EV Smart Charging

According to recent research, the growth in EV sales worldwide is expected to boost demand for charging points, with up to 30 million installed by 2025.

McKinsey Research shows that unmanaged, load-increases from EV-charging-power-demand may eventually push local transformers beyond their capacity, requiring expensive infrastructure upgrades.

What is Smart Charging?

EV smart charging ensures the safe delivery of power to EVs without compromising on delivering electricity to offices, campuses and homes. EV smart charging plays a critical role in charging electric vehicles in a reliable way using intelligence.

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So, How is EV Smart Charging Done?

When a vehicle is charging using smart charging, communication is established between the charger, the car, the charging operator and also possibly the electricity provider.

Smart EV charging is enabled by a centralized EV charging management platform.

The platform optimizes the charging infrastructure by efficiently distributing the available power.

By using advanced algorithms and demand response, it automatically shifts charging loads based on:

  • dynamic grid and renewable supplies
  • dynamic energy cost
  • preconfigured policies
  • and the needs of vehicle owners

In other words, it ensures that the right amount of energy gets to the right power consumer at the right time.

The overall amount of energy generated by electricity providers is planned by peak hours and days during a year. Increasing the generation power is very expensive because it requires building new power generation capabilities. To avoid or postpone these costs, the electricity provider can use incentives to encourage consumers to balance their demand over the hours of the day. They can do this by reducing costs during some hours of the day, or even paying consumers that commit to reduce consumption at specific times. This is known as the energy flexibility market.

The Benefits of Smart EV Charging

Smart EV charging provides significant benefits to the EV charging ecosystem as a whole – from the electricity provider to individual EV drivers. It optimizes and stabilizes energy flow within a balanced grid while ensuring more reliable service and quality power.

From the perspective of the electricity providers, smart energy management enables them to optimize their infrastructure by efficiently distributing the available power between vehicles and other power consumers.

With EV smart charging, businesses offering charge points to their employees or customers can ensure that they maintain the critical balance between the facility and the EV charging power requirements so as not to incur peak pricing charges and avoid straining the grid.

This is even more important for fleets that use electric vehicles. Buses, trucks and vans must have enough energy when they leave for their route.

The vehicle schedule, state of charge and energy costs are critical information for the planning algorithm to make sure that the vehicle leaves with enough energy.

For individual EV drivers, smart EV charging’s greatest incentive is cheaper, eco-friendly, and safer charging.

EV owners and charger owners can further increase the benefits and lower costs by storing additional energy in the vehicles and then discharging that energy at night for use within their homes using vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities.

 

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