If we are to successfully battle climate change, we need to do two things pretty quickly. We need to convert our home heating from gas and oil to electricity. And we need to do the same with our cars.
Once we’ve done that, then our houses and cars can be supplied with as much renewable electricity as we can generate, and our carbon emissions should really start to plummet.
So far, car people have been working on the car side of things, and heating people on the other. However, an Irish company called EVHACS has started to work on both at the same time, and it has come up with a double-whammy combination of technologies that should simplify the dual process of electrifying our houses and our cars.
Jeff Aherne knows his cars. He was a director at Cartell, one of the first online vehicle history checking services to operate in Ireland, and having built that firm up and successfully sold it on to Independent News & Media, Aherne went back to his roots – in air conditioning.
“I grew up in refrigeration and air conditioning,” Aherne tells The Irish Times. “That was my dad’s business, so I worked in it, helped with installations, all that kind of thing.”
Making the leap from refrigeration and air conditioning to charging up electric cars may not seam like the most logical of connections, but Aherne’s antennae started twitching on this some time ago. “I was working on projects to do with connected cars and future cars, and we all started to realise that a major shift towards electric cars was coming. But there were no charge points. If you think back to 2012 and 2013, there were only Nissan Leaf drivers on the road in EVs, and even then, when they essentially had a free charging network, they were giving out about it.”
Aherne had a lightbulb moment. “The inside of an air conditioning unit is like the engine bay of an old petrol car. You can have a 1.6-litre engine, or a 2-litre, or a big 3-litre one, but the engine bay, the box that the air conditioner comes in, remains the same. And that gives you spare space inside.”
His idea was to fill that space with a charging system for an electric car. The idea seems so obvious when you think about it now. Restaurants, shops, warehouses all have a need for air conditioning, so if you can supply them with one box that cools the building and can charge an electric car at the same time, you’re killing two climate birds with one stone.
“In 2020, I sold Cartell,” Aherne says. “I had the opportunity to start on this, and I did what everyone does; a bit of googling to see what was out there. And then I started to think that maybe I shouldn’t be googling it in case Google sees the idea.”
But it turned out that no-one was doing this, and so EVHACS – short for electric vehicle charging heat pump air conditioning system – was born.
Initially, the company was supported by Enterprise Ireland, but now following a €1 million seed capital funding round in 2023, and a second €1 million investment round that completed in June, EVHACS has managed to raise €2.7 million worth of investment. It is also about to embark on a venture capital funding round, and it’s expecting to launch its first combined units to the market this autumn.
Currently, EVHACS has around 30 units being tested, and it’s been through a tested-to-destruction regime at a facility in Slovenia, including a simulated lightning strike, to ensure that the charger and air conditioner can live happily together.
Of course, it’s not just an air conditioner. Generally in the Irish market, air conditioning units are sold to retailers and businesses, not private individuals. But the technology of an air conditioner is basically the same as that of a heat pump (you just reverse the flow of heating and cooling, really) and so EVHACS’s technology can be just as easily applied to the enormous need to kit out our homes with both non-fossil fuel-based heating systems, and a way to keep our electric cars charged up.
There’s a straightforward financial benefit in doing so – fitting a combined heat pump and car charger should cost just under €1,000 plus VAT – but there are much bigger benefits offered in terms of managing how the electricity flows through your house.
“When you take transport and heating and cooling and put them together, the amount of advances we’re seeing, we actually can’t keep up with the IP we’re building,” Aherne says. “Now, heat pumps use a lot of energy, but in a good way as they’re very efficient. Electric cars are the same. But there is some fear out there that if it’s a cold day, and everyone’s trying to generate hot water, and everyone’s trying to charge their car at the same time, that you could be blowing out transformers up the grid, or tripping out trip-switches on your own house.
“But here’s the thing, if you put the two together, they monitor each other, they talk to each other, and one says ‘I need X amount of power for heat’ and the other says ‘I need X amount of power for charging up the car’ and so the heat pump starts monitoring the power going to either heating or home, and you end up with this really affordable energy management system.”
Energy management is going to be a key requirement for future electric heating and charging systems, to ensure that the grid doesn’t get overloaded, so if EVHACS can provide an affordable solution that does both at the same time, then it’s a major breakthrough.
There’s a further fringe benefit. As Aherne notes, traditionally the makers of air conditioning units have made a machine, put it in a box, sold it to a wholesaler who sells it to a retailer who sells it to an end user. Which means the manufacturer gets one payment and that’s it. By adding in an EV charging component, EVHACS has created a potential regular revenue stream for the air conditioning and heat pump makers, allowing them to recoup investments much more quickly.
So far, EVHACS has been working with Mitsubishi Electronics, one of the world leaders in heating and cooling technology, and it’s from EVHACS’s bases in Clane and Shannon that the first units will start to ship later this year. Everything has been made to CE mark and ISO standards (Aherne says that the thought of someone making a unit like this on the cheap keeps him up at night, so complex are the internal relationships between the two units and their electrical systems).
So far, the design has been focused on low-power AC electric car charging, at 7.4kW, 11kW, and 22kW speeds, but design work is already afoot on high-powered DC fast-charging installations.
“We love being at the forefront of technology in Ireland,” Aherne says. “But this is a global solution. The heating and cooling industry is a €200 billion industry worldwide, but they want to take on big oil, and take away the heating industry from it, and now take away the car industry side of things too.
“It’s a big win for the industry, and it’s not just cars – we’ve had people asking us about drone charging and even aircraft charging, and we can do all that. Air conditioning is everywhere, heat pumps are going to be everywhere. So it’s a complete no-brainer, and when the heating and cooling industry gets into this, they’re going to come in at a ferocious pace.”
