Lemont's Argonne National Labs pioneers fast-charging super-station for EVs

CHICAGO - We're just days away from the 2024 Chicago Auto Show, and McCormack Place has been taken over by electric vehicles.

This week, FOX 32’s Scott Schneider was invited to Argonne National Laboratory where "range anxiety" and extreme weather are just some of the challenges sending scientists under the hood.

For the first time in its history, the Chicago Auto Show has created an indoor track dedicated solely to electric vehicles as automakers attempt to lure would-be car and truck buyers into the world of plug-in driving.

At Argonne National Labs in Lemont, the Transportation Power Systems Division has converted an analog gas station into an all-electric fast-charging super-station.

Manager Dan Dobrzynski is tasked with studying the current trends of EV owners and those considering buying electric or hybrid vehicles.

"The refueling of a vehicle, it's a ubiquitous process right now where you go to the gas station, you fill up, but we envision a future where there may be refueling stations but the places that you normally go - the workplace - or the home - there's already electricity there," said Dobrzynski of Grid Integration Technology.

Whether you are charging from home, the office, or anywhere else, owning an EV can be challenging. Remember in January when some Tesla owners lost power in sub-zero temperatures and found charging stations not functioning in the cold?

"There are challenges that have to do with temperatures. We do study vehicles and their charging performance at low temperatures as well as high temperatures. The summer months in Chicago can be pretty hot too and pretty humid," Dobrzynski said.

After record sales in early 2023, many consumers opted for gas-powered or hybrid vehicles late in the year, citing the dreaded "range anxiety" - the fear that no matter where their travels might take them, there might not be a charging station around when the juice runs out.

"The real challenge is that the vehicles are coming, the charging stations are coming, but the grid has to prepare for that as well, and a lot of times understanding where to upgrade the grid, what permitting is needed, where the funding source is coming from that takes maybe decades in some cases," Dobrzynski said. "We run this through this large simulation models and again, when you see it pull out, you see the scope, we're going all the way to Kenosha."

But at Argonne, the future is decarbonization and Joshua Auld's Mobility Division studies what is affectionately known as "what if" analysis - envisioning a Chicagoland where gas-powered vehicles are mostly museum pieces.

"The advantage we have with electrification is that a lot of it can be done at fixed points with existing architecture and we need to infill that so the hope is for massive expansion of EVs where it's needed," Auld said.

That's right, while more charging stations are coming to Chicago, the real growth in EV sales is likely to come with the expansion of home and office hookups.