XPeng X-Energy 1 MW charging station: 400 kWh storage and a 240 kW grid connection

© xpeng.com

XPeng has launched its first commercial X-Energy station in Hong Kong with peak output of 1 MW, but another figure is more revealing: the site needs no more than a 240 kW connection to the city grid. The missing power comes from an integrated 400 kWh energy storage system — at peak, the station can deliver more than four times as much power to a car as it is drawing directly from the grid.

The station was built together with Halo and operates around the clock for electric vehicles of any brand. The site has four charging bays, one of them equipped with a liquid-cooled megawatt terminal rated for up to 1000 A. According to XPeng, this is the first commercial deployment of the company's own X-Energy technology.

The buffer addresses a basic infrastructure problem: instead of paying for a grid connection of roughly a megawatt, the site can make do with up to 240 kW while the battery smooths demand peaks. In a separate test of the new XPeng G9L, charging power reached 619.6 kW and the vehicle added a claimed 450 km of range in nine minutes. In other words, the 1 MW figure currently describes what the station can deliver, not what an XPeng production car can accept.

The gap is also clear from XPeng's other current models. The G6 and G9 use 800-volt architectures and accept up to 451 and 525 kW respectively. The newer X9 is rated for up to 542 kW and, with a suitable charger, can replenish its battery from 10 to 80% in about 12 minutes.

Europe is the next step. XPeng has previously said it plans to build its own network of more than 1000 stations across 13 countries and deploy X-Energy together with storage systems and 10C charging. The race is therefore shifting away from the terminal's headline power figure to a different question: can ultra-fast charging be installed where the local grid was never designed for megawatt loads?