Telecommunications Company
The client is one of the largest telecommunication companies in the UK and is based in London.
Battery Buffered EV Charging
What is Battery Buffered Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging?
Battery Buffered Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging is the use of a battery storage system to reduce the impact of EV chargers on your overall power demand.
This allows you to implement multiple slow chargers or even high power, rapid chargers without the spikes in demand that they would otherwise cause. In some cases, it may be essential in order to add the charging capability to a site’s load profile and connect them to the National Grid.
The transition to EV & the Goal of NET ZERO
As part of the UK Government’s goal to achieve net zero carbon by 2050, the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030. Alternate technologies will need to be widely adopted. The most mature of these alternatives is Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV or more commonly EV).
EVs are rapidly gaining market share around the world, but there is still a lot of work to get to the point where the technology is ready to take over from internal combustion engines entirely.
In 2014, only 1 in 200 new vehicles sold in the UK was an EV. That grew to 1 in 10 by 2020. That is impressive growth but the annual sale of EVs will need to rise from 150,000 to approximately 2.4 million before 2030.
What is The impact of transitioning to EV?
To enable rapid adoption of EVs, there is an urgent need to create access to charging facilities. A fleet of service or delivery vehicles or busses will need on-site charging. These will probably be rapid chargers, to ensure that the vehicles and personnel are not idle waiting for charging to complete.
As employees adopt EVs they will also expect to charge their cars while at work. The highest speed chargers currently being installed require as much as 350kW of power each. Putting that into perspective, it is twice the demand of the entire Powerstar factory.
Implementing rapid or multiple EV chargers at your facility may not be possible without paying for an additional or upgraded grid connection. That is a major infrastructure project and can cost anywhere between £100,000/MW and £1.7 million/MW. In some cases, an application for a new connection may simply be refused. They can also take years to be implemented, but there is another alternative.
How do you Overcome Barriers to installing EV charging?
Organisations and businesses considering electrifying their vehicle fleet have several barriers to overcome. One of the most significant, but least well understood, is the limits of the grid supply.
Using a battery buffered EV charging system enables you to implement Electric Vehicle (EV) charging without the need to upgrade your electrical infrastructure and supply from the National Grid. This is done by using a Powerstar Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) as a buffer between the EV charging installation points and your grid connection.
How does battery buffered EV charging work?
Any type of EV charger can be integrated to a bespoke battery storage solution, including the charger head (e.g. CHAdeMO/type 1/type2) and the charging power (e.g. 50/100/150kW).The battery energy storage system stores electricity as a DC supply, rather than the normal AC supply of your site. A benefit of DC charging is that it can be much higher speed and thus a battery-connected system is ideal for rapid chargers (more than 11kW).
The chargers are directly connected to the battery so that the vehicles charge rapidly from the electricity stored in the battery. The battery then recharges at a slower rate from the National Grid supply, or from on-site generation. The system can be integrated with any form of on-site generation, such as solar PV. This could be part of a Smart Microgrid
HOW BATTERY BUFFERED EV CHARGING CAN HELP YOU
Battery buffered EV charging is an application of Powerstar’s battery energy storage solution, which enables you to store electricity on your site. The battery can be charged more slowly than the electric vehicles, meaning that the additional demand to your site’s authorised capacity is dramatically reduced. If the site is already operating near its maximum capacity, it may be impossible to implement rapid charging without paying your Distribution Network Operator (DNO) to increase capacity. A battery buffer can eliminate the need for upgrades.
If your site has, or will have in the future, renewable generation, such as solar PV, then the battery system can be used to store that electricity for directly charging electric vehicles. On-site renewables are unlikely to generate enough power to charge a vehicle, but by storing the energy over a longer period of time in the battery system you can ensure that your fleet of cars, vans, busses, and other commercial vehicles are charged with 100% clean electricity.
How to implement battery buffered EV charging
Powerstar can customise and install its battery energy storage systems to suit your electric vehicle charging requirements. The artificial intelligence driven microgrid control can automatically optimise the charging patterns to ensure that the cheapest and cleanest electricity is used at all times.
Which sectors benefit most from battery buffered EV charging?
In order to facilitate the move forward to more electric vehicles on the road, every sector would benefit from battery-buffered EV charging as the demand for electric vehicle charging increases.
Sites that need to manage fleet vehicles will have the greatest need. If vehicles need to be charged in a short period of time to keep the vehicles and/or drivers utilised as much as possible then rapid charging will be essential. Distribution centres, service fleets, transport hubs and delivery operations are perfect examples of this sort of operation.
Contact us to discuss installing and implementing battery-buffered EV charging capabilities
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