The CPC tags on The NOCO Company's grant US11600996B2 (issued March 7, 2023) — H02J 7/0018 (battery charging arrangements), B60L 50/40 (propulsion with power from external sources), H01M 10/052 (lithium secondary cells), and H01M 2220/20 (batteries for vehicles) — point at a battery-buffered charging station, and the claims confirm it. The abstract advertises five-to-fifteen-minute charging, but the actual claimed novelty is architectural: a cascade of stored-energy "reservoirs" sitting between the grid and the car.

“An electric vehicle (EV) charging station for fast charging (e.g. 5 to 15 minutes) an electric vehicle (EV). The EV charging station can be configured to charge multiple EVs and multiple conventional fuel type vehicles at the same time.”— U.S. Patent No. 11,600,996 source

Independent claim 1 builds the chain explicitly: "a power source; an electrical service receiving power from the power source; a primary electric reservoir receiving power from the electrical service; a secondary electric reservoir receiving power from the primary electric reservoir; and a first EV charger receiving power from the secondary electric reservoir." That is the whole idea in one sentence — the charger does not pull fast-charge power directly from the grid service; it pulls from a secondary reservoir, which is fed from a primary reservoir, which is fed from the service. The reservoirs decouple the burst rate a vehicle demands from the steady rate the grid connection can supply, which is precisely how you deliver a 15-minute charge on a service that could never sustain that current continuously.

Claim 1 then multiplies the architecture: "the electrical service is a plurality of electrical services, the primary electric reservoir is a plurality of primary electric reservoirs... the secondary electric reservoir is a plurality of secondary electric reservoirs... and the EV charger is a plurality of EV chargers." That parallelization is what lets the station "charge multiple EVs and multiple conventional fuel type vehicles at the same time" from the abstract — each charger has its own reservoir lineage. Independent claim 2 extends the cascade by one stage, inserting "a tertiary electric reservoir receiving power from the secondary electric reservoir" before the charger, so the depth of buffering is itself a claimed variable.

The dependents specify the power-electronics plumbing that makes a multi-reservoir DC chain coherent. Claim 4 adds "an AC to DC power converter receiving AC power from the electrical service," establishing that the buffering happens on the DC side. Claims 5–8 then place a dedicated DC-to-DC converter between each stage: first converter feeding the primary reservoir, second feeding the secondary, third feeding the charger, and a "fourth DC to DC power converter" inside the charger feeding the EV. Stage-isolating DC-DC converters are what allow each reservoir to sit at its own voltage and state of charge while still passing energy forward — the converters are the valves between the tanks. Claims 9–14 repeat that converter ladder for the three-reservoir (tertiary) variant of claim 2, so the plumbing is claimed at both depths.

The reservoir-chemistry dependents are short but consequential for scope. Claim 15 says "the primary electric reservoir comprises a flow battery"; claim 16, "a Li-ion battery"; claim 17, "an electrical storage capacitor." Naming a flow battery, a lithium cell, and a capacitor as alternative primary reservoirs is a deliberate breadth play — it covers high-energy long-buffer chemistries, conventional lithium, and high-power short-burst storage under the same claim family, so a competitor cannot escape by swapping the storage technology. Claims 18 and 19 add the operational flexibility that the station "is configured to selectively or simultaneously provide power for charging the EV from the electrical source, primary electric reservoir and/or the secondary electric reservoir" (and the tertiary, in claim 19) — meaning the controller can blend grid and stored power, or draw from any tank, to meet a given vehicle's demand.

Independent claims 20, 23, and 24 are alternative entry points that fix specific converter placements — claim 20 ties an AC-DC converter to the service and a second DC-DC converter between primary and secondary reservoirs; claims 23 and 24 pin the first DC-DC converter to the AC-DC output feeding the primary reservoir. These give the patentee several independent footholds on the same cascade, so an accused design that omits one converter stage may still read on another independent claim.

The grid-relief logic behind this architecture is worth making explicit, because it is the commercial rationale the CPC tags only hint at. H02J 7/0018 covers the charging arrangement and B60L 50/40 the external-source propulsion, but neither captures the why: a site's electrical service is sized for an average, not for the instantaneous current a 15-minute charge demands. By interposing primary and secondary reservoirs, the station can trickle energy from the service into the tanks continuously and then discharge a tank into a vehicle at a far higher rate for a short window — the reservoirs act as a power buffer that converts a modest, steady grid draw into intermittent high-power bursts. That is why the chemistry dependents matter so much to scope: a flow battery (claim 15) suits a deep, slow-refilling primary buffer, a lithium cell (claim 16) a balanced one, and a capacitor (claim 17) a shallow high-power secondary stage closest to the charger. The inter-stage DC-DC converters (claims 5–8) let each tank hold its own voltage and state of charge while still passing energy forward, and the "selectively or simultaneously" blending of claims 18 and 19 lets the controller top a fast session by drawing the service and both reservoirs at once when a single tank cannot keep up. Read together, the family fences not just one buffered station but the general principle of staging stored energy between grid and car.

The verdict: enabling and examined, with the novelty squarely in the cascaded reservoir architecture rather than in any charging-time number. The "5 to 15 minutes" language is a benefit, not a limitation — none of the independent claims recite a charge time. Report it as a battery-buffered, multi-stage DC charging-station claim whose moat is the primary/secondary(/tertiary) reservoir chain and its inter-stage DC-DC converters, with chemistry-agnostic dependents (claims 15–17) widening the protection. Treat the headline speed claim as marketing context, and read the substance in the reservoir cascade.