Overview
The emergence of electric driving and sustainable charging is a significant development and challenge for the electricity grid. It is also an essential component in order for Europe to shift to the low-carbon circular economy it strives to be, as the transportation sector provides the biggest potential to reduce CO² emissions. Last year, the European Commission published a strategy for low-emission mobility (Brussels, 20.7.2016 COM(2016) 501 final). Here it states that 'Europe needs to accelerate the transition towards low- and zero-emission vehicles'. We consider smart charging as the way to cope with the increase of EV's and more feed-in of intermittent power sources.
In this Orchestrating Smart Charging in mass Deployment (OSCD) project, we want to unleash the power of flexibility towards all the requesters of flexibility. We research the hypothesis that the aggregated EV's can deliver (almost) all the (future) flexibility which is needed (proven by simulation), provide the necessary equipment (hardware, software and interfaces) for that and visualize the challenge and the solutions in different grid-constellations.
EV is a challenge and a solution to the energy market at the same time. As the number of electrical vehicles grows (e.g. The Dutch governmental ambition is 1 million EV's in 2025), the impact of the EV's on the grid grows and requires disruptive and creative ways to adjust the Grid technology, the EV charging technology to the energy generation and energy demand. The OSCD brings together a consortium of leading companies and academia with different and large variety of expertise:
- Grid companies;
- EV charging network operators;
- EV charging Hrdware solution providers;
- Advanced software solution providers in the field of EV's and Energy management; and
- An academic research body.
In the project we plan to orchestrate the various interfaces and protocols and to come up with a solution that will enable to balance the electricity network capabilities and the EV charging/ driver needs. The project scope includes:
- Interfaces from both the electricity network side and the EV charging network side;
- Variety of protocols for the above;
- Simulation of mass activity in the networks;
- Dash board and visualization of both the supply and demand side; and
- Algorithms to balance the requirements.
The different systems will get information about the amount of energy exist in real time and control the usage of the energy using smart charging algorithms in a way that will both satisfy the DSO needs and the EV users' needs. The plan includes innovative ways to better understand the problems in a granular way, better analyse the situation based on real and simulated mass data, For both testing and correction measures that will assist to tune the algorithms. As we combine academic and operational approach, we plan to provide innovative, disruptive and advanced practical solutions that will improve the existing protocols and will enable to orchestrate the various interfaces and transactions while creating better usable EV charging environment in order to balance the impact on the grid.