The emergence of the electric car has made headlines as a first step towards deautobonization. Of course, private transportation is one of the largest participants in global CO2 emissions. But for many other people with home charging, electric vehicles may be just part of an environmental economy. Home-centric, home-centric ecosystem that could also come with solar panels, a home battery, a heat pump, and potentially other devices in the future. I spoke to Timo Feger about E. ON and how the car is at the center of this. electrical network.
Feger runs the TestingLab, a facility in Essen operated through E. ON to validate family electrical equipment, on chargers specific to home electric vehicles. It is a business that continues in “wild west” mode. Over the past four years, the rise in charger brands has been even more pronounced. In essence, an EV charger is a device that provides maximum power for an extended period of time while communicating with a vehicle’s circuitry.
It doesn’t seem that difficult, which is why companies that were already operating in the electronics sector have launched themselves into this new sector of activity. But this is a gross underestimation of the difficult situations ahead. Security and reliability can temporarily take their toll. This is not necessarily due to reasonable engineering. This is possibly due to a mistaken impression of the points involved. For example, a charger design reviewed through TestingLab overheated because the engineers did too clever a job of isolating all the high-voltage parts but leaving no room for them to cool.
Unfortunately, there are no European regulations regarding electric vehicle chargers. Different countries have their own requirements, such as the use of non-conductive wood panels in the Netherlands. Feger observed that the certification procedure seemed more like a coherent and official corporate education than a rigorous safety-focused procedure. So TestingLab started certifying charger installation engineers and then training running shoes to spread the features more widely. TestingLab now trains 100 to 150 running shoes per year, with partners such as BMW, Volkswagen and Harley Davidson. The company can check chargers in Europe to identify a problem. For example, this helped identify a charging failure in the BMW i3 model, due to a change in the way it initialized a cycle.
The house is not the only concentrate of the E. ON TestingLab. The company is also testing public DC testers and running a solution to rate trucks. The challenge with giant cars like this is how complicated it is to maneuver. It is very easy to accidentally injure an evaluator when impacting them. E. ON’s solution is to place the charging cable on an elevated gantry, so that the device is stored in one place. The truck passes under the gantry and then the cable is lowered through the most sensitive part to load it.
Another fear about public charging is whether the grid will be able to handle it. On average, it is possible. The great challenge lies in the excessive demand and lack of connections to the high-power electrical grid, or at least in the long procedure necessary to install them. E. Adding to this challenge is a public DC tester with an integrated battery to monitor peaks. One edition is designed to run on just a 30 kW grid connection, with two hundred kWh batteries on board serving two 125 kW DC connections. Rate 40 Renault Zoes in a row before the battery runs out, which will of course charge once the tester is idle.
A second edition includes the same duo of hundred-kWh batteries, but is designed for an 80 kW grid connection. This can service two three-hundred-kW DC connections. It should be noted that few cars manage to travel such a long distance while charging. The curve will fall well below this value, closer to 50 kW at around 50% load. This will be replaced as cars capable of maintaining a faster speed for longer arrive, such as the XPENG G9, although most do not yet have this capability.
The broader challenge Feger learned about was how qualifiers are compatible in an increasingly complex electrical power source system. At home, it’s all about digitization. If a charging device doesn’t use stressed Ethernet and instead relies on WiFi, a visitor would possibly replace home routers not knowing that it would cut off their EV tester in the process. This poses a challenge as smart charging price lists prevail, where less expensive nighttime energy is used to qualify an EV. When the energy supplier controls the car and the evaluator, this service can even be dynamic, taking advantage of transient moments of oversupply. But you want Netpaintings to access the charging device to work properly.
This charger packs two hundred kWh batteries, so it only needs one 30 kW input to force two 125 kW DC outputs.
But this is just the beginning. Reducing charging costs becomes more confusing if you also have solar panels in the home, a battery in the garage, and a heat pump. Then it’s imaginable that your car’s huge battery would be available to your local electric power provider to balance the grid. charge it when energy is abundant and discharge it to the grid during peak periods. Called Vehicle to Grid, this generation is still in its infancy, but it has proven its effectiveness in limited testing. ON is testing the concept at Cranfield and Octopus Energy has been conducting its Powerloop trial since 2018. It has the potential to solve the problem of renewable energy intermittency without the need for large public battery storage facilities. The United Kingdom is considered to be a control case in this area.
In 2021, E. ON acquired smart grid intelligence company GridX. The company’s software has advertising and client applications, which are intertwined. For the customer with a full suite of electrified smart appliances, the software allows them to focus on whether their desired balance prioritizes low CO2 emissions, lower cost, or a warmer home (when a heat pump is included). However, the energy supplier can also take advantage of this possibility and reduce certain high-consumption appliances, such as the heat pump or car charger, for a decrease in production, e. g. 4. 2 kW, if the network is very likely to exceed its limits.
It is clear that we are entering a phase in which integration is king. Those with home charging and smart energy pricing have learned the benefits of a more connected relationship between their electric cars and home charging. But there is much more on the horizon. The electric vehicle will be part of a national energy ecosystem that is not only interconnected internally, but also compliant with the national source system.
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