Smart Charging – intelligent electric vehicle charging

What makes Smart Charging so sustainable?

Moritz: In contrast to vehicles with combustion engines, electric vehicles have great potential to contribute to the reduction of harmful CO2 emissions in the future. However, they can only fully develop this potential if they are charged with clean energy. It is of little use if the electric vehicles themselves produce no emissions, but are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power station. This is why the algorithm we are developing for Smart Charging explicitly considers the effective use of renewable energies in addition to the electricity price and the site loads. An example: Current charging systems regulate the timing – the sun is shining, we have a certain amount of energy and we can distribute it over all vehicles in a company car park. But our goal is to make forecasts, or in other words to look into the future. For example, a driver has to leave soon, and his vehicle has to be fully charged beforehand. However, a cloud front is currently moving in and the energy from the photovoltaic system will decrease accordingly. We incorporate such data and forecasts up to seven days in advance into our model and can thus achieve, in the best case, optimized charging at the lowest prices and with the highest possible proportion of renewable energy. Of course, this is crucial for the fleet planning of companies.

And how can such serious “misallocations” be avoided by a charging infrastructure?

Alexander: We are currently developing an energy management system that prevents this problem by providing the greatest possible flexibility in energy use – for example by forecasting user behavior. For example, our algorithm is supposed to learn the respective loading requirements of the vehicles using their respective user IDs. The algorithm does not know who these users are and where they are going – but it should know what they need. The situation is similar in large bus depots or in the fleet planning of logistics companies: These are very dynamic systems in which the vehicles sometimes arrive and depart at minute or even second intervals. The energy management system must react flexibly in order to provide an optimal charging plan as quickly as possible. We are working on precisely such a solution that can cope with large, dynamic systems and can be used in many different ways with only minor adjustments, be it in bus depots, logistics companies or even company car parks. Here at our Bosch site in Renningen, for example, we could test an energy management system in which the smart charging of electric vehicles adapts to the site’s load profile to avoid peak loads.

Besides fleet charging, the optimized charging of individual electric vehicles is the second focus of the Smart Charging project. What improvements are you talking about here?

Moritz: The charging of individual electric vehicles can of course also be organized more efficient and cheaper, with the highest possible proportion of renewable energy. So our research is, for example, about looking at which functions we can perform in advance, during the charging process, in order to save energy afterwards during operation. One example of this is the air conditioning of vehicles, such as heating the interior cabin. This is no problem at all for classic vehicles with combustion engines: The waste heat from the engine, which is available anyway, is used for heating. E-vehicles, however, hardly generate hardly any heat loss. So if we can predict the driver’s user behavior with Smart Charging, we can draw the energy needed to preheat the cabin from the grid just before departure – and thus help reduce energy consumption during the journey. Intelligent charging with an energy management system such as Smart Charging therefore also uses the energy from the power grid for individual vehicles in the wise foresight of saving the battery energy for later.