Connected Smart Charging

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£1,289,080

Sept. 30, 2020

March 31, 2021

In 2018 Miralis successfully gained Innovate UK funding through the Faraday Battery Challenge for our Smart Automotive Managed Battery Algorithms (SAMBA) project. SAMBA investigated whether managing EV charging schedules could extend long term health of batteries. While we successfully proved this, the potential savings made through optimising charge schedules to take advantage of fluctuating electricity costs were more compelling. In SAMBA we developed algorithms that created these schedules to prove the feasibility of electric vehicle smart charging.

Since SAMBA concluded in 2019, we have extended our smart charging algorithms as part of an exploration in how best to commercialise them. While current state-of-the-art works only for individual vehicles we wanted to extend it to the charging of whole fleets. This isn't just charging a larger number of vehicles individually (as is currently offered by a number of organisations under the description of "fleet smart charging"), this is taking in to account the make-up and requirements of the fleet as a whole, the electricity grid and the building to which the electric vehicle chargers are also connected and other priorities unique to the scenario.

This new project partners Miralis with Envisij, a UK based energy management solution with an established customer base, to commercialise that research through the following developments:

* Tariff optimisation. Automating the charging of a whole fleet at the optimum time and pricing to minimise cost.
* Charge level optimisation. Using the vehicle's history to charge the battery to the level it needs and not to 100%.
* Load balancing. Taking into account the impact of vehicle charging on a whole site's energy usage, including buildings and machinery.
* Prioritisation. Ensure the right vehicles receive the right amount of charge in the most cost effective way while making sure the energy requested doesn't affect the energy requirements of the site as a whole.
* Demand side response. The ability to manage high draw assets like charge points in real time allows sites to participate in Demand Side Response agreements meaning that they can be responsive to requests to reduce energy draw when demand peaks. This gives the company the opportunity to generate revenue while still optimising charging.

The potential benefits to companies with multiple electric vehicles are significant - saving money, spreading cost, protecting its energy supply and generating new revenues to offset costs.