Audi opens third charging hub in Berlin
Audi has opened a charging hub in Berlin. The Volkswagen brand’s third own fast-charging location after Nuremberg and Zurich offers four fast-charging points with up to 320 kW power that can be reserved in advance.
In Berlin, Audi relies on a local partner company: the neighbouring Frischeparadies with its shopping market and bistro is a cooperation partner for the hub and provides its power connection for this purpose. According to Audi, the available energy is to be shared according to demand and load: Audi’s charging station, which is equipped with second-life batteries, only charges the buffer storage units when Frischeparadies needs little electricity.
After the Nuremberg Charging Hub in a car park of the exhibition grounds, the second German location is much closer to the city centre: The Frischeparadies, including Audi’s new HPC facility, is located at Hermann-Blankenstein-Strasse 48 in Prenzlauer Berg. Unlike in Nuremberg, where Audi also operates a 200-square-metre lounge on the first floor of the Charging Hub, this feature was dispensed with at the Berlin location – the Bistro of the Frischeparadies is to provide the quality of stay and catering on site.
The decision in favour of the Frischeparadies was apparently not only made because of the synergies with the partner: in choosing the location, Audi relies on the group’s own data analysis, which checks the local demand in advance.
What makes the final choice of location easier is the buffer storage made from second-life batteries that come from dismantled Audi test vehicles. This means that the fast chargers can also be operated in places where the power grid is not sufficient. And: since a low-voltage connection is sufficient for recharging the buffer batteries, no transformer station is needed for the medium-voltage connection, for example – this saves civil engineering work and avoids the currently long delivery times for transformers.
“Our dynamic load control system enables us to shift our energy demands to a time of day when Frischeparadies is using less power from the grid,” explains Elias Hammer, responsible at Audi for the rollout in Berlin and for the energy system integration of the Audi Charging Hub. Ralph Hollmig, project manager for the Audi Charging Hub, adds: “In this way, we will manage all hub locations as efficiently and sustainably as possible. We are working on energy optimization. In the future, we can even imagine using smart trading to buy electricity from the energy exchange. This also means, for example, that we buy electricity from renewable sources when it’s affordable.”
With the new stations in Berlin, the third of four announced locations is now in operation. An Audi Charging Hub in Salzburg was also announced for mid-2022.
In addition, Audi provides insights into the use of the Nuremberg and Zurich locations to date. In Nuremberg, the 10,000th hub visitor was registered at the end of January 2023 after just over a year of operation. The return rate there is 70 per cent. “Customers there have now integrated charging at the hub into their daily routine,” says Hollmig. On average, there are 36 charging processes per day, at the peak, there were already 62 – around half of which are for Audi models.
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