Electricity Supply Upgrades for EV Charging
Do I need to upgrade the electricity supply to my building for an EV Charging installation?
Electrify EV provide consulting, feasibility study and electrical data logging services to help you to understand the capacity of your electrical installation and the constraints of your site.
There are many factors to consider when looking at EV Charging installation feasibility.
For almost every installation, there will be an option to install EV charging without upgrading the electricity supply. But depending on the goals for your EV Charging Infrastructure project, you may need more capacity than can be serviced with the existing electrical supply or infrastructure such as the switchboards.
How do we install EV Charging without upgrading the supply?
A Load Management System is key to being able to manage the load of multiple chargers on a site whilst staying within the constraints of the existing electrical supply.
A detailed review of your existing electrical installation by our specialist electricians and our electrical engineers will identify the capacity of existing cabling and switchboards. We often install an electrical data logger for 1-2 weeks to ascertain the existing site loads.
It is important to remember that in many applications, EVs will not be coming back with a completely flat battery, in fact, they’re more likely to be coming back perhaps 20% depleted. This means that they are not likely to be charging at full capacity (which is often 32Amps AC) for very long, if at all. Similarly, EVs will all return back home / back to base at different times. So again, they’re not all going to need a high-rate charge at the same time. The way we manage the load of multiple chargers on a site is with an on-site industrial computer, known as a Load Management System or LMS.
The LMS is designed to factor in all sorts of things such as:
- Total allowable EV load for the installation – known as the Set Point.
- Real-time load on the electrical mains – which determines the Dynamic Set Point.
- Real-time load on different system components such as EVDBs or Busways.
- Prioritising charging at times of the day with a lower electricity price.
- Prioritising certain vehicles or certain users if necessary – known as VIP function.
We will always look at options to provide you with a solution which fits within the existing electricity supply at your site, because this will always save on the capital costs of the EV charging installation.
