Why Charging Has Become the Bottleneck
Electrification of heavy-duty vehicles is accelerating across freight transport, buses, construction equipment, and industrial platforms. While vehicle architectures, power electronics, and energy storage technologies continue to mature, charging infrastructure is increasingly emerging as a limiting factor in large-scale deployment.
In these sectors, charging time directly affects vehicle availability and productivity, making charging requirements a core consideration in vehicle design. Trucks, buses, and industrial vehicles operate to tightly defined schedules, where extended downtime is rarely acceptable. Unlike passenger vehicles, which can often charge overnight, these platforms must replenish large amounts of energy within short, predictable windows.
As a result, the next phase of heavy-duty electrification depends as much on charging capability as on the vehicles themselves.
Why Conventional Fast Charging Is Not Enough
Most existing DC fast-charging solutions were developed around the needs of passenger electric vehicles. Technologies such as the Combined Charging System (CCS) typically operate at voltages up to around 1,000 V, with current levels in the hundreds of amps. In practice, this enables charging power in the low-to-mid hundreds of kilowatts.
For passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, this approach works well. For heavy-duty vehicles with battery capacities measured in hundreds of kilowatt-hours — or even megawatt-hours — it does not. Charging times quickly extend beyond what is operationally viable, particularly for vehicles expected to run multiple shifts per day.
Attempting to scale existing fast-charging approaches by increasing current alone introduces practical limitations around cable handling, connector size, thermal performance, and safety. These constraints highlight the need for a charging architecture designed specifically for heavy-duty operation.
Introducing the Megawatt Charging System
The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) has been developed to address these challenges directly and is designed from the outset to support megawatt-class power delivery for heavy-duty electric vehicles.
Developed under the umbrella of CharIN, MCS reflects a global, industry-led effort to align vehicle manufacturers, infrastructure providers, and component suppliers around a common charging interface. The objective is not only higher power, but interoperability, safety, and scalability across applications and regions.
MCS supports significantly higher operating voltages and sustained current levels than conventional fast-charging systems, enabling power delivery in the megawatt range. This allows large battery systems to be recharged within timeframes aligned to driver rest periods, loading windows, or scheduled stops.
What Makes MCS Different for Designers
Diagram of megawatt charging (Source: Argonne)
From a design perspective, MCS represents more than an incremental increase in charging power. It changes several underlying assumptions about how vehicles, chargers, and energy systems interact.
Higher voltage operation reduces current for a given power level, easing thermal stress on conductors and connectors while improving efficiency. At the same time, megawatt-scale charging requires careful consideration of insulation coordination, connector design, thermal monitoring, and system integration from the earliest design stages.
For vehicle OEMs, this has implications for onboard power electronics, battery architecture, cooling systems, and control strategies, bringing charging into the core of vehicle system design.
Safety at Megawatt Scale
As charging power increases, safety becomes a central consideration in system design. Megawatt-level energy transfer places specific demands on connectors, cables, power electronics, and control systems, particularly in environments where equipment is handled frequently and exposed to harsh conditions.
At these power levels, safety measures cannot rely solely on operating procedures or external safeguards but must be built directly into the charging interface and supporting systems. Protection mechanisms include controlled connection and disconnection sequences, continuous monitoring of temperature and operating conditions, and robust mechanical designs that minimise the risk of misuse or damage.
The MCS approach reflects this by treating safety as an inherent part of the charging system rather than an add-on. By embedding these features into the interface itself, MCS supports consistent safety performance across vehicles, charging stations, and operating environments, while reducing reliance on application-specific workarounds.
For designers and operators, this integrated approach simplifies deployment and supports confidence as charging power scales upward.
Charging Designed Around Real Duty Cycles
Heavy-duty vehicles operate according to real-world constraints defined by regulation, logistics, and human factors. Mandatory rest periods, shift changes, and loading schedules create natural charging opportunities — provided sufficient power is available.
Megawatt charging allows meaningful energy replenishment within these fixed windows, reducing the need for oversized battery packs while maintaining vehicle availability. This has knock-on effects for vehicle mass, cost, and overall system efficiency.
In this sense, MCS aligns charging capability with operational reality, supporting electrification without forcing fundamental changes to how fleets operate.
Interoperability, Standards, and Global Deployment
For OEMs targeting global markets, charging interfaces are a strategic consideration. Fragmentation across regions or vehicle platforms increases development cost, complicates certification, and limits operational flexibility.
As a standardised interface, MCS reduces these risks by enabling interoperability across manufacturers and infrastructure providers. A common connector and charging architecture support global deployment, future-proofs vehicle platforms, and accelerates infrastructure rollout.
From a commercial perspective, this standardisation provides confidence that investments made today will remain viable as electrification scales.
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Graph shows hdv recharging stations per category in european countries (Source: EAFO)
Engineering Implications and Enabling Technologies
Supporting the power levels enabled by the Megawatt Charging System places new demands on power electronics, thermal management, and overall system architecture. MCS-level charging combines very high power with defined interface, safety, and interoperability requirements, which in turn shape how chargers, vehicles, and site infrastructure are designed.
For designers, this means balancing efficiency, power density, safety, and reliability under demanding operating conditions, while also accommodating higher operating voltages, sustained current delivery, and tightly controlled connection and monitoring functions defined by the MCS approach. These requirements extend beyond the connector itself, influencing upstream power conversion, protection strategies, and thermal design.
As discussed more broadly in the context of heavy-duty vehicle electrification, enabling technologies such as advanced power semiconductors — including wide bandgap devices — are increasingly considered alongside cooling strategies, insulation systems, and modular architectures. Within MCS-based systems, these technologies help support higher voltage operation, improved efficiency, and compact power conversion, but they are only part of the overall solution. Successful implementation depends on coordinated, system-level design across vehicles, charging equipment, and supporting infrastructure.
Enabling the Transition at Scale
Megawatt charging is a foundational requirement for the next phase of heavy-duty electrification. Without it, many applications will struggle to transition away from diesel while maintaining productivity and economic viability.
As a leading distributor and technology partner, Avnet Silica works across the power electronics and energy infrastructure ecosystem, supporting customers as they navigate these system-level challenges. By combining access to advanced technologies with application insight and supply-chain support, Avnet Silica helps enable interoperable, scalable solutions for heavy-duty charging and electrification.
As charging power moves into the megawatt range, MCS reinforces the need for coordinated choices across power electronics, thermal management, and system architecture.
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