Dumb New Electrical Code Could Doom Most Common EV Charging
Story by Frank Markus,Getty Images • 17h
A coming ground-fault circuit-interrupter revision could make slow-charging your car nearly impossible.
The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) publishes a new National Electric Code every three years, and we almost never notice or care. But the next one, NFPA 70 2026, has the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric-vehicle charging subcommittee, OEMs, and companies in the EV Supply Equipment (EVSE, or charger) biz mightily concerned. That’s because it proposes to require the same exact ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection that makes you push that little button on your bathroom outlet every time the curling iron won’t heat up. Only now, that reset button will often be down in an electric panel, maybe locked in a room where you can’t reset it. If EV drivers can’t reliably plug in and expect their cars to charge overnight at home or while at work, those cars will become far less practical.
Why GFCI?
We’ve all probably felt a jolt of electrical current at some point in our lives. If so, your body basically completed a circuit between a live wire or outlet and the ground. Just 40 milliamps of AC current (or 300–500 mA of DC at high voltage) can cause cardiac fibrillation.
What a ground-fault circuit-interrupter (GFCI) does is constantly monitor the current flowing back and forth on a circuit’s “hot” and “neutral” (often black and white) wires. Any difference detected is presumed to be a person grounding some electricity and causes the circuit to break. In North America, those 120-volt kitchen, bath, and outdoor GFCIs get tripped by just 5 mA (in Europe, the trigger is 30 mA). Fun fact: Sometimes the simple presence of water on the cable or connector can bleed enough current to trip these circuits (ever had Christmas lights suddenly blink out in the rain or heavy dew?).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/dumb-new-electrical-code-could-doom-most-common-ev-charging/ar-AA1xFrdT?ocid=widgetonlockscreen&cvid=054f8dbf8e1f4405b8ca218a5cc38cc9&ei=112
