Intelligent power management company Eaton and EV charger financing and installation firm AMP IT SA have joined up for a new project aimed at expanding the rollout of EV chargers in buildings across Switzerland.
The collaboration will see the launch of an “EV-charging-as-a-service” model, in which the two companies will install and manage EV charging infrastructure for multi-residential, office, industrial and logistics buildings.
The plans will take advantage of Eaton’s “Buildings as a Grid” approach which combines local power generation, energy storage systems, and smart energy control to maximise renewable energy consumption and optimise energy usage for large-scale buildings. By combining this with AMP IT’s smart charging infrastructure, building owners can manage the energy needs of a building without directly owning related assets such as solar PV systems, EV charging infrastructure, and energy storage.
The plan has already been praised by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, which awarded the offering through its RechargeAuPoint program, which promotes innovative developments in EV charging infrastructure.
While the charging-as-a-service offering with initially only launch in Switzerland, the two companies have stated that they fully intend to roll out the scheme to other countries in the EMEA region in the future.
Andreea Laplace, director of sustainability and energy transition offerings at Eaton, called decentralised energy production and management “essential to meet growing global energy demands,” adding: “the project shows how collaboration and technology developments will make the energy transition sustainable and profitable for everyone involved”.
Ilya Tyuvildin, AMP IT co-founder, added: “We trust that this program will bring significant contributions to e-mobility with smarter EV charging solutions making better use of locally produced renewable energies, enhanced energy self-consumption schemes, and cost-effective battery storage solutions”.
Smart EV charging management key to the future of EVs
Using energy assets and grid capacity as intelligently and as flexibility as possible has been identified as key to ensuring the successful rollout of EV chargers.
In response, US utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has announced a new service which will allow more EV chargers in California to connect to the grid without needing to wait for grid capacity upgrades. The new FlexConnect service allows the grid to adjust the power flow to an EV charger site based on current supply and demand; for example, an EV charger site that asks for a 2MW connection in an area where 2MW can’t be guaranteed in times of high demand can connect to the grid and receive the requested 2MW when it is available, but drop to 0.5MW at peak times, such as on hot summer evenings.
