During the ‘decade of delivery’, the Government has pledged that up to 145,000 extra charge points for electric vehicles will be installed across England each year. But this rings alarm bells because the energy infrastructure in the UK isn’t ready to cope with the demands this will place on the grid.
Sites where EV chargers need to be located often don’t have an electricity supply or system able to cope with the intense bursts of electricity they require, and are ‘grid constrained’. Recent reports of EV charging stations being backed up by diesel generators to cover any loss or lack of power show just how silly the situation could become.
There is however an answer which doesn’t require expensive transformers or cabling and is one which makes complete sense for the automotive industry, and which literally powers the circular economy for cars.
Where sites are grid constrained, with an electricity connection which isn’t large enough to supply more energy, a battery energy storage system (BESS) is the solution. A BESS can be a cheaper and greener solution than upgrading network supplies to overcome grid constraints.
The National Grid has described battery storage technology as “essential to speeding up the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy. Battery storage systems will play an increasingly pivotal role between green energy supplies and responding to electricity demands”.
A 300 kW BESS housed in one container can manage the grid supply to a cluster of EV chargers. It can store energy at times when the electricity supply is cheaper, or that has been generated from renewable sources.
Even better is when the canopy of the EV charging station holds an array of solar panels, and the solar energy is stored in the BESS and used to help supply the EV chargers.
