Lincoln Electric is leveraging its experience making welders and vertically-integrated supply chain towards producing electric-vehicle chargers. This file photo shows a student practicing his welding skills at Lincoln Electric.The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Lincoln Electric is taking 127 years of experience making welders and motors and channeling it toward a new industry — electric vehicle charging. The company plans to have a working product by year’s end.

The Cleveland-based company is planning to design and manufacture Level 3 chargers, the kind that can charge vehicles in about 30 minutes. These powerful charges would be found at charging stations along the interstates, not in people’s homes.

While Lincoln Electric is new to this space, it has a good track record of looking beyond its traditional business, said Steve Sumner, vice president of global equipment. And the company has advantages that many startups and new companies don’t.

Expertise with industrial power-systems, a vertical-integrated supply-chain and the ability to build at scale will give Lincoln Electric a leg up, Sumner said.

“Everything that goes into making a good product is under our roof,” Sumner said.

Lincoln Electric makes many of its components in-house, Sumner said. It assembles its own circuit boards, makes it owns transformers and electrical harnesses. It molds its own plastic parts, and fabricates its own parts out of sheet metal. All minimizing a need to outsource.

The company is also used to adding smart technology to its products. Electric vehicles will need to be connected to the internet and to be able to communicate with vehicles and other chargers, another kind of engineering Lincoln Electric is used too.

At its core, Sumner said the company makes rugged and reliable industrial power systems, and people will expect reliability out of EV chargers the same way they need it from welders.

And Lincoln Electric is very used to handling large amounts of power.

Lincoln Electric said it has developed a 50-kilowatt module for its EV chargers, which can be scaled up and used to deliver up to 300 kilowatts of power. The device is similar to what’s found in Lincoln Electric’s 44-kilowatt welder.

“There wasn’t a lot we had to change from a broad architecture perspective,” Sumner said. “It was very much in our wheelhouse from day one.”

A big difference is how fast the devices deliver electricity. Welders are low voltage and high current; chargers are high voltage and low current.

It makes more sense if you compare an electrical system to a water pipe.

Voltage, measured in volts, is the pressure inside the “pipe” and it pushes energy through the system. Current, measured in amps, is like the water coming out of the pipe and is the stream of electricity that comes out, whether its leaves a welding torch or a charger.

The electrical power is voltage multiplied by current, in this case measure in kilowatts.

A welder doesn’t need “pressure” built up but needs a large stream electricity to come out at once to weld. The vehicle charger needs to limit the stream and deliver current slowly, and needs more volts.

“The battery that’s in the car can only accept so much energy at a time,” Sumner said.

Branching out isn’t new for the company. Lincoln Electric has turned its expertise toward a kind of 3D printing, but with metal. Through “additive manufacturing,” Lincoln’s machines stack layers of metal on top of each other to create parts. Items that used to only be possible through casting can be made much quicker through this process.

Lincoln Electric plans to enter the market when EV charging networks expand. As part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, states are being given funding to build vehicle-charging networks with the goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle chargers across the country by 2030.

The law also requires chargers to have a certain amount of components made in the U.S., giving Lincoln’s Cleveland-based facility a leg up on overseas competitors that would need to build factories here.

* Read more: ODOT identifies 15 ‘alternative fuel corridors’ for installation of electric vehicle charging stations

States should begin their requests for proposals in 2023 and 2024. Sumner said Lincoln Electric wants to be ready with an option. Its chargers would use the open charge point protocol, an industry standard for electric vehicles.

Because the EV charging market is rapidly changing, Sumner said there’s isn’t a set timetable for production or a sales goal. Sumner said the company doesn’t expect it to rival welder sales by any means. But it sets out on these initiatives, expecting at least $50 million in new sales.

Lincoln Electric is hiring more employees to work specifically on its electric-vehicle chargers, and it is looking for potential commercial and development partners.

“We’ve moved beyond the tinkering stage to where we are launching an initiative,” Sumner said. “We are fully intentioned at putting a product on the market.”

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