Can We Avoid EV Charging Overload and Electrical Grid Meltdown?

Current Issues the Grid is Facing with EV Charging?

We’ve got over 100,000 EV drivers now connected to our platform around the world. One of the most common things we see is no matter where you are, EV drivers typically come home and plug in their car around 6pm. That happens to coincide with peak electricity demand on the grid and household demand. The big problem and a big challenge is that EVs typically almost double the electricity consumption of a normal home. If everyone has EVs, you’re nearly doubling the amount of capacity needed on the grid to cope with that peak demand. That results in several things. 

Overall, it is just a lot more expensive, and there’s a requirement to build more electricity network capacity. That means more cables and wires; not only is it’s expensive, but it’s also disruptive. So, if everyone plugs in their EV and they all charge at the same time at peak, then it will overload the local grids. You’re talking about having to dig up roads everywhere to lay new cables in cities like London, which is incredibly disruptive.

Shared EV Charging Solutions and its Benefits?

The ability to integrate vehicles, charger manufacturers and charge points gives access to the data and the ability to control charging, which then connect with the energy grid. Initially the focus with charge points was on the biggest mass market, private homes, and driveways. Where you’ve probably got one, you might have two EVs or you’ve got one EV parking on a private driveway and that vehicle just uses that charge point. More and more as EV adoption is growing and increasing, people who live in shared accommodation or flats, maybe have shared parking, have one charge point that can be used by many people.

There’s a broad range of applications here, one is apartment buildings. With charging, there’s also car parks. There are several other applications as well – such as workplaces. It could be a workplace where you want to offer charging to customers or to employees. There are several challenges around that: Who is connected and using the charger? How much energy is being used? If it is a shared building, you may want to split the cost of charging and then bill the right amounts to the right people, or even if you’re providing it for free, you just want to keep track of the usage and what’s going on.

There are also solutions where we can do load balancing. A big challenge is this: If you’ve got 20 charge points in a small car park, it’s great to have those 20 charge points, but you don’t necessarily want them all charging at full power at the same time, because that could give you loading issues. We work with charging manufacturers in the set-up and can schedule charging to mean that you can install more chargers on a smaller connection.

A key part of that solution is what we’ve expanded on from our private residential use case which is the great user experience. We focus on the experience. The EV driver has the app, and they can see all of the charging sessions that they do. It still feels like a very personal experience for the driver using that charge point. Then we’ve also got back-end systems that allows a building manager or fleet manager to look at all the charging happening across that whole charge point system with all of the billing solutions.

How Does this Solution Benefit the Grid?

What it does is it takes Smart Charging, which typically would happen on a private off-street driveway setting and apply it to more areas. It puts the needs of the EV driver first, for the requirements of when you need your car ready by and how long you’re plugged in; that then determines what flexibility you can have within your schedule. Not every use case will be suitable for smart charging; however, lots of them are. Residential shared apartments maybe have a typical pattern like a home where the preference is to be plugged in overnight. So, in the same way, we can delay charging and do smart charging using cheaper, greener energy and avoiding the peak times

Not every use case will be suitable for smart charging; however, lots of them are. If there is flexibility within the schedule as well, for all electric vehicles and charge points on our platform, we can aggregate and control that overall electricity load together in a virtual power plant which at scale is able to deliver a positive impact on the grid.

We’re currently delivering tens of megawatts of flexibility, which is the scale of grid scale battery storage, just from all these distributed assets. What that means to the end-user is that this can be pausing charging across 10,000 vehicles for 30 minutes, and then starting again. So, from the user perspective, there’s flexibility in the schedule, it’s still charged when they need it. By doing that and helping the grid, we’re able to unlock value or energy networks and then we pass some of that value back to drivers in the form of rewards for smart charging. They can basically earn money for charging, reduce their cost of charging, or sometimes charge for free.

If More People are Driving EVs Would This Solution Allow the Grid to Cope?

The electricity system operator in Britain has published a report called The Future Energy Scenarios. Their job is to look out for and examine different scenarios and consider the impact that they will have on the grid, as well as costs, and then help plan the network to ensure that it is future proofed.

There was a slide which had a graph that showed if everyone does un-managed charging and plugged in when they get home, it will increase the peak load on the grid, and the winter peak by almost 30 gigawatts. So peak loads on the grid today is maybe around 60 gigawatts; that’s 50% additional demand total on the network, which is really a worst-case scenario. That would be incredibly expensive to deal with. It’s probably possible, but it would be extremely expensive to deliver. It would also hinder moving to net zero carbon because we would likely need to keep gas and coal on the grid for longer.

The good news is that there’s a huge amount of policy, effort, and investment in smart charging to make sure that the worst case doesn’t happen. For example, every private charge points now sold in the UK, for the home and workplace, must be smart capable, and therefore must be capable of shifting when it’s loaded.

The consumer transformation scenario shows that if around 80% of people adopt smart charging and therefore shift their charge usage, you’re still using the same amount of energy but you’re just using it at a different time; you’re using it in a smarter way, so the total additional peak capacity that needs to be built is reduced by about half.

What is particularly interesting is when we start talking about bi-directional charging. So bi-directional charging is where your vehicle can push electricity back to your home or back to the grid during peak times. National Grid has said that if 26% of customers upgrade from smart charging to bi-directional – so we’re talking about a quarter of EVs – then the peak demand on the grid in winter from EVs would see the net demand being negative.