Smart Charging

When a vehicle is ‘smart charging’, the charger is essentially ‘communicating’ with your car, the charging operator and the utility company through data connections. In other words, whenever you plug in your EV, the charger automatically sends them important data so they can optimize charging.

Thus, smart charging allows the charging operator (be it an individual with a charger at their home or a business owner with multiple charging stations) to manage how much energy to give to any plugged-in EV. The amount used can vary depending on how many people are using electricity at that time, putting less pressure on the grid. Smart charging also prevents charging operators from exceeding their building’s maximum energy capacity, as defined by local grid capacities and their chosen energy tariff.

What’s more, smart charging allows utility companies to define certain limits for energy consumption. So, we don’t overload the grid by using more energy than we are producing.

This saves everybody time and money and, most importantly, economises energy to help us to better protect the planet’s precious resources.

How Does Smart Charging Work in Practice?

Smart charging is all about connecting charging points with users and operators. Every time an EV is plugged in, the charging station sends information (i.e. charging time, speed, etc) via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to a centralized cloud-based management platform. Additional data may also be sent to this cloud. This can include, for example, information about the local grid’s capacity and how energy is currently being used at the charging site (house, office building, supermarket etc.). The mass of data is automatically analyzed and visualized in real-time by the software behind the platform. It can then be used to make automatic decisions about how and when EVs are charged.

Thanks to this, charging operators can control and regulate energy usage easily and remotely through one platform, website or mobile application. Other features and benefits are also enabled. For instance, EV owners can use a mobile app to monitor and pay for their charging sessions from anywhere, any time.

Most Relevant Smart Charging Features

Power Sharing 

Power Sharing, also sometimes referred to as load balancing or levelling, allows network operators or businesses with multiple chargers onsite to distribute the available energy capacity proportionally across all active EV charging stations. As available power is limited at each site, normally more demand for energy would mean expensive electrical infrastructure upgrades. Smart charging means power can be optimally distributed so that such upgrades can be avoided. You can check out the video below to see how this is achieved.