Hello Alpitronic, bye ABB
Analysts at simplywall.st posted yesterday that insiders at ABB sold off $8.3m of stock this year signaling a lack of confidence in the business, I have been following the business because it has been historically the goto provider of public DC fast chargers for electric vehicles, charging networks like BP Pulse, Shell Recharge, Gridserve for the last decade have been all installing ABB chargers, that is until they all switched to installing Alpitronic chargers in the last couple years, Fastned for one, has now started selling their ABB chargers altogether not even considering using them anymore.
That makes it so at the moment fastned, instavolt, ionity, allego, enel, eon, total energy, EnBw, mer, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, as well as BP and Shell all are deploying Alpitronic DC chargers, in many cases instead of ABB ones.
And when I say chargers I mean largely the base Alpitronic hyc75-150 charger which is their cheapest fast charger, as you can see from the image on the left, there are also a few hyc300 chargers deployed by Mercedes, Audi and Shell.
To compare the price and capabilities of both the ABB and Alpitronic chargers here are the main ones:
€17,974 Alpitronic HYC50 DC 50kw wallbox, parallel charging possible at rate 2 x 25kW, V2G ready
€63,999 Alpitronic Hypercharger HYC 300
€54,000 ABB HPC Power Cabinet 175kW
€50,999 ABB Terra 124kw
€89,000 ABB Terra 360kw Hypercharger
All are modular, can be configured with any type sockets and support up to 2 simultaneous DC connections with 22kW AC fast charging in parallel, where Alpitronic shines is in the modularity, build quality and software reliability.
But this alone does not explain why everyone literally overnight switched to what was to begin with a relatively unknown and quite small Italian aircraft power supply specialists in detriment of a established industrial power specialist like ABB.
Trying to dig further and establish potential reasons for this turnaround the relevant articles like this one from Alpitronic partner Infineon do not provide a lot of clues other than lot of tech that surely ABB has access to as well, eg:
This is made possible by using EasyPACK™ CoolSiC TM MOSFET 1B and 2B modules from Infineon Technologies AG in combination with the EiceDRIVER™ X3.
Other sources of information like https://www.alpitronic.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/alpitronic_PCTB-D_Technical_Information.pdf and the founders page are consistent with relatively small operation that has experienced truly explosive growth.
The only other snippet of information I can ascertain from there is that Alpitronic does not have extensive in house labs for all the analysis it is doing.
Failure analysis can be enhanced by additional non-destructive analysis methods like optical inspec- tion at open housing, X-ray or Scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM) for which we rely on external partners.
It seems like their rise to prominence is truly miraculous, whatever got them here they are surely winning against what is a giant by comparison, ABB, and are setting themselves up for long term success, for example the recently announced HYC400 is at the moment the fastest production EV charger and the following might explain its raison d’etre
In 2021 the German government revealed plans for the “Deustchlandnetz” (Germany network) involving over a thousand fast-charging parks nationwide, for which two billion euros are to be made available. Here, the government stipulates that each charging station must have two charging points at which two vehicles can charge at the same time and that a nominal charging power of 200 kW must be available per charging point.
Currently the only charger to satisfy the above requirement is the Alpitronic Hypercharger HYC 400
Peering at the specs of this charger it looks good that it is future proof with the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) 1.6 J, ready for 2.0 J, I might be able to investigate that further but until then I wish them good luck and hope to visit the new planned headquarters in the Tyrol one day, it looks to have the makings of a great eco building and if the are just as successful with it as they are with their chargers its going to be quite something.