differently in response to a request from electrive: “We will build 22 parking bays there and we can install up to 11 fast chargers (of 175 KW) in total. But it is possible that we will start with a couple of fast chargers in the beginning and that we will add more chargers later.”

According to the report, electric mobility will also only be a small part of the overall project. Schüren also wants to offer AC charging points on the 12,000 square meter site. Besides, a five-story office building with a cafe-bistro and bakery on the ground floor called Seed&Greet is to be built there – the waste heat from the bakery will heat large parts of the building. Besides, a vertical farm will grow lettuce and berries for the bakery and bistro all year round. The electricity required for the charging stations will be generated partly on-site by photovoltaic and with two small wind turbines.

The provisional Supercharger Park is scheduled to open in mid-February. The first construction phase with the bistro, the solar roofs and according to a Facebook entry of the account “Ladepark Kreuz-Hilden”, which belongs to Schüren, it claims that “just under half the number of charging stations” of Tesla and Fastned should be completed by “approx. end of May 2020”. Fastned so far has not yet confirmed this statement, however. In winter 2020/2021, the final access road is to be built in the second construction phase, and Fastned and Tesla will have expanded the number of charging stations by then. At the end of 2022, the third construction phase should be completed, and tenants should be able to move into the 3rd to the 5th floor of the office building.

But one thing is certain: There will then be no shortage of HPC facilities in the region around Hilden and on the A3 between Düsseldorf and Cologne. Just a few kilometres south of the motorway service stations Ohligser Heide East and West, Ionity recently built charging parks with four charge points each.

Update 17 April 2020: The German manufacturer Tesvolt will supply power storage containers with a total capacity of 2 megawatt hours for the charging park currently under construction at the Hilden motorway junction. The battery storage units will temporarily store electricity from the 700 kilowatt peak photovoltaic system and two small wind turbines in order to cut expensive peak loads. However, they will also store green electricity from the grid when it is particularly cheap and relieve the grid when there is more electricity in the grid than is being drawn.

“Of course, it is particularly important that a charging park’s storage systems can be quickly charged and discharged at any time. Currently, only a very few storage products are capable of this,” says Gregor Hinz, general planner of the charging park. Tesvolt has prevailed because the TPS flex storage container offers high performance in a relatively small space. According to Hinz, he believes that the two storage units will have paid for themselves within a few years.

In our studio broadcast Roland Schüren recently commented on the current status of the construction work. There are also video recordings from the construction site.

temagazin.de, facebook.com (Both in German), tesvolt.com (Update)