A temporary powerline was installed to keep a small industrial area in Amsterdam powered up while there was a new substation built. Step up and step down transformers on either side of the link took care of not having to use a massive diameter cable which amongst other obstacles had to be strung underneath a bridge. After a week or so the power failed. A hacksaw blade was found embedded in the cable. The police declined to investigate because the people from the power company told them that whoever did that had already been punished sufficiently.
There was a person with severe burns admitted to the nearest hospital (OLVG) so that wasn't a real problem (for the authorities, for that guy it was a completely different matter). I trust his copper thieving days were over. It was a real problem too because it wasn't exactly a trivial thing to splice, in the end they just ran a new cable in exactly the same way and that one lasted until the substation was back online. I lived there (illegally) at the time so I got to be the one to call it in. I got some funny looks from the cops when I returned to my company quarters with the power off.
To make matters worse: I also took that whole lot offline one cursed evening not that long afterwards just before a tradeshow. Not my best moment. To put it mildly.
They do that here with the ISP wires and it takes out internet and cell service all over the county and beyond for usually two days straight each time. All the providers here run off the same infrastructure, so the only people with internet are those with satellite internet when it happens. I started driving in a direction to see how long it would take me cell service during it once and I had to drive about 40 miles.
At its peak it was happening every single month, but slowed after it started catching press.
Not just meth heads, but junkies too. Only around here, they climb the poles to cut the cables. Unfortunately for all involved, they are cutting the fiber lines so not only do customers loose signal, the junkies don't actually get any copper.
wait until it becomes widely known how much copper is in one of those EV super chargers. Although witnessing a bug zapper effect may deter some thieves.
The unfortunate thing (for deterring theft at least) is that the actual DC cabling is going to be unenergized for safety reasons unless you’re actually charging. Copper theft on those charger plugs is already happening.
I'm told that many (if not most) chargers in Europe are Bring Your Own Cable. I don't know if that's for compatibility or for theft reasons, but it makes sense.
I’m not aware of any DC fast chargers that do that, even in Europe. It wouldn’t make sense, since the amount of power you have to push through a DCFC setup is so immense that the cabling is quite unwieldy and specialized. Often the cables are liquid cooled.
Indeed, they're talking about L2 AC public chargers in Europe being BYOC. And going back to the idea that cables are de-energized when not charging, this is true for L2 AC also (the EVSE will have a contactor that the car effectively controls).
Yup, basically the only chance for you to get zapped by a charger is either ripping the whole thing out so you make contact with the input AC, or cutting the wire while it’s actively charging a car. And even then, chargers have ground fault protection for L2, and L3 chargers have high voltage isolation monitoring. They’re remarkably safe even against blatant tampering.
Would we be able to insulate sufficiently for a new generation of DC fast charging where voltage is so much higher that current is so much lower that the cable isn't thick enough to be worth stealing? Could eliminate active cable cooling, as well.
I guess the problem would be stepping it back down inside the car to match the battery voltage, which is an AC endeavor, at which point it might as well just be AC grid power delivered to the car (albeit high/primary voltage, not residential/secondary voltage), and we're back to the car having enormous equipment on board that ought to be stationed, so no.
Stepping up the voltage for DC power makes the overcurrent protection insanely expensive, there is no ‘zero point’ for DC like there is for AC so circuit breakers are tricky to manufacture. Maybe fuses would work, I’m not entirely sure.
You’d be better off replacing the charger cables, in my best estimation.
AFAIK you can’t charge a battery with AC current, you’d need an inverter onboard the vehicle to convert to DC.
DC fast charging is already 500-800volts- so 125A max for 100kW, only they liquid cool the lines so you're not trying to plug in a big floppy... 4/0awg... anyway, its mostly a water/liquid jacket- not copper.
Most DCFC cables are not watercooled. A typical 175 kW / 350 kW (400 V and 800 V, respectively) DCFC cable spec is 4x50 + 1G35 + 3x 2x 1, so around 250 mm² of copper, about 2.5 kg/m. They're usually around 4 m long (exterior to the dispenser), let's say five bucks per kg, so 2.5 * 4 * 5 = 50 bucks each. Most chargers have two cables, so 100 bucks. I'm guessing the methhead bringing them to the scrap fence/yard gets like 15 bucks for having caused around 10k in property damage.
Though in many of these cases the cables are not actually stolen. People just cut them off and throw them in the bushes or don't even bother moving them. In those cases the motivation is obviously anti-EV vandalism.
That's an even more complicated system. How would we catch them without the type of surveillance or anti-fencing measures that have even more downsides than the amount of theft they eliminate?
I have no idea how none of them have died yet, as frequently as this seems to occur.