Montréal's MET airport now runs 120 EV chargers, 48 more coming

120 charging points are now online at Montréal Metropolitan Airport, in Longueuil, Quebec. The chargers sit at the YHU Terminal, where they serve employees, visitors and airport operations. Wallbox, the company that supplied them, has put 48 more on the way, which would take the site to 168.

The chargers are Wallbox Pulsar Pro units. Wallbox lists the maximum output of this Level 2 model at 11.5 kW (kilowatts, the unit that measures how much power a charger can deliver). The announcement does not say what charging speeds the airport's drivers actually get, so the figure is the ceiling, not a measured result. The 2,600-plus parking spaces across short-, mid- and long-term lots give a sense of how many cars the network has to reach.

The hard part is the grid. If 120 cars plugged in at once each demanded full power, the site would exceed its electrical capacity. Wallbox's Power Sharing technology handles this by dividing the available electricity among groups of chargers, so the airport can add plugs without treating every car as a separate demand for full power. Charging management software from Foresta runs the network and processes payments. Quebec's électrique agency edp électrique coordinated the integration, with EG Électrique and Westburne also involved in the project.

Travelers and airport staff who leave a car parked for days gain access to 120 chargers that are already available today. For the airport, the expansion to 168 depends on a building that is still under construction, and Wallbox has not announced when the extra 48 will open. Prices have not been set either, so what a recharge will cost the people who use them remains open.

The project is a deployed one: these chargers are in service, not a pilot or a prototype. What it does not yet show is how the network performs at peak times, when many drivers arrive together and Power Sharing has to do its job in earnest. That is the test the next 48 chargers will face.